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First and foremost, in the development of DP-related business models I’m seeking win-win solutions for consumers and businesses. As DP goes mainstream there will be proponents and opponents of a slew of different, important, and highly controversial aspects of DP. At the front of the line and at the top of my mind are privacy concerns. I actually think we have a chance to change privacy for the better, gain the (nearly) complete trust of consumers, and at the same time, provide businesses with better opportunities to engage in opt-in, targeted, 1-to-1 marketing. This is the holy-grail of DP IMO and the future of advertising.

This post represents a rough sketch-up of the future of DP and DP business models. It’s not quite the “sharing data between facebook and Myspace” that seems to be all the rage today. But I believe this is a realistic direction in which to head, and I think it makes a lot of sense to develop models that maintain customer privacy while sharing data in every aspect of their lives, not just on and over the Web. Furthermore, these models will help businesses employ next generation advertising that allow them to serve customers to the highest potential of the business.

Zuckerberg argues that Facebook provides something the larger web doesn’t — an undo button — which he feels is more important than data portability.

The example he offers is the Facebook news feed. As it stands if you publish something to your news feed and then decide that you want to limit who can see it by changing the privacy settings, that information is removed from your friend’s updates (assuming they no longer have the privileges necessary to access it). However, were the Facebook news feed offered as an RSS feed available outside Facebook (as we’ve often argued it should be), it would, because of the nature of RSS, no longer be retractable. Even if you changed the privacy settings and removed it from the feed, many RSS readers would already have cached or otherwise stored the post you’d like to retract.

The business risks for Web 3.0 are fundamentally changing with increased public scrutiny of data privacy, portability, expanded Web Services, data sharing, cloud computing, etc. New privacy laws, new technological capabilities, and new user demands have created a situation where the question most frequently cited by students of Web 3.0 implementations have asked: we understand how beneficial it is to link data and derive new improved services, knowledge about our users/customers but what about privacy, regulation from the consumer perspective?

Key questions are discussed: who owns user data? How should users be able to reuse it? Why should companies consider allowing their users' personal data to be easily transportable? The answer here is: because in the end it will bring our users/customers closer, a finding many major enterprises have realized: Nokia, etc.

“Today Microsoft is announcing that it has joined DataPortability.org, a group committed to advancing the conversation about the portability, security and privacy of individuals’ information online.  There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users.

Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

"Increasingly, there are no limits technologically as to what a company can do in terms of collecting information . . . and then selling it as a commodity to other providers," said committee member Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who created the Privacy Caucus 12 years ago. "Our responsibility is to make sure that we create a law that, regardless of the technology, includes a set of legal guarantees that consumers have with respect to their information."

Markey said he and his colleagues plan to introduce legislation next year, a sort of online-privacy Bill of Rights, that would require that consumers must opt in to the tracking of their online behavior and the collection and sharing of their personal data.

What is needed though is a discussion about this and what the best practices in these cases should be. One option would be the opt-in for such XFN-markup but of course those links would still be available although not that easily extractable. Making it more private would probably harm the site’s usefulness. Removing them might also harm social services such as dopplr which make good use of them to find your contacts on dopplr.

So it’s many questions to be answered and I wonder what a good process might be to answer them. Surely there is the  around but of course they cannot just publish guidelines and the problem is solved. A broader discussion is needed and for a start maybe an exact description of the problem and coming from these some proposals to solve it.

I've been following the barrage of news regarding Data Portability with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I've been a proponent of OpenID, and regularly use services like PassPack to keep track of the ridiculous number of log-ins I seem to have accumulated. At the same time, I worry about what data is essentially mine, and what doesn't rightfully belong to me. I'm still not convinced that Robert Scoble owned the contact information for his 5000 "friends" on Facebook, and that is the facet of Data Portability that worries me, at least a little.

I'm finding that the more avenues I have to share my data online, the more I find myself wanting to pull what I already have out there back. I find it hard to imagine that I'm the only person who worries about the over-reaching umbrella of Google linking up to every other site who joins the Data Portability Workgroup and the sheer amount of amassed information any one entity could end up possessing about me.