Agency and the Internet of Things / Everything (You choose!)

As the word Agency starts to gain credence and regain it's original meaning, the state of being in control, we are starting to understand it's importance. Sentient entities have the capacity to have agency. I gave my Smart TV (made dumb) another chance the other day, the first thing it did after I gave it a glimpse of the Internet was to delete two of it's Apps. I had not made this request, clearly Samsung thinks the device is theirs and not mine, I have no means of controlling how it uses it's Smarts, thus it was disconnected again. At the same time Apple are making a veiled attempt to give me control over my iPhone. They have introduced a means of controlling Advertising on the device. "Your challenge should you accept it, is to find the control... this tape will self destruct in 10 seconds" OK, clearly the mission isn't actually impossible, but give yourself 1000 points if you opened settings and went straight to the "About" section.

Agency is something we should work hard to retain, for when it is lost, it is very difficult to regain. Put at its most basic; Freedom is a result of having Agency. Many of the worlds constitutions aim to keep their citizens safely in control of their lives. (That word "safely" has many implications)

As the number of Things in our worlds gain the ability to behave in an apparently sentient manner we should be very wary of who is actually in control of the devices.

A recent experience in our conservatory got me into hot water, the conservatory lights are controlled by X10 switches. My wife started complaining that the lights had started to have "a mind of their own" (a very agency laden phrase!) After two weeks I tracked down the issue to a subtly hidden infra-red detector that had previously been programmed to switch on the lights if movement had been detected. No names, but I had shown the controlling device to another member of my family, who presumably thought it would be fun to hide the detector in the lounge, facing in such a way that the conservatory lights would be triggered at seemingly random intervals.

In an old episode of StarTrek: The Next Generation, based solely on the concept of Agency. "Data" was triggered by his creator to return home, and he used his Cyber Hacking skills to take over the Starship Enterprise, over-riding any number of security controls to take on the Identity of the Captain and add his own security layer that locked the Captain from taking control of his own vessel. His creator had even gone to the lengths of lacking "Data" out of his own memories of the event.

Agency will become a very important aspect of the Internet of Things or Everything depending which hype laden article you read, and thus Identity and Entitlement services will be crucial. Sadly just as with all things related to Safety and Security they are generally added after the fact, rather than built in.

If I had my druthers (an 1870's American term for Agency, being a contraction of "would-rathers") I would ensure that everything I owned was in my control, and as the things become harder to control I would have an Agent acting on my part to help me deliver the control required.

Any one remember having to manipulate the choke on the carburettor? My guess is that few of the Nintendo generation will have experienced the joys of flooding a petrol engine, especially not under the withering look of a father, who being ever so competent at all things mechanical, could manipulate the choke in his sleep.

The interfaces involved in controlling complex machinery reduce to fewer and simpler. Designing natural interface, or controls that offer Affordance, another key aspect of Agency, is not as simple as it looks.

Services in the Internet of Everything world must offer Agency to the right folks at the right time with the right degree of Affordance. (Not the affordability that pertains to the cost of the service... look it up!) After all you don't want to be like Jean-Luc having to separate the saucer section while travelling at warp speed in order to regain some semblance of control.

So all you folks designing Everything that will connect to the Internet, design Agency in, and be very careful about assuming that your clients don't want any of it....

Appendix
Perhaps more importantly to all folks designing Agents here is my list in order of importance of the Agents that I want

Software Update Agent: Allows for the automated update or deletion of software under my control, not the control of Samsung or Apple.
Security Agents (I suspect there will be more than one) My use of the OpenDNS service best exemplifies this service, good luck trying to access pornography from my household!. I have four buttons to press to select how aggressive the filtering is, note to self don't use the highest level again, as it stops key folks in the household accessing Social Media! Bad Idea!
Identity Agents
Agency Agent (This one makes my head hurt but think of it as the Butler that manages all the other Servants to ensure a smoothly run life!)
Entitlement Agents: Manage my Entitlements, both those bestowed on me as well as those I bestow on others.
Contract Agents: Arguably a join of Identity and Entitlement agents. Would manage all the contracts that cost me or gain me wealth.
Energy Agent : Would manage the energy hungry devices in my world to consume at cheaper rates, or lower levels.
Home Automation Agents: We've touched on these...
Garden Agents: Water my greenhouse when it needs it, I am fed up of withering or waterlogged seedlings!

