Persona Prime

I think the biggest current barrier to creating equitable relationships btn shared data in social networks btn the customers has to do with the contracts.  I mean B2B relationships wouldn’t put up with this all or nothing behavior.  So we have to fix this before a mesh of Social Net’s can occur.

Most contracts currently on the cloud are all or nothing arrangements.  Therefore people accept contracts that this non lawyer views as unreasonable and often enforceable… Simply because they have no option. They typically give up ALL RIGHTS to their data (please please post links here to any that don’t! as I would love to say THANKS!)

I do think we need an organization ala Creative Commons/eTrust to police these businesses.  ~4 yrs ago I registered wetheusers.org in anticipation of such issues occurring. I just wish I could clone myself (and grant myself $20Mi) to pursue this idea too!

People only become aware of these severe inequalities when something fails on a social level say Kodak decides to delete all the data… This will happen more as more businesses on the Cloud fail.  That data means more to the individual at that point than it does to the business.  So deleting is the easy thing to do and fiscally makes sense for the business.

It seems that people only see the social contracts that are broken btn them and the organizations.  They do not notice the other forms of lack of control over their data…  Like Facebook and Beacon, people don’t care UNTIL this data is reflected back to their friends.  Then they care.  This doesn’t make sense from a data ownership point of view.  That is because we are short sighted creatures and few understand databases, data mining, and social behavioral metrics.  They cannot see this reflection and I am as guilty as the rest of them.  I also hope that society will take care of this issue.  But I worry and wonder what our “star of david” will be if will are not observant.

I would tentatively like to propose 3 settings for the contracts

1. Transparent – All sharing ON CC enabled
2. Paranoid – All sharing OFF only to members of friendlist explicitly granted?
3. most popular settings- in the middle – not sure here… um Copyright all right reserved?

Maybe the Social Net’s or other products on the cloud can give different levels of features to encourage people to choose transparent…  but really the big thing that I would point out is that the most necessary piece is to be OPEN about the data being collected.  I did issue this challenge to Mark Hindsbo at Microsoft for the new cloud they are creating.  They have the ability and power to do it right.  I hope society will also reward them for doing so…

I know these need work but I still think it is a good starting point of discussion. having met the attorney at several of these businesses they are looking for guidance too.  Businesses are become wise to the fact that people often lie in inequitable relationships…

Tags: equitable contracts, mutual data ownership, Privacy issues, social network

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Business, Mutual Data Ownership, Privacy issues, Social Business, Social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.