5 thoughts on “Peerless

  1. Hmm, not sure about that one. If I login to a site I’ve never been to before using Facebook Connect, the site can know more about me than the employees of stores I visit on a regular basis. I can present my identity, reputation, and shared connections efficiently. Among businesses who’re tapping into this sort of thing, using Klout for example, they can fairly easily discriminate in favor on trustworthy, credible people, and do sore much more efficiently than in the offline world.

  2. Ed, if you read Doc’s post, he supports having individual privacy policies and not having to use Facebook’s or Twitter’s. (The paragraph Garrick quotes begins with the sentence: “So, why don’t you have your own policy?”.) This is one of the ideas behind his VRM model (Vendor Relationship Management as opposed to CRM).

    I want to control what I share on the Web and not have to abide by TOS’s which I rarely read. I also want to be able to share more or less with particular sites and would like the ability to be anonymous in the way I can walk in a store, pay cash, and leave without leaving a trail.

  3. Thanks, Garrick, Ed and Peter.

    My point, to sum it up, is that all of the conveniences we enjoy on the Web, including Facebook Connect and services from other companies, are given in the context both of the client-server model, and of site and/or API systems they each control, either by themselves or in cooperation with other sites and services. Their positions are dominant, and ours are submissive. If we are treated fairly and kindly within their systems, that’s nice; but those are still their systems and not ours. We still live with their policies and not ours. What status we enjoy is what they provide or allow.

    What we need are means to assert our own policies, come to relationships with our own tools, and manage those relationships in our own ways not just theirs. We’re working on those in the VRM development community. It has taken a few years, but some tools are getting close to being real. Stay tuned.

    1. Doc – thanks for elaborating. To me, this is the most salient point:

      “What we need are means to assert our own policies, come to relationships with our own tools, and manage those relationships in our own ways not just theirs.”

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