Category: Privacy

Giving Customers Scale

Customers need scale. Scale is leverage. A way to get lift. Big business gets scale by aggregating resources, production methods, delivery services — and, especially, customers: you, me and billions of others without whom business would not exist. Big business is heavy by nature. That’s why we use mass as an adjective for much of what big… Continue reading Giving Customers Scale

Privacy is an Inside Job

Start here: clothing and shelter are privacy technologies. We use them to create secluded spaces for ourselves. Spaces we control. Our ancestors have been wearing clothing for at least 170,000 years and building shelters for at least half a million years. So we’ve had some time to work out what privacy means. Yes, it differs among cultures and settings,… Continue reading Privacy is an Inside Job

New Rules for Privacy Regulations

The Wall Street Journal has an informative conversation with Lawrence Lessig: Technology Will Create New Models for Privacy Regulation. What underlies a change toward new models are two points: the servers holding vast user databases are increasingly (and very cheaply) breached, and the value of the information in those databases is being transferred to something… Continue reading New Rules for Privacy Regulations

Electronic Health Records and Patient-Centric Design

CIO’s story Why Electronic Health Records aren’t more usable offers an interesting perspective on the current (improved?) state of affairs in medical care records. From the article: The American Medical Association in 2014 issued an eight-point framework for improving EHR usability. According to this framework, EHRs should: enhance physicians’ ability to provide high-quality patient care… Continue reading Electronic Health Records and Patient-Centric Design

Customer Commons and User Submitted Terms

Above is a strawman proposal for icons for user-submitted terms that I’ve been presenting in talks and in prototypes for creating privacy-protecting technology for individuals. I’ve been sharing this with people for the last couple of years to increasing recognition that we need a simple way to assert our terms. I made it up to demonstrate… Continue reading Customer Commons and User Submitted Terms

On Bringing Manners to Markets

Privacy in the physical world has been well understood and fairly non-controversial for thousands of years. We get it, for example, with clothing, doors, curtains and window shades. These each provide privacy by design, because they control visibility and access to our private places and spaces. The virtual world, however, is very young, dating roughly back to… Continue reading On Bringing Manners to Markets

We are not fish and advertising is not food

This is how the Internet looks to the online advertising business today: This is how they approach it: And this is the result: Advertising is a huge source of the “data pollution” Fred Wilson talked about at LeWeb a few weeks ago. (See here, starting at about 23 minutes in.) What’s wrong with this view,… Continue reading We are not fish and advertising is not food

Data Privacy Legal Hack-A-thon

Customer Commons is supporting, and board member, Mary Hodder, is hosting the Bay Area event. Additionally, there are NYC and London locations. Please join us if you are interested: This is an unprecedented year documenting our loss of Privacy. Never before have we needed to stand up and team up to do something about it.… Continue reading Data Privacy Legal Hack-A-thon