The advances in neurology are fascinating right now. MRI scans no longer limit themselves to one brain. It is the interaction of people which ups the ante. How do my mood changes affect you? If you don’t want to get bogged down in mirror neurons and spindle neurons and the detailed science of it all, I thoroughly recommend “Social Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman. Snap judgements on whether or not we like someone or a product are well worth analyzing because the same principles are even more important online.
I famously wrote that I would sacrifice one of my hands for access to the raw data of Facebook or Google. Well, I just thought of a good way of keeping all my hands and still getting those invaluable insights! While the media suddenly get excited about privacy online, projects like Diaspora are a good idea. Yes, I don’t like the idea of giving away my personal information, my thoughts, photos or anything else to someone else. Of course they will try and make money out of it! But what if we could establish a research cause worthy of being a part in?
Remember when everyone installed SETI screensavers to help crunch data from alien-looking observatories? Or the global appeal to help process human genome analysis? (The idea was we would help discover solutions to global diseases, turns out we just helped pharmaceuticals get richer!) But we can use the same principle, that same altruistic sensibility to get people’s personal data. Heck, we can beat Facebook at it’s own game!
Here’s how it would work: a set of totally trustworthy institutions throughout the world, something like the United Nations, runs the show. OK, we don’t really trust anyone and we all think that once data is digitized it can and will go anywhere, but we will have to settle for the best available trust levels. Then we get widgets, could be in the browser, could be anywhere else on your computer or mobile phone, that monitor what we do. Facebook, Twitter, email, whatever we feel comfortable sharing. Here’s the catch: the data is whitewashed of our names and other personal details from the beginning. I may choose my data to be shared as “a guy in Greece”. In fact I, and many others I suspect, would be more willing to give really private information to such efforts, stuff I would never put online otherwise.
Open privacy policy from the beginning because the whole point of this tool is to help you understand how much information you are giving away with everything you do. (Yes of course Symantec or some other security company could attach it to their antivirus but it wouldn’t be the same, read on.) And here is where I get my data at last: universities or other researchers from private or public institutions can apply for access to your data. They write up a proposal, what they will do, what they will look for and what insights they will give us. Maybe they will give whoever gives their data up more detailed information to make it worth participating. So in fact, I won’t even have to do the research, I will just install the browser plug in and choose whichever scientist makes nice proposals! Then they will give me their findings to mull over.
We will effectively be breaking the monopoly that large institutions like Google or Facebook have over user data this way. Sounds hard to sell but simply getting the academic community involved would be a huge leg up; in fact they would sell it for me as they would all need the platform to get their research done. We could even make sneaky Facebook apps for it!
