Release 9.0: User-Managed Privacy Tools

The NY Times has an interesting piece today by Steve Lohr about Bynamite, a service that lets users manage their own data for themselves.

I love this idea... but I have loved it for more than 10 years! What makes Ginsu Yoon more likely to succeed than Seth Goldstein with RootMarket and the many others who all have had this same idea? Or the services like UPromise that give you deals if you shop with partners? Is he a great entrepreneur?

It may be simply that its time has finally come... Facebook et al. have accustomed users to managing their own data -- and Bynamite wants to help them to do that Web-wide rather than merely on Facebook (and all the places it reaches with Open Graph). Behavioral targeting is also gaining traction recently; it's the same idea, except with the marketers in control watching the consumer surreptitiously rather than communicating with her.

It's interesting to note that the first round of these companies a decade ago -- WhenU, Claria -- began in this way (with much less data and worse UIs), but ultimately turned into spyware because they had such a hard time generating opt-in downloads and instead relied on sneaky practices to get installs.

With luck this time it will be different, because the basic principle is a good one: Give people control over (the use of) their own data.

If I were doing this (or investing in one), I would play up the social angle and let users compare themselves to others (Shopville -- it's a parking site right now)... or buy things together ... and then I might end up with a user-demand (as well as a user-aggregation) version of Groupon.

 

Follow Esther Dyson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/edyson

Comments

[xmlgrrl]

04:36 PM on 07/18/2010

The idea of turning behavioral data, something you "shed" accidentally while wandering around the Internet, into accurate and intentionally shared data is an excellent one. This offering will be interesting to watch.

This article caught my eye because I work on a Web protocol called User-Managed Access (UMA) -- and a shift to intentional sharing is one of our goals. (Interested folks are invited to check out our work at the Kantara Initiative site.) The more reasons a person has to willingly and trustfully share information, the likelier the sharing transaction will be a win-win...

[ragtag]

10:05 AM on 07/19/2010

Seems like a great way to exploit people...

[James Snowgrass]

11:45 AM on 07/21/2010

In addition, ProtectNetwork has been doing user data management privacy work for nearly a decade. ProtectNetwork is currently in use in more than 30+ countries and millions of users use it everyday to access thousands of sites in a privacy enhanced fashion. Also Kantara is awesome.

[renatam]

01:36 PM on 07/18/2010

Good response, Ginsu. Respect for the consumer experience first and foremost as priority no. 1 will be the differentiator. It always is.

[ginsudo]

11:13 AM on 07/18/2010

Hi Esther - you're totally right: if Bynamite succeeds, the most important factor will have been that our timing was right. A decade ago, advertisers didn't have the power, and consumers didn't have the awareness. I think Seth had some brilliant ideas with AttentionTrust and Root Markets, but they may have been too early.

Regarding the social angle - we intentionally made this beta with no built-in social aspect, against the advice of many smart people. It's not that we're trying to be thickheaded, but we wanted to test the proposition that people simply want to know and control their own information. Not for sharing, not for discounts, not for games - but just because it's your information and you should determine how the advertising world views you. Maybe that audience is small, but that's the audience we wanted to start with, because they have the problem that we want to solve. The world doesn't need another way for me to tell my friends what I bought at Walmart.

Anyway, thanks for taking a look and posting your thoughts!