Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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Can We Have Both: Real-Time Data and Personal Data Privacy?

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Increasingly a major challenge for businesses is how to balance the need for real-time data and still protect the privacy of personal data. With information becoming so mobile and real-time on the internet, there is a real danger of people losing their rights to privacy and even their freedoms. The question for businesses and society is how can people enjoy rich, real-time information, and not lose their freedoms?

The Personal Data Privacy Challenge. Ideally, data needed for an application is freely available. Free, accessible data is easy to move and transfer between computers in real-time. There are challenges when data is Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This is information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person or can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a single individual. In these situations data is needed to be protected both at rest (storage) and in motion. This can be done through procedural methods such as password protection or the use of encryption. More and more businesses and application developers are balancing the need for the free movement of data versus the need for personal data privacy.

The Social Debate of Personal Privacy. Our society as a whole is still coming to terms with personal data privacy versus reaping the benefits of social networks and real-time data. An example of this is where Facebook made their privacy policy significantly less restrictive for their hundreds of millions of subscribers. See RWW’s posting Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over, for more on Facebook’s privacy changes. My comments on this were as follows:

“Is Facebook’s privacy settings leading us into a new era of social openness or are they arrogantly deciding for us that we need no privacy? I do not like Facebook’s cavalier and drastic approach in changing their privacy policy, but the real question is whether their privacy policy is reflecting social norms, and as a society should we be giving a way our privacy for the benefits of social networking.

Privacy is so closely tied to freedom. If someone wants to control you and knows everything about you, they can control you and take your freedom away. If someone wants to control you and they have no information about you, it is difficult for them to control you.

In the decades before the internet, Americans had a lot of privacy. I would say that this was not always the norm. When the U.S. was first founded, your neighbor’s usually knew everything about you. If you committed adultery, you received a Scarlet Letter. Everyone knew it. It was not until our society started to become more mobile that we began to have a high degree of privacy.

Now with information becoming so mobile, we are losing our privacy again. How can we enjoy all this rich, real-time information, and not lose our freedoms?”

The benefits of real-time data versus the risk of losing personal data privacy is a thorny issue. Businesses will need to balance these issues in light of customer needs, Government guidance, and business service offerings.


Back to All About Real-Time Data Networks.

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Overcoming Web Information Glut – Use the Trust Quadrant to Decide Who and What to Trust

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

With the web comes an onslaught of data. No one believes everything they read on the web, but how do you figure out who to trust? It wasn’t that hard to figure out who or what to trust when information flowed a lot slower in the off-line world. You could trust your textbooks, you could trust your mother, and you could trust the local newspaper. It just seemed natural on who or what you could trust or not trust before the internet. Now with all this real-time data, we need to be more deliberate in figuring out who and what we can trust online.



Kieron O’Hara in his book, Trust: ..From Socrates to Spin, offers a simple model that defines different types of information sources in terms of trust. This trust quadrant is a great guideline for identifying types of information sources, what type of information you can trust with your “trusted sources”, and affirm why you should trust some information sources and not others. This model is relevant for real world and the online world.


Characteristics of Trust


Trust can be characterized in a quadrant using two axes, global and local, and horizontal and vertical. Any “trusted” information source can be found in one of the four areas of the quadrant. With the web becoming more and more real-time, it becomes critical to know who to trust and even why you trust them. This “trust quadrant” can help.

Trust on the Local and Global Axis. This trust characteristic is defined as the closeness of the relationship that you have with the information source. A local trust is defined as trust that is based on personal acquaintance. At the other end of the spectrum is global trust. This is a trust by association or “proxy”. In this case, you may not know the source of the information, but someone or some institution has vouched for the person or organization. This is a global trust.

Trust on the Vertical and Horizontal Axis. An horizontal trust is a trust between equals. On the other end of the spectrum is a vertical trust. A vertical trust is granted within an established hierarchy. A horizontal trust is not really enforceable if the trust is broken or strained. A vertical trust is enforceable and accountable as the source of the information is within an established hierarchy or organization.


Examples of Types of Trusts Within the Trust Quadrant


A Local-Vertical Trusted Source. An example of a local-vertical trusted source would be a family friend that works as a bank manager. This person would be easy to trust as a source of information on financial matters and trends.

A Global-Vertical Trusted Source. An example of a global-vertical trusted source would be a published professor associated with an university. An university professor would be easy to trust and reference as a source of information in his or her field of study. A good thing about referencing a global-vertical trusted source is that if the information is later found incorrect, your “bad” reference does not necessarily reflect back on you and your reputation. With the backing of an authoritative source (the university), a professor is identified by the university as a trustworthy source of information.