Agents, are in my mind like Fire and Forget weapons, rather than the Fire, Ready, Aim wire guided missiles that still need the continued involvement of their operator.

Tyre Frustration: Where do I put the data?

The Prius needed an MOT, apparently according to the newly published data, tyres and brakes cause the most MOT failures in my particular model of Prius. Hurrah to the DVLA for finally releasing the data. But that's another Blog "The value of joining public and personal data"

So anyway I checked the tyres, and lo I found damage to a sidewall a possible MoT fail. I then spent an inordinate amount of time researching the tyres I should put on the Prius. There is now a whole section in "mybrain" devoted to the data gathering effort. Thanks to the EU we have new data on Fuel Efficiency, Braking and Noise created by tyres, sadly they have not furnished us with the the missing Rate of Wear data. (I suspect the industry fought hard to keep that from us, or perhaps it is inversely proportional to the Fuel Efficiency impact and governments are keeping the data from us) No matter how hard I looked I could'nt find the data. Frustration growing... Data should be easier to get than this I should be able to just ask my agent. What are the tyres that will give me, great braking, the best fuel efficiency to wear ratio, and who is the cheapest supplier?

I eventually found the tyre I've gone for a set of Falken ZE914s C/B/70dB from ctyres.co.uk, they have now been fitted. I also had the car serviced they found two of the wiper blades split, (note to self check the wiper blades before the next service) They gave me a piece of paper with lots of very useful data printed on it relating to the safety of the Prius, including 12 point depth check of the tires. Try as I might I could not find an A/A/70 !!

But all that is the build up. I now have a lot of potentially linked data most of which is embedded in the text above, that will be useful to me later and some of which I would be very happy to make public. But where the heck do I put it all...

If I don't store it all now how will I be able to ask my personal agent...

"How long did those first Falkens last?"
or
"How many miles did the last set of tyres do?

The answer is clearly that I won't be able to....

So I want a personal data store, and I want it now!!!!

Otherwise it's going to take a while longer for my personal agent to be useful to me, just asked SIRI he didn't have a clue. But then what should I have expect from a cyber butler whose only focus is pleasing it's real employer: Apple, and who clearly doesn't have access to my personal data.

Regulators skating to where the puck never was!

In ice skating the trick is apparently to skate to where the puck will be, I suspect the same is true of developing regulations. Naturally, though a regulator wants to reduce the impact of the last pain point that cost them votes. So we should not be surprised by the fact that not only are they not skating to where the puck will be, they rarely skate to where the puck is!

This is especially true in the fast moving world of the internet. We might think about the controls needed in the future being about where the puck will be. The need for agency, as where the puck is at present, and the desire to solve Privacy issue as where the puck was, while the "Right to be Forgotten!?" as some confusion on the part of an as yet unidentified individual, for the puck was never there!

I fear the regulators are putting far too much energy and focus into Privacy and not enough on Agency or the Capacity to Control our environment. Primacy, Transparency, and Privacy all result from having Agency, which means in the sociological sense; the ability to control one's environment, which in turn relies on having access to usable controls.

All Entities should be concerned about maintaining their Agency, whether they are Governments, Enterprises or Individuals

I wonder whether in the race to secure the internet, we are not rushing headlong towards a world where we ALL lose Agency, apart of course from those that manage to grab it. I see this next phase as the great Cyber Agency Land Grab.

Google, Amazon, Facebook and perhaps to a lesser extent Paypal, all understand this.

Hopefully our regulators will make the switch in time....

An example: Facebook, having become masters of moving the curtains to the their side of our windows,  have now quietly moved the ability to protect one's Identity out of our control to a less easy to find, and impossible to control location, ie on our friends Facebook page! Worse they have set the default to "expose" or as I say to my students "Promiscuous Mode". With the upcoming Facebook Graph Search, understanding and applying the controls we do have, will be even more important.

