One of the most powerful forces in our society is the growing need by information-literate citizens to have control over their personal information.
I know I'd like to have more control over my stuff, and I think others feel the same.
If you're just dropping in, we're in the middle of a connected sequence attempting to tie together multiple themes sweeping our industry, and our society as a whole.
If we step back for a moment, I've introduced this series, written about the growing need for information governance, identified information risk management as the new frontier in security, pointed to the unmet needs of knowledge workers as a crisis in the making, described how the changing nature of applications will change IT, positioned virtualization as creating the potential for "frictionless" IT, and speculated a bit on how the cloud might affect us all.
But all of this assumes that it's corporate information.
What if I think of it as MY information?
Our Digital Shadow
Our society has a pretty good understanding of the rights around property ownership, money, etc. When it comes to "who owns information", we're definitely in new territory.
Shallow "privacy policies" aside, who really owns my medical records? My financial information? The record of my phone calls? The list goes on -- the default today is that the entity that collects the information, owns the information.
Just ask Google.
My Personal Content
And there's another important category of personal information, which I call "my stuff". You know, the pictures, videos, music, letters, etc. that's sloshing around at home. As I mentioned in an earlier post, when I took home one of the new EMC LifeLine-based shared storage products, I had well over a terabyte of stuff. And a whole lot of duplicated stuff.
Not only did I now have it all in one place for the first time, I could get to it on any device in my home, including cell phone, HDTV, game console, etc. It was very cool.
And, for the first time, it's getting backed up off-site. I don't know if I shared this with you, but a few years ago, I had a Very Bad PC Day that resulted in me losing all the pictures of the kids.
Yes, I had backups.
I just couldn't figure out a way to restore.
My Work Product
If you're like me, you create a fair amount of somewhat unique intellectual capital in the course of your work.
Who owns this? My company would say, of course, that they own it, as would your company, but I don't know if those of you reading this would entirely agree with this positioning.
I'd like to think that we have a sort of "shared ownership" of my work product. Yes, the primary goal is to help the business I work for, but if I can think of a way to repurpose it ethically at some future point of time, that should be considered as well.
BTW, how many of you put your work stuff on a USB drive, or email it to yourself? C'mon, be honest ...
The Big Question -- Who Are You Going To Trust With Your Information?
Assuming I have a level of control over my personal information (debatable, to be sure), who am I going to trust to make sure it's there, it's usable, it's relative private, it's preserved, I can control who sees it and when, and so on?
One focal point is the home. You've seen EMC's LifeLine (software that gets combined with OEM hardware to create a shared storage device, usually combined with a remote backup service), and -- of course -- our recent announcement of our intent to acquire Iomega -- so one way to think of this is a device that I buy, and I trust the device.
Another model is a service provider. Some people trust people like Google, Yahoo, et. al. with their personal information. Maybe that works for them, but I wouldn't be comfortable.
How about financial institutions? I trust them with my money, would I trust them with my personal information? Or, perhaps, my health care provider? What about telecommunication providers who are selling me network connectivity (both fixed line and wireless) -- could I trust them with my information?
And would we need something like PI Corporation's offering (recently acquired by EMC) to make this attractive?
Getting Control Of My Information Back
Face it -- all the really sensitive stuff I care about lives on someone else's computers -- my bank, my financial adviser, my doctor(s), my kids' school, and so on. They all tell me to trust them, but I'm not given the option to do otherwise, and I don't like that.
You know what I'd like? My personal information cloud that I control, and I can permit others to access and update my personal information repository on a fine-grained and auditable basis.
Any company that offered me that sort of model would be a strong contender for my business, and my loyalty -- simply because they'd be putting me in control of my own information.
And I like to be in control.
What Does This Mean?
As consumers in this information world, you'd probably agree that you'd like a world where you have more control over your information, and not less. You'll have choices to do this in the home, or using an external provider, or perhaps both.
But, if you're in the business of collecting sensitive information about your customers, you might consider a model where you put them back in control of their own information, and do so in a convenient (and trustworthy) manner.
Because, in the end, more of us are going to want control over our stuff.
Comments