A Local-Horizontal Trusted Source. An example of a local-horizontal trusted source would be a friend on Facebook, a follower on Twitter, or a family friend that works at the local grocery store. This person should be easy to trust as a source of information on certain topics. At the same time they can, on occasion, pass on bad information or set an erroneous expectation. A local-horizontal source is not necessarily reliable or right all the time. Just because you know someone at the grocery store does not mean you will get the best service at the grocery store everytime. If a local-horizontal trusted source continue to give you bad information or erroneous expectations, you can easily stop trusting them and break your link with them.

A Global-Horizontal Trusted Source. An example of a global-horizontal trusted source could be a business that an audit firm has audited. As long as the audit firm maintains a good reputation, then the audited business can be trusted to a degree. If you loose your trust in the auditing firm, then you would probably also lose your trust in the audited business.

In the real world we all use this quadrant of trust to identify who we trust as an information source. This is common sense and we are almost unaware of why we trust a source of information. On the internet we need to be more deliberate with who we trust. There is an information glut online and it is flowing increasingly and increasingly at a real-time pace. We must deliberately identify who we trust as a source of information in order to make good decisions, avoid disappointment, and avoid from being scanned. See article by Geoffrey W. Bilder, In Google We Trust?, for more on who and why to trust online.

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Real-Time Data in Motion Creating a New, Augmented Reality

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Real-time data was first just used for navigation and for tracking things. Now with the advancement of computers, data transfer, and the web, real-time data is now technically feasible for doing about anything. Real-time data feeds and processing is what is behind augmented reality applications. What is happening with real-time data is that computers, the internet, and the real world are quickly converging into a real-time, augmented reality. Social media-type applications are only the beginning. What is making this possible is the integration of web-based technologies as well as real-world sensor technologies such as video, instrument sensors, RFID tags, and biometrics. To make this integration occur requires the real-time and near-real-time movement of data.


Real-Time Data Definitions.

Real-time Data Definition. Traditionally the definition of real-time data was “information that is delivered immediately after collection. There is no delay in the timeliness of the information provided. Real-time data is often used for navigation or tracking” (see A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems). Today the definition of real-time data has not changed, but it now involves more and more variations of data types, data transformation and mashups that are processed and delivered in real-time.

Augmented Reality Definition. Augmented reality is defined as “a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality”. See Wikipedia for more on Augmented Reality.


Trends With Real-time Data in Motion.

B2B Web Squared – Web Meets the World of RFID, GPS, and Sensors. This is an exciting time for anyone that follows information technology trends. There is not so much as a bunch of new technologies emerging, but there is a convergence of web-based technologies and real-world sensor technologies. The web is becoming real-time and it is converging with omnipresent sensors (video, GPS, cell phones, instrument sensors) in the real-world to create an augmented reality. Find out more about B2B Web Squared.

Real-Time Social Networks – Affecting Society and Commerce. Online social networking is upheaving mass media, Government, local communities, and business. Online social networking communities are and will soon become more important social influences and governance than our Governments, mass media, churches as well as local clubs and local community activities. Social commerce will affect how people and business pay for products and how products are distributed. See below for examples of how social networks and real-time data are changing our lives.

  • Social Commerce. Examples of potential social commerce applications include people using a collective shopping cart to shop at several online stores at once, businesses providing open access and geo-coding to all their products and services for true supply chain visibility to all their business customers, and so on. Find out more about the The Social Networking Shift.
  • Real-time User Generated Data. The social web consists of user-generated content, user-generated filtering, user-generated distribution, and user-generated context. Instead of waiting for a reporter to generate an article, editors to edit, and publishers to publish, real-time data and information is getting generated by everybody, everywhere, all the time. Find out more about The Anatomy of the Social Web.
  • The Hyperactive Internet. Social media is causing the internet to becoming increasingly hyperactive. Some are calling this Web 3.0 or 2010 Web. See posting, The Internet Has Gone Hyperactive for more details.

Logistics Situational Awareness Technology. Situational awareness technology is not any new piece of technology, but it is the “mash-up” of various hardware, telecommunications, and applications to produce near-real-time information for better decision-making. For many logisticians, most decision-making cycles are based on quarterly reporting and at best weekly cycles. These are decisions like determining stockage levels, demand forecasting, and carrier selection rules. Historically, many of these extended decision-making cycles were based on the limitations of information technology and telecommunications. Now all of this technology can be integrated to find out what is happening along the supply chain in real-time and near-real time. Find out more about Logistics Situational Awareness Technology.


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