You Do Not Exist.

That’s a hard concept to grapple with, but in many ways it’s true. At South By Southwest yesterday, the panel tackling online privacy the panelists spent a great deal of time discussing online privacy within our current framework for such discussions – “my data is me”.

One panelist went so far as to suggest that your metadata had an assessable value. He suggested that you should have full control over it and went so far as to suggest that you should be compensated for its use.

That prompted me to tweet the following:

Your individual information has no value. Only in aggregation does it gain value. Nobody targets “you”. They target the characteristic.

That led to a bit of chatter on Twitter and some discussions with people there. Most of those forums weren’t really sufficient for really fleshing out the idea, so let me explain.

First, you should understand that the comment was made in the context of privacy and targeted advertising. My friend Paul actually took the concept in a completely different direction and has been pondering the value of individual Twitter content versus the collective. It’s an interesting take, and one I’ll think on. For purposes of this post, however, I’m talking about targeted advertising and your personal data.

You golf. You eat at various restaurants. You travel. You buy things. You have credit cards for certain stores. You are a collection on indivisual characteristics. In typical psychological analysis, those personal characteristics could probably be described as the self. The “self” is very important to our conception of the world.

In the world of digital advertising, however, the self is irrelevant. Those characteristics are meaningless. Unless you are buying very, very expensive luxury goods, there is a high degree of probability that no advertiser is targeting “you”. No advertiser will run an ad campaign with the sole purpose of getting “you” to buy their product. There is simply no economic benefit to limiting your audience to one person.

They are, instead, targeting a collection of characteristics that you happen to have, and characteristics you share with many, many, other people. Your concept of protecting “your” metadata, then, is illusory. There is nothing of value to protect.

How can that be, though? Advertisers will pay a premium to reach me based on that data. So clearly my metadata has worth.

I’m Unique, Just Like Everybody Else.

Advertisers devlop a profile of the person likely to buy their products. That information is matched against consumer information databases. If your profile happens to match those characteristics, those advertisers will deliver an ad unit to you.

However, they’re not delivering that unit to “you”. They are delivering it to a random identifier in a database which matches a random set of variables they found important.

The problem is our sense of our own identity is tied inextricably to that random set of variables. When people use it to communicate with us, we fell manipulated – we feel like big brother is watching us.

I followed up my first tweet with another that read:

A noble goal would be to get people to divoce their concept of “me” from the individual characteristics that comprise that.

I say “noble” in the sense that we hamper our ability to get the most out of the digital world when we cling to these antiquated notions of “self”. The benefit of the digital world comes from the aggregation of data, information, and creation. We recognize the wisdom of crowdsourcing movements and creating in a collaborative environment, yet we resist the aggregation of information for the purpose of making advertising more efficient.

I, for one, welcome a world of targeted advertising. I may never (at least until I’m 50 or 60) have to watch another Viagra or Cialis ad. I may never see another dancing mortgage calculator.

It is ironic that the value of your personal data, and your control over it, was argued at a conference on digital media. The panels at SXSW spend a great deal of time discussing corporations and the fact that they must give up “control”.

That takes many forms. PR practitioners must give up control of their message. Intellectual property holders must give up control of their creation. Network owners must give up control of their networks.

Despite this, we cling to the notion of “our control” of our data based on the flawed notion that it has value – on an individual level – to anyone but us. As I said, our metadata has no value in the singular. It is only in the aggregate that the information means anything to advertisers.

I would like to take a moment to express my sincere thanks to the many friends, both real and virtual, that I have.

The outpouring of support, thoughts and prayers for me and my family this week has been tremendous and has really helped me deal with the challenge of losing my dad and the additional tragic loss of my sister-in-law.

I hope to someday have time to go back and thank everyone individually for your kind words. In the meantime, I just hope you will know that the tweets, e-mails, comments, Facebook messages and calls were greatly appreciated. You all made a very difficult situation much easier.

At times like these its important to know that you’re not alone. I feel good knowing that I have so many good friends – even the ones I have never met.

Thanks.

(I’m posting this here to create a permanent memorial for my dad online. The link will get picked up by Twitter and Facebook. I want to be sure that anyone looking for information about my dad sometime down the line will find this and know who he was and what he meant to me. If you’re not inclined to read it, I don’t blame you. It’s kind of sad.)

(Read more…)

That feels weird to say, and even weirder to type. I keep wondering if this is even something I should be typing. I usually use this space to talk about less serious topics. However, I originally set up this blog to get stuff off my chest, and this is a doozie.

About ten years ago, my brother called to tell me dad had been rushed to the hospital with pneumonia. He had a fever of 105 and they had to stop his heart to break the fever. We didn’t expect him to survive that, but we got another decade with him.

My dad is tough. It was actually the third time he had pneumonia.

My dad had always said that no male in his side of the family had ever lived to be 80. The women all live to be 100, but the men just don’t have the stuff.

Tonight, dad suffered a massive heart attack and was gone. The paramedics attempted to revive him, and kept him functioning until he got to the hospital, but then he was gone.

I had talked to him on Thursday. He sounded good. We discussed politics, stocks, the economy, and the kids. It was a good conversation cut short by the fact that I had to make dinner.

Whenever I feel uncertain about the world, and my place in it, I call my dad. He doesn’t always have the best advice, but he’s the one person I always turn to.

Now he’s gone.

There is so much I wish I could say to him now – so many conversations we didn’t have about a million life topics. I’ll never be able to get his opinions on those things.

We were always really close. When my parents got divorced, I was too young to understand what makes people split up. I have realized since then that my dad wasn’t the greatest husband to my mom. But to me, he was absolutely the best dad.

I’ll miss you.