Life's better when you're in control
I've had a number of people asking me about what I'm doing and the product I'm involved with. Now that it's on the verge of reality (well... beta anyway) I feel happy to start talking. First off we've updated the long-neglected PAOGA website to try and reflect our real business. I know the design sucks but feedback on the content, whether we're starting to get the message across, is warmly welcomed!
In a nutshell what PAOGA seeks to do is give everyone who wants one a no lock-in, open standards based, "my eyes only" information silo of their own. Each of us can then decide whether we want to dish out our information, when, and to wohm.
This is a response to the many problems that afflict us with the rise of CRM and data mining. These were a reasonable response to the know your customer dilemma when they started all those years ago, but they have gotten out of hand. At a recent conference where Graham was speaking a Swiss researcher contradicted his assertion that our data is held, on average, on 700 databases to say their research put the number closer to 1,000! The situation is, for us as individuals, unmanagable today and getting worse by the second.
To have so much data about us so far beyond our knowledge or control is creating identity problems, life problems, whose consequences will be with us for years. Just ask the many people afflicted with identity theft and fraud. PAOGA's mission is to change the dynamic and put the individual back in the driving seat.
The idea is that if you have your own personal silo that you trust is totally under your control (and which you keep uptodate) that it will -- in time -- be cheaper and less risky for a company to come ask you directly than to try and harvest your data behind your back. In return you know what has been learned about you and by whom.
This seems a pretty clear win-win deal to us.
But it's a difficult world to change and we're a damn small company to change it. There are some companies that want to act ethically but business as a whole is very happy with the idea that it owns your data and can do what it likes with it. Only our voices in concert telling them that this is not how it's going to be will change the status quo.
We won't do it overnight and we won't do it completely. Some companies will not play ball, some people will not care. That's okay. The point is that the world we are shooting for will be qualitatively better for most of us that do and the companies that will.
Our vision is:
"under your control, with your consent, for your benefit."
In a previous post I flippantly quoted something Tim Kitchin said to me about Web3.0 being for the individuals (rather than companies or communities) but it's the truth. We think it describes the web that will emerge when we individuals are in control of our relationships with suppliers, employers, friends, and acquitances. Marc Canter and his company Broadband Mechanics are doing this from a social network perspective, we want to tackle the rest.
Here's an example of the kind of thing we want to enable:
You want to get a quote for home insurance. How much of your personal information do you need to give away?
What if you could just share an anonymous description of your home and your risk zone (the mapping from post code to actuarially evaluated risk) to a range of insurers. When offers come back that you are interested in you can selectively offer more information until you are ready to make a deal and reveal your identity with the winning vendor.
In this model some of your information (like your risk category) may be certified (by a trusted 3rd party) even if it's anonymous. The idea being that a company can trust your risk score (because it's certified) even if they don't know your address. The upshot is that you may have talked to 20 insurance companies but only the one you end up doing a deal with knows who you are. The other 19 don't have your name, address, telephone number, or email. They can't process you, spam you, or profit by selling your details on to god knows who.
There's a huge range of other opportunities here, things that can change the way we live as we move increasinly towards a dual physical/information existence. I'll talk more about those as we get further down the road, but if you let your imagination run free it's not hard to see where this might go.
Practically speaking we're at the beginning of this new journey and as much as we'd love to run we have to take baby steps for the moment. We don't want to take any risks with sensitive personal information and, frankly, the product interface and functionality isn't ready for the mass-market today. So we're making our beta a by-invitation event to begin with.
If you're a hardened data warrior, worried about invasion of your privacy, or interested in being in control of your information I invite you to come and sign-up for the beta. Alternatively if you've got a long train journey or rainy afternoon ahead of you, you might like to read our vision paper and see where all this leads.
We're updating the application weekly and it's been encouraging to see how quickly it's coming on. We hope to be able to open the doors to everyone quite soon.
Please let us know whether we've got something interesting (signing up for the beta is a good indicator) and where you'd like to see us take this.