shake it up

Much has happened on the web in the last two and a half years, and of course I've been too wrapped up in it to say anything here.

It's time to change that.

A little over a year ago I returned to my roots.  I've always had my sights set on teaching, and it's fantastic to be back in a place so dedicated to education.  We need to alter the Web's course and the best place for me to contribute to this goal is by preparing our future software designers and entrepreneurs to lead the charge.

I'll admit that I got a bit tired of trying to change the Web.  It's exhausting working on an initiative that has the whole force of online marketing against you.  Skeptics and those who rely on the opacity of data trading alike are a powerful force.

But I haven't stopped caring.  Admittedly I backed off, but some (with more stamina than I) haven't.  On January 20, Andreas Gal posted his thoughts with a very optimistic headline: "Brendan is back to save the web".  He does a great job of making a point that I've been trying to articulate for years: the economic incentives online are stuck and we need a new player to emerge with new incentives and a fresh look at how to make the Web an economy again instead of a giant data mine.  Andreas makes a clear case that all the current web browsers cost money to produce, but nobody pays for them directly; instead they are indirectly kept aloft by whatever makes the Web go round.

Right now that's almost exclusively advertisements.

Somehow the web has found itself in an advertising monoculture where advertising is frequently aggravating and at best an unnecessary bloat in an ecosystem that should not be bogged down by distractions from generative content.  The web should be a place vibrant with commerce and innovation: clear of distractions and rich with creativity.  People should not be sold on what they want, they should instead be able to make what they want.

But the question remains: how do we get the web from where it is to where it should be?

We need economic incentives that encourage Web sites without this bloat.  We need content that is a generative "makers" platform.  The Web should be an ecosystem where businesses get rewarded for their content and not the willingness to plaster solicitations all over their digital presence.  This is what Brendan wants to do.

Brave is his attempt to steer the web in the right direction.  His vision is to make a web browser that is a true user agent again, and not a self-serving or web-serving agent.  People should be molding the web instead of the web molding its people.

I agree with Brendan that the web should not be an ad-blocking fight, it should be a place for novel and generative things, but we can't just turn our backs on ads.  I'm intrigued by Brave's new approach and excited to see where Brendan and his team take us.

what is privacy?

Often times when I find myself in a conversation about Privacy, there's a lack of clarity around what exactly we're discussing.  It's widely accepted that people who are experts on privacy all speak the same language and have the same goals.

I'm not so sure this is true.

This came up in a discussion with Jishnu yesterday, and we needed a common starting place.  So I'd like to take a little time to lay out what I'm thinking when I talk about Privacy, especially since I'm mainly focused on empowering individuals with control over data sharing and not so much on keeping secrets.

Privacy is the ability for an individual to have transparency, choice, and control over information about themselves.

At the risk of sounding too cliché, I'm gonna use a pyramid to explain my thinking.  There are three parts to establishing privacy:

First, an organization's (or individual's) collection, sharing and use of data must be transparent.  This is crucial because choice and control cannot be realized without honesty and fairness.

Second, individuals must be provided choice.  This means data subjects (those people whose data is being collected, used or shared) must be able to understand what's going to happen with their data and have the ability to provide dissent or consent.

Third, when it's clear what's happening and individuals have an understanding about what they want, they must be given control over collection, sharing or use of the data in question.

This means control depends on choice which depends on transparency.  You cannot make decisions unless you're given the facts.  You cannot make your desires reality unless you've decided what you want.

For the engineers out there (like me), this dependencies can be modeled as such:

[Transparency] = Awareness of Data Practices
[Choice] = [Transparency] + Individual's Wants
[Control] = [Choice] + Organizational Cooperation

Control is the goal, but it requires Transparency and Choice to work -- as well as some additional inputs.  Privacy is the whole thing: all three pieces acting together with support from both data controllers and data subjects to empower individuals with a say in how their data is used.

The privacy perception gap is a symptom of ineffective transparency and choice; it is the result of peoples' inability to really understand what's going on so they have no chance to establish positions about what is okay.  When transparency and choice are built into a system, the gap shrinks and people have most of what they need to regain control over their privacy.

What is privacy to you?