Pushing String

Remember in The Fifth Element when Leeloo threatens to shoot Korben Dallas for stealing a kiss, saying “ecto gammat”? Turns out it means “never without my permission”. A good rallying cry for personal data sharing in today’s world!

The Economist has a thoughtful article called The Data Deluge on the benefits, and the privacy risks, of making better use of the torrent of data (it mostly focuses on, but doesn’t ever say, “personal” data) being generated in all kinds of business and marketplace endeavors. My favorite part, ’cause I share this assumption with the author:

The best way to deal with these drawbacks of the data deluge is, paradoxically, to make more data available in the right way, by requiring greater transparency in several areas. First, users should be given greater access to and control over the information held about them, including whom it is shared with.

This article makes a great companion to this meaty blog post by Iain Henderson laying out a serious vision for the notion of a personal datastore as a personal data warehouse. Iain knows whereof he speaks; he’s been in the CRM business a long time, and runs the Kantara InfoSharing work group (along with Joe Andrieu, another thoughtful guy who’s passionate about this stuff). I’m lucky to have both of them on my entirely complementary User-Managed Access group, UMA serving as a technological match for InfoSharing use cases.

I tried to add a comment to the Economist article about an aspect it didn’t cover: the quality of the personal data that’s floating around. Either this commenting effort completely failed, or in the fullness of time three copies of the same comment will appear — sigh. In the spirit of using this blog as my pensieve, here’s the main bit:

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Volatile data goes stale. Excessive data collected directly from people is often larded with, to put it bluntly, lies. (To acquire a comment account on this site, I was required to provide my given name, surname, email address, country of residence, gender, and year of birth. If everyone were totally honest when signing up, that’s a powerful set of facts with which to locate and track them pretty precisely. You can tell which fields are excessive by looking at which ones people lie to…) And data collected silently through our behavior is, at best, second-hand and can never know our true intent.

Privacy is not secrecy (says digital identity analyst Bob Blakley). It is context, control, choice, and respect. Ideal levels of personal data sharing may actually be higher in total than now — but more selective. And they won’t be interesting to people without offering convenience at the same time.

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Wouldn’t it be great to get out of the defensive crouch of “never without my permission” and turn it into “with my permission, sure, why not, it’ll help me just as much as it will help you”?

(Any bets on whether I told the truth and nothing but the truth when I registered at the Economist site?)

Robin Wilton’s post on Google Buzz hits the nail(s) right on the head(s). The benefits of social networking center on human-to-human connectedness and collaboration, but the entire “social networking” construct obscures the fact that it’s really human-to-application-to-human. In revealing information that its users never authorized nor expected to be revealed, Google has created digital shadow cruft.

Simon Phipps often feeds me tidbits — intellectual rather than gustatory — having to do with nutrition. Recently he recommended I watch a lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig of UCSF in August of last year, called Sugar: The Bitter Truth.

This lecture is really better described as a call to action with biochemistry diagrams. Lustig argues that fructose is an evil that’s been behind the rise in obesity and metabolic syndrome of the last few decades; that soda, juice, and sports drinks loaded with sucrose or HFCS are the single biggest factor in childhood obesity (his specialty); and that we had better start treating fructose as the chronic hepatotoxin it is and stay the heck away from it. I agree.

The lecture series is called Current Controversies in Nutrition: Letting Science Be the Guide. Well, yeah — what other guide have they been using all this time, for goodness’ sake? You know, I started my carbgrrl.com series admitting a worry about looking like a loon…no more. Richard Nikoley, primal blogger extraordinaire, often talks about Modern Ignorance and the ways in which supposed experts tie themselves in knots because of broken preconceptions about stuff we used to understand instinctively. (Richard blogged this lecture, and also another I’ll touch on here sometime soon…) It sure looks like Lustig is emerging from a cave of institutional ignorance, blinking — and pissed off. Good.

Lustig’s obsession with fructose probably doesn’t give an accurate picture of all the factors in play. He seems to think glucose is just fine to consume in whatever quantity — it’s the “energy of life”, he says (around 1:26:00) — and so I suspect he’s misguided about the evils of spiking one’s insulin over and over, in addition to spiking one’s triglycerides. Remember that the glucose that feeds our brains and bodies can be made from practically any old thing lying around, as I’ve discussed before. And in GCBC, (The Great) Gary Taubes discusses the pernicious effects of eating fructose and glucose in combination:

Because sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS-55) are both effectively half glucose and half fructose, they offer the worst of both sugars. The fructose will stimulate the liver to produce triglycerides, while the glucose will stimulate insulin secretion. And the glucose-induced insulin response in turn will prompt the liver to secrete even more triglycerides than it would from the fructose alone, while the insulin will also elevate blood pressure apart from the effect of fructose. [GCBC, Ch. 12, p. 201]

I have a couple of other quibbles (I’m not sure Lustig’s lust for fiber is entirely warranted), but it’s absolutely worth watching if you care about this stuff.

Experiences not to miss:

• Helping the Concordia group understand your needs for confidence in outsourced identity data and your business and technical drivers for authorization, to inform future harmonization work in these areas — the surveys should take you only a few minutes

• Joining the User-Managed Access webinar on January 29 to learn about UMA benefits, progress to date, and next steps — register early, as there’s an attendance limit

(I will not say “Join the conversation”, I will not say “Join the conversation”, I will not say “Join the conversation”…)