The outcome is that we as individuals have lost control of how we expose our identities, the responsibility or agency was moved to our friends and the control is not placed in the obvious Privacy enhancing location.  Agency Fail = Loss of Privacy

There are many more examples; Enterprises of the future will find that they have been disintermediated, and that the internet storefronts of the future will be owned by a small number of powerful corporations. We may achieve cyber security, but at what cost?

If I were in control of an Enterprises' Information Technology Strategy, I would be looking hard to find solutions that allowed an Outside-In approach to Identity, that kept the my enterprise in control of it's assets, and my customers in control of theirs. Easier said than done! I would also be encouraging the regulators to look to solutions that enabled growth of the economy and stop them making regulations that encouraged citizens to believe that they ever could be forgotten, let alone have the "Right to be Forgotten!"

Is the Identity Iceberg Toppling?

Posit 1: The future includes a time when entities own their own Identity.

Posit 2: In that future the focus on Privacy expands to the more important concept of Agency

River's regularly change course, without the landscape fundamentally changing. However, the landscape on the Identity Iceberg given it does topple would change dramatically. The challenge seems to be that intellectually even some of the identity 2.0 protagonists are looking at the opportunity apparently assuming that the landscape is not going to radically change. Perhaps they believe that the forces at work aiming to strengthen and maintain the new status quo. This would result in the Amazons, Googles and the Facebooks (AGFs) succeeding in owning our personal data. While it is clear that individual enterprises should give up now on the idea that they can each own our individual identities, for they are rapidly being marginalised by the AGFs, with Linked-In, and more recently Salesforce making a late attempt to join the Entity Identity grab. Linked-In and Salesforce entry into the space further counter the forces that could topple the Iceberg. Unless of course any of these switch to becoming a true Identity Service provider with the Individual and their devices as their main users, and enterprises as the Payors.

I first realised the possibilities behind a dramatic shift in the Identity landscape, when sitting behind a one way mirror listening to a diabetologist responding to questions about Identity on the Internet with the immortal phrase: "I need another Identity from a pharmaceutical company, like I need a hole in the head!" In the pharma sector this tension was resolved with DocCheck, an organisation that had pharma companies pay to know that a doctor was actually a doctor. This need was triggered by a German Law that required pharma companies to ensure that only doctors could access their medical websites. This is an Identity Service model that took a step towards the future world by giving doctors the opportunity of controlling an Identity that would be trusted (and paid for) by multiple pharmaceutical companies. Thus DocCheck started extending the monetisation of Attribute claims, from the "You will get paid" claim, which was already in place with Credit Cards.

Even the UK Governments innovative Midata program is seemingly just looking at giving individuals "access" to their data which has been collected by others. 

There are clearly folks looking at things from an entity centric perspective. At present I am not betting either way, though I am clear which way I do want it to go. I want to benefit from the value in my information / attributes either from services I value, but occasionally from a monetary sense.

The most important aspect I want from this world is that desire to be in control of how my information / attributes are used, in short I want to have Agency. (Actually I want Agents that will do that for me... but that's another blog....)

Agency defined as "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power."

Given that there is a tectonic shift in play, enterprises have a number of options.

1) Try and maintain the status quo (which would be like trying to super glue the San Andreas fault)

2) Give up and let the new Identity players take control of their clients Identities and Attributes 

3) Be part of a movement that ensures individuals have Cyber Agency, help create a Cyber Trust Ecosystem that will enable individuals organisations access to their Identities and Attributes

Readers who also engage with my LEF persona will know that Consumerisation has been a interest of mine for years. Indeed Doug and I created the original topic on Wikipedia.  Chris Weisinger of CSC identified that this shift towards Cyber Agency, involves Consumerisation.  I had previously toyed with the concept of Identity being consumerized, but he spotted that actually we are talking about the "Consumerisation of Power". A Blog topic in itself that also alludes to Doc Searles Intention Economy

I will be coming back to tighten up this Blog but I want to put it out there...

Apologies for the weak grammar and poor structure and flow.

