Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Friday, June 23, 2006

Who Owns You?

We ask: What information do you get about people, and whose information is it? Here’s what these panelists say (text is not verbatim):

Seth Goldstein, Root Markets
Kyle Birkman,
John McCrea, Plaxo

Root Markets: We enable buyers and sellers in the mortgage space to exchange consumer data. We provide price discovery for lead generation. Brokers who traffic in this data see wide margins because they maintain a black box between buyers and sellers. We provide more transparency. Attention Trust is a non-profit organization for consumers to advocate for ownership of their own metadata. They have property right to a copy of it, it should be mobile between services, you should be able to participate in an economy with your data, and you shouuld have transparency to see how it’s being used. Sometimes what you don’t pay attention to is as important as what you do pay attention to. We enable people to capture their click stream data.

MySpace: It’s a user generated content site, mostly for teenagers, where they exchange photos, post comments, send messages and other data. It’s not an ecommerce site. But it gets very personal about people. We view the data as belonging to the user. The technology that supports that data, the social network that links your profile to others, creates value for the user. A user can cancel and delete their account. And we can cancel and delete accounts, if they violate our terms. We have to provide a safe and welcoming environment without a heavy hand.

Plaxo: Plaxo is a smart address book service that enables people to have richly populated address book with the assurance that that address book will be available anywhere and will never be lost or stolen. The same address book can be used in Microsoft Outlook at work, at home on your Mac or PC, through a secure web site, or through your mobile phone. We store your contact info, and the info about your contacts. With info about 10 million users, we need a high bar on privacy policy. We are the custodian of their personal information. The information belongs to the user. We store it and enable you to share it.

Q: Plaxo has drawn fire for emailing everyone in your book for an update and asking them to join Plaxo.

Plaxo: The controversial feature of the update contacts request email, that was not a well executed strategy. We’ve taken steps to publicly apologize, as well as change the feature set so we don’t send out emails to update someone else’s address book.

Root Markets: The enterprise value created by Plaxo is carried by the people who do the updating. There will be a big challenge to rebuild trust. All of these services own bits and pieces of people, but people may choose one service to promote themselves. Their trust will go to the provider who provides the most value.

MySpace: If we ask people to create a discreet address book at every service, that is a waste of their time. We should let them use contact lists created elsewhere.

Q: If you want to join another social networking site, the interfaces are closed and don’t work together, so you can’t bring your identity with you.

MySpace: If you have a large network that you spent a long time creating, you don’t want to give that value away to your competitors. Some users join the service because it’s portable. But that’s not the standard value proposition.

Q: Is it realistic to think people will voluntarily give up information that will be used to market to them?

Root Market: People with bad credit and need cash will give up a lot of information about themselves. What drives lead generation is sub-prime credit. A California refinance candidate with fair to good credit and wants to refinance is worth $150, and that customer gets sold four times. They’re contacted by four qualified lenders. As people express more data, the lead generation space will figure out how to monetize that by selling their data to advertisers.

Q: The lead generation market sounds kind of scary. Will MySpace users with X fields filled out in their profile be worth a certain amount of money?

Root Market: The data is there, the question is whether we’ll surface those prices— how much would they sell it for? Once you go online and start to search and click, you become worth more to certain types of advertisers. We’re finding out what the price is.

Q: Does identity and reputation management become a function of the service?

MySpace: We’re not planning to become a database of buying intentions.

Plaxo: We take a narrow view of what we want to do. We don’t’ do advertising. We plan to add services on top of the address book.

Q: There’s explicit information you contribute, implicit information you contribute (e.g., your click stream tail), then there’s a third category of data that’s about you, but it doesn’t come from you. What are the boundaries around that third category?

Root Market: If whose blog you’re reading is being tracked by others who want to read the blogs you read, then your online reputation is affected by that. Where your attention is on the internet is of interest to others.

MySpace: Knowing who views your profile is a privacy issue on both sides. In a physical community, there are lots of things we don’t know about people.

Plaxo: Whether it’s MySpace or FaceBook, it’s how people react to the service and how comfortable they are sharing information. It’s shocking to see how much people reveal sometimes.

Q: One model in Germany is to put in your business information, open your network, and see who looked at your profile based on what keyword they typed in. It opens a world of transparency. But it’s the opposite of the anonymous Internet presence.

Plaxo: Like LinkedIn, it’s an experiment in social networking. It’s interesting to see how it is adopted in other cultures.

Q: In the RFID tech area, privacy concerns arise because people don’t understand what data is being tracked. How do we participate in the public forum about privacy?

Plaxo: With consumer facing Web services, most users don’t read the terms of agreement. We continue to struggle to get better transparency screen by screen on our services.

MySpace: You try not to surprise people with things they wouldn’t expect to get from the info they provided.

Root Market: What Attention Trust did with click stream was empower people to see their data and understand where it goes.

Q: There are two clashing currents: Teenagers are desperate to put all their personal information online vs. privacy concerns of parents about information like addresses and phone numbers making them vulnerable.

MySpace: We need to do a better job of educating people about what is reasonable behavior online.