Alex Iskold has written a post called “Privacy and Personalization: From Clickstream to Targeted Advertising” over on Read/Write Web.
Alex performs a great community service with his regular posts about Attention on RR/W and we should all thank him for his efforts in keeping the limelight on the Attention Economy.
As Alex explains however, privacy is actually not really the core problem. He writes:
“Many times over the past few years I had conversations where people asked: But what about privacy? My answer is always: What exactly are you concerned about? the majority of people just worry about privacy as a word; they can’t express what it is that worries them. It is a conservative, mostly uninformed behavior: “I just don’t want them to know about me.”
This is a rather naive position. First of all, “they” do know about you and you agreed to it when you did not uncheck the privacy box. So a better worry would be to find out who they are and what they are going to do with your information.”
He’s right. People (for the most part) are not after you - they’re after your money. They want to lead you to the checkout and have you part with your cash.
The issue then is not about privacy. Many of us are already revealing plenty of information about ourselves. Some of us are actually going out of our way to share our lives using Flickr, del.icio.us, Cluztr, Dandelife, Twitter, Facebook and more. We are publishing our personal breadcrumbs for the world to see and our friends to follow.
The real issue then, is how can we build Transparency and Control for the information that is already publicly available. How can we leverage our own breadcrumbs to create personal experiences everywhere - to pick and choose who gets our Attention Profiles so we can move from one service to another.
For this, the APML workgroup, along with the general public on the mailing list and the Facebook group, has designed the APML specification. An XML format designed to encapsulate a user’s Attention Profile so that she can move it from service to service.
The format, however, is just the first step. It moves the conversation forward from ‘How’ to ‘When’. The issue at hand now is to build more tools for creating, remixing and sharing APML so that users and applications can get involved. APIs and Tool/Application support is critical.
So in order to keep propelling the conversation forward, it is critical that we stop pretending that Attention is a black box of complexity and start discussing the emerging solutions and move onto building open prototypes and lobbying for greater support from industry leaders.
Another way of driving adoption by the mainstream is for startups - who are often more nimble and open to new approaches - to start experimenting with emerging solutions.
This trend has been seen with the adoption of OPML, Microformats and OpenID. Once enough smaller players began implementing and supporting these great initiatives, the mainstream had no choice but to follow suit and give control back to users.
It then only takes one major player to take a leap of faith and be rewarded by an influx of support and good will. We are already seeing this happen with the discussions occurring around APML.
