The Social Gene Pool : Whose Data Is It Anyway?

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Facebook. Privacy. Valuation. Advertising. Customers.

A rich, combustible, volatile mixture – and it’s exploding all over the blogosphere.

Doc Searls, Jason Calcanis, Dave Winer and many others are hotly debating Facebook’s ‘rude, greedy, vulture-like’ behavior of capturing, analyzing and presenting user data in a form that advertisers can take advantage of to mutual profit – Facebook and advertisers, of course, not li’l ole you and me, the ‘customer’.

At the core of the debate is the question: Why won’t Facebook give back OWNERSHIP of the data to its members – and seek permission about sharing it with others?

A lot of it also centers around a thorny and hard to resolve thing called IDENTITY. What is it really? How is it defined? Who ‘owns’ it?

For decades, I’ve obsessed over a question I first heard a professor ask in college: “Who am I?”

Superficially, I am Dr.Mani. But that’s just a tag, a label, a descriptor. Sure, it identifies me, but at the same time, it is NOT ‘me’.

Going deeper, I am a set of values, behaviors, interests, passions, actions, relationships and more.

Together, the cohesive whole made up of multiple parts and components goes to make up an entity, a persona, an individual that it’s convenient and easy to refer to by the use of a name like ‘Dr.Mani’

On an even deeper plane, there’s more to it… but let’s not go there just now.

Assuming that my ‘identity’ is so defined, anyone with access to all the data pieces that make it up can categorize, group or classify me pretty accurately. Fortunately, perhaps, it has not been possible (or practical) for anyone or any company to gather such information together – until recently.

Reading this article about the pervasive influence of Google had me mildly worried about what I was doing online. Facebook, within a more limited range, has probably greater ‘depth of penetration’ than even Google does into the components that make up our ‘identity’.

But all of that begs the question: Who OWNS the data?

So, my name is Dr.Mani. Do I own it? If yes, every other ‘Dr.Mani’ in the world needs my explicit permission to use it, isn’t it? No one else can be named ‘Dr.Mani’ unless I let them do it. Right?

Uh-huh, that won’t float. So I don’t really ‘own’ my name. Correct?

Who does, then?

In reality, the ‘community’ does. They are the people who use it to refer to me, call out to me, relate things and events to me.

If I owned my name, and retained COMPLETE control over everything about it – usage, mention, reference, everything – the name itself would become pretty much worthless and meaningless.

Because the name is widely usable, it multiplies in VALUE as more and more people access it. Use it. And even abuse it. There lies the rub.

Processes, systems and laws exist to protect usage of my name – even though I do not OWN it. They are geared against MIS-USE of something that’s uniquely mine, even if I don’t completely own it.

The entity, persona or individual known as ‘Dr.Mani’, even if only leased out to me, is ‘protected’ by law against a company or business or individual taking advantage of it – against my wishes, or without my permission.

And because ‘Dr.Mani’ as an entity is made up of a collection of parts – the bits being available for compilation as data elements – it is natural to believe that even though the individual bits of data are not anyone’s exclusive property, the assembling of it into a pattern that makes up a unique individual subjects the compiled whole to the same protection and permission accorded to the guy we call ‘Dr.Mani’.

This is at the core of the privacy issue Facebook is apparently violating.

They are signing up members in huge numbers. That’s fine.

They are collecting bits of data about each user. Again fine.

They are compiling the data into a ‘composite’ and assigning it to the identity of members. Now it’s getting into tricky area.

They are making that composite available to advertisers and marketers who can monetize the information. Definitely gray terrain.

They are refining the dataset to gain ever greater insight into the ‘identity’ of its members. Potentially dangerous, very serious.

Here’s the thing. Assembling such data got a whole lot easier – years ago.

Indeed, the first thought I had when I read about Guy Kawasaki’s interesting visit to the 23andMe party (”Great Expectorations”, great tag!) is that ‘genetic profiling’ is the new frontier… and a WHOLE lot more personal and individual than behavioral profiling which can be mimicked and faked pretty easily.

Who owns THAT data?

My gene pool is uniquely mine (or should be).

But by giving others permission to break it down into component bits, over which I cannot claim ‘ownership’, I have tacitly accepted that the company *may* use the composite of data bits it ‘generated’ from my sample into a ‘profile’ – which it could later claim to ‘own’ (or at least suggest permission had been granted to use – and/or abuse!)

We’re at an era of technological advance and development where once purely theoretical issues have become seriously practical ones.

No longer is the cost or complexity of gathering discrete data bits of a population of 6 billion inhabitants of planet Earth a mind-numbing or bank-breaking task.

No longer are mysteries of social identity and bio-chemical composition of the human race likely to remain unraveled.

The race for ownership of the genome hotted up decades earlier with Craig Venter winning by taking ’smart’ shortcuts.

The race for ownership of the social ‘gene pool’ is now the focus of attention, with Google, Facebook, DoubleClick and who knows who else in the race for first place.

Doc Searls is right. We can’t petition them to stop, and hope conscience or concern for privacy over a dubiously defined ‘ownership’ will cause these behemoths to halt their headlong rush for riches and dominance.

You - yes, YOU – have a choice. Exercise it.

Decide how much of YOUR ’social gene pool’ you will reveal so others can access it. Remember than ANYTHING you do online will reflect a bit of it. Don’t fool yourself that you can keep things ’secret’ online (and maybe even off).

And hopefully sometime in the future, as Doc Searls speculates, we’ll harness the same powerful technology into a system that gives us pre-emptive right over the part of our shared data that can be reassembled and used in a likeness of ourself – without first getting our explicit permission to do so.

It will happen. We just don’t know when.

Or what may go wrong in the meantime!

Related reading…

• Wendy Seltzer – Facebook: Privacy versus cross-context aggregation
• David Weinberger – Facebook’s Privacy Default
• Jeff Jarvis – I’m not dating your cookie
• Ethan Zuckerman – Facebook changes the norms for web purchasing and privacy