Some relevant Links

http://respectnetwork.com/consulting-partners/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)

"An Englishman's Data is his Chattel"

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"An Englishman's Data is his Chattel" :- We seem to have forgotten this important point, which is often mistaken for a lesser statement about homes and castles!

I believe that it is down to the lawmakers of England to reinstate this key right, not just for us Brits, but the whole world. In fact we need an addition to the UN Declaration of Human Rights. A declaration of Digital Rights.

e-Trust can only come from a base of clear data ownership, "big data" is confounding this key legal concept. There are whole businesses being founded on the idea that acquiring my data, using it and selling it on without my express permission is legitimate.

Yesterday I received an email offering me 1.6 Million email addresses for $450

I was affronted as they were clearly likely to be selling one of my email addresses gained by theft or fraud. The particular email it was sent to was one of my many ghost email addresses "twitterdeck @ s-mail.me.uk" one that I never use and only gave out to one supplier. Late last year ALL my ghost emails where "acquired/stolen" from somewhere in one go. I could only assume my ISP 1and1, either sold them onto someone, or they were stolen from the 1and1 servers. I never did discover which.

My data is My Data!  Whether it is my current weight measured by my wifi weighing machine, the amount of wine in my house, or my home address. We need to stop the theft and misuse of personal data before the great british public gets used to the idea that they do NOT own their own data.

I feel very strongly that we have allowed whole business models to be formed on the premise that Personal Data Theft and Misuse is OK. It is NOT OK!

Who, but the Brits can get this back under control? (Actually the Brits alone can't but at least we can start a movement!!)

Finally as a reminder, it is not about Privacy, it is about AGENCY!

Agency, or being in control, is what gives rise to the privacy outcome not the other way round.

The good news is that those that have "acquired" our data by fair means or foul are starting to understand that there is a growing demand for cyber agency. Take a look at the data controls in the latest Apple IO6. The growing power of the screams that occur each time Facebook opens our metaphorical privacy curtains also shows that the public is starting to get the need to be in control.


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I wrote this Blog a while ago and felt it was missing something, now having read +Michael Koster's post  on User Agency and IoT, I finally realised what it was.... the importance of both Affordance and the "Things" and the sheer impossibility of accomplishing control in this new world without a great deal of help from Content Curation Agents as well Thing Management Agents that operate on our behalf.

I need mine now, before it is too late!!! And no I do not mean Application by Application I mean an integrated Content Curation Agent that will fight "Data Entropy" while extracting the maximum value from our data, and set of Thing Agents, likely to operate in a heirarchy under the Content Curation Agent.  See earlier post.... 

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Bits or pieces?: The king was in his counting house ...

Bits or pieces?: The king was in his counting house ...

So who is the Blackbird, and why doesn't it peck of the King's nose!!!

What will retribution look like?

"The Politics of Sharing"

I attended a very interesting discussion this week at Microsoft, about the politics of information sharing. The topic was being explored from a local government perspective. It became clear that under the guise of "we are not allowed to because of the Data Protection Act" many local government departments and services avoid sharing information about citizens with other organisations, often to the disadvantage of the very citizens they are responsible for serving and protecting.  The real reasons for this was far simpler! The seagulls in Nemo are good exemplars!

It became clear that many of the representatives of the various bodies, organisations and advisors had missed two key points!

1) Not sharing causes more harm than good, (though there were some present who understood the dangers of not sharing, and that effective sharing can be good for citizens)

2) The information that they were refusing to share, was owned more often than not, by the very citizens that they were elected or paid to serve!

We had a number of discussions about some important mechanisms that need to be in place to enable sharing, such as the standardisation of definitions and standardisation of API's. We recognised that a more effective means of virtial identity was required, and that asset owners would also need to be able more effectively and efficiently manage entitlement and access to their data. One excellent point that was made involved the "value" flow in the transaction. Individuals would either be paid in cash for giving access to their personal information, or could benefit other ways that they would value. (I would allow the police to have access to my home alarm system information, if that meant they would respond quicker to an incident. I wouldn't expect them to pay me for access to such data!).

