Monday, February 25, 2013

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!"