The future of lifelogging, reputation management and privacy
Singularity Hub had a great post today about the ‘lifelogging’ trend and what we can expect to see in the years ahead. Here’s the bottom line – it all sounds like bad news for people who worry about their privacy. Keith Kleiner does an excellent job of highlighting the potential benefits of having a detailed recorded memory, coupled with the tools to access and retrieve the data efficiently. He also briefly touches upon the fact that lifelogging is a double edged sword (who hasn’t done a thing or two that they’d rather not be reminded of?). Ultimately, Keith arrives at the conclusion that he has to embrace the idea, because as he boldly puts it “The trend is unstoppable”. Unfortunately, he’s right. But there are two key challenges (a.k.a. great business opportunities) that will need to be overcome before we see widespread adoption of lifelogging.
Lifelog analytics tools: No matter how extreme/ridiculous the idea of lifelogging in its strictest sense (recording every single minute of your life) may seem, we’re rapidly heading in that direction. We may all not know what a lifelogging camera is yet, but most of us already choose to create a record of (and in many cases broadcast) our daily activities and whereabouts via social media platforms, location-aware applications and by using the web in general. Just read Jeffrey Rosen’s excellent article “The Web means the end of forgetting” that was published in the New York Times Magazine. The difference is, we presently don’t think about what we do in terms of creating a recording our lives for the purposes of retrieving information from it in the future. This is because most of the current web-based services are not designed/marketed for this purpose and lack tools that provide its users with meaningful insights into their recorded activity (whether intentionally or not). I’ve previously written about how location-based social media services can potentially enhance their consumer value proposition by developing personalized analytics dashboards. The purpose would be to provide users with insights into the data that is gathered about their daily lives (For example, Fred Wilson got people pretty excited today with his Foursquare Google Maps Mashup). If existing social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. don’t do this, third parties will eventually step in to fulfill the need for search and analytics features on such platforms. This will unintentionally lead us another step closer to lifelogging nirvana.
Reputation Management: Another potential roadblock facing widespread adoption of lifelogging is that the privacy-sensitive amongst us won’t easily warm up to the idea of maintaining a detailed record of their lives. However, as mediums to create, store and transmit media become more efficient with each passing day, no one will truly be able to escape this trend. You may choose to not use Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or may even go to the extreme of living life without the web, but unless you give up information technology entirely and live alone in a log cabin in the woods (and avoid any social contact), there is likely going to be a some digital record of you created by others. This is obviously going to lead to several interesting policy questions related to surreptitious data collection and respecting the rights of those that unwittingly get dragged into the lifelogs of others. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about how this impending loss of anonymity caused by social media and the web in general has its benefits and drawbacks. We will all struggle to manage our reputation by curtailing certain thoughts and actions and will eventually have to pay corporations for reputation management services (to help us enforce limits on what others record, say and share about us).
But what about privacy?
Although everything I’ve written so far may sound like privacy dystopia is inevitable, let’s first consider what people are worried about when they lament the loss of privacy in the digital age. The key issue that concerns most people is the loss of control over their data –- specifically, how it is collected, analyzed, used and shared. All the recent attention around privacy issues in the mainstream media can largely be attributed to the fact that people are not entirely sure who has their data, what they know, and how they plan to use. Panic inevitably ensues and a day doesn’t go by without someone discussing the end of privacy as we know it.
The little beacon of hope I noticed rising above all the despair was a recent New York Times article about a start up called Bynamite. They’re trying to develop a product that will give consumers control over their own information. The idea seems to be focused around giving consumers tools that empower them to extract value from their own profiles and preferences. What if this basic idea gains momentum and can be expanded beyond just one’s web surfing activities? Further, what if something along these lines can eventually be combined with sophisticated lifelog analytics tools and reputation management systems? The end result could be a single platform that not only helps us record, retrieve and analyze the most minute and mundane pieces of our online and offline lives, but also manage what is recorded about ourselves by others. Theoretically, consumers could also control their own ‘life’ profiles and (if you really want to get creative) use their own data as currency.
Is this concept too far fetched? Do consumers really want this much control? If Esther Dyson thinks that the time may have finally come for user-managed privacy tools, perhaps this could really happen down the line. I can’t be certain, but it sure beats looking into the future and proclaiming that privacy is dying!
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P.S. No post about lifelogging can be considered complete without mentioning Gordon Bell, co-author of Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Here’s a short video that accompanied a 2009 BusinessWeek article about his effort to build a searchable digital memory.
“Data is digital air”, proclaimed Danah Boyd 