There was apparently begrudging agreement in the room around the concept of citizen centric data stores, there were however far too many individuals who preferred the idea of creating Government controlled citizen "Big Data" stores shared across multiple agencies, "All the better to control you with my dear!". The recent World Economic Forum's paper on the subject effectively signals an important shift. 

Imagine a local authority that provides each of it's citizens a personal data store and helps them create wealth from this personal data store (likely taking a portion of the income for providing the service and as a means of reducing local tax,) while at the same time using the data store to enhance the safety and security of those same citizens. Information stored in such local government personal data stores would only be data that relates to the business of local government. Other more sensitive data would be in more 'personal' Personal Data Stores. There are many businesses that would love to gain access to such local government information that for example details which houses have double glazing installed. This data may not always be used for wealth creation, as an example it might also be used in the context of supporting the  infirm and aged.

Imagine the "politics of sharing", in the light of an ecosystem that creates wealth for the individual citizen, reduces their local taxes and gives local business access to accurate and timely data that helps drive the local economy. 

Human Agency can be even further enhanced by the full and complete realisation of exactly whose data it is. Politicians and Regulators will do well to recognise that their focus should shift from being overly concerned about the details of privacy law, to the more fundamental and far more important issue of Cyber Agency.

After all it is the control over the curtain that gives privacy. Privacy is simply the result of being in control. So laws that encourage increasing the control by the citizen over their own data, and the development of Personal Data Stores, will be good for the economy, the individual, and society. So why are we not seeing such laws being enacted. My belief is simply that the power is in the hands of those that currently create wealth from our personal data, citizens rarely pay lobbyists!

What to do? The answer is simple : Ensure value flows to the individuals and organisations that created or own the data. Anything else is Data Usury.

Doing so will involve taking on those that would lose out from such a redirected flow, and remember, voters, the economy and society can all benefit.

The web will finally be able to do what it was designed for, creating a more open and egalitarian society. 

Data Entropy, my new battleground

In a recent Blog Simon Wardley was bemoaning the inappropriate use of the terms Structured and Unstructured as they pertained to data, I started writing a comment that turned into this Blog.

I believed the words that he was exploring also pointed to the power Entropy has over data. The simplified post (I didn't see the EP/LP version of his Blog, he had reduced its length b4 I read it) seemed to assume an inexorable flow from Unstructured to Structured. As humans we are in a constant battle to bring structure, order, form meaning to the world around us, this especially applies to data.

History is still only what we believe happened, as we have yet to gain dominion over data. A key difference between energy and data is that data can be destroyed and far too frequently is destroyed, as the non-existance of many historic records can attest!

I was trying to find the word equivalent to exergy, which applies to energy, in the world of data, when it struck me the lack of its existence maybe because that with data there is no "maximal value". Which on reflection is obvious as when one uses data or information and take nothing from it, far from it more often than not combining data can create new data/information plus there is no natural friction in the world of data just entropy. This in itself was on obvious realisation, but then I already knew that the more I knew the more I realised I did not know!

In our journey of transformation, fighting data entropy all the way

- with data (bits) to information (informs) we add form to create new facts or "informs"

- with "informs" to knowledge (knogs) we discover new forms, & meaning 

- to achieve the highest form we make the right use knowledge and attain wisdom!

Aside: It strikes me that with data, entropy reduces the value of data with the square of time, like gravity reduces with the square of distance.

This is shown very well when I look at the graphical data that I have stored about my life, I can readily access images from a month ago, but many of the images taken a decade ago are lost to my iPhoto album, or of they exist in the Album have lost meaning. The majority of images from my childhood are lost with a few hanging on by their finger tips in physical photo albums, the meta data around even older photos makes them all but meaningless; Who is that man in a soldiers uniform in that fading sepia photo?

Thus my final comment after the mind storm that Simon's Blog evoked is:-

Thankyou I created this Blog as a direct result of your post Simon

I enjoyed the journey and find myself even more motivated to fight data entropy, and add or maintain the order, structure/form and meaning of my personal data. 

Which makes me even hungrier for the Linked Data tools I can only envision but have not the skills or time to create. ORAC is sounding more important and desirable every day, Blakes Seven has a lot to answer for!