Saturday, January 19, 2008

Personal control of personal information

Personal control of personal information: [...] there's a very interesting move afoot to set up an open standard to describe user "attention" data - which I gather includes browsing history, mostly, but could also certainly include any other information about what a user is interested in...Netflix reviews, Amazon purchases, search queries, you name it. The hope is to break this data away from the many different sites (each if which controls a piece of it) and put it in the hands of users, who can then go and get purchase recommendations (or what have you) from whoever does the best job. [...] [...] I don't see any particularly horrible technical roadblocks, but I do see a lot of interesting technical problems (e.g. reference resolution over this data!) and of course there might be pushback from the people that control the data now. (Via Cranial Darwinism.)

I see two big technical and political obstacles:

  • Privacy and security controls: how can the user control in a sufficiently fine-grained way who can use what pieces of their attention data for what? There's no solution on the horizon that avoids a trusted third party, and even then it will be difficult for the user and the various parties to reach common understanding about particular uses (see the recent issues with social networking sites, which are not just political).
  • Data collector confidentiality: Attention data related to a particular site, say an online merchant leaks out a bit of information about that site's operations. If enough attention data collected by Acme Corp. is made available by Acme's users to BottomFeeder Inc. for a consideration, BottomFeeder may be able to reverse engineer important aspects of Acme's recommender system, for instance. Preventing such leakages is very hard.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Volcano erupts in southern Chile (AP)

Volcano erupts in southern Chile (AP): The Llaima volcano erupts spewing lava, ash and smoke in Conguillio National Park, some 650 kms (403 miles) south of Santiago, Tuesday, Jan. 1st, 2008. Even though 150 people were evacuated from the area, no casualties or damage were reported, officials said. (AP Photo/Hector Andrade)The Llaima volcano erupts spewing lava, ash and smoke in Conguillio National Park, some 650 kms (403 miles) south of Santiago, Tuesday, Jan. 1st, 2008. Even though 150 people were evacuated from the area, no casualties or damage were reported, officials said. (Via Yahoo! News - Science.)

I've part-way to the summit of Llaima in August 2006, but incoming weather prevented a summit attempt. I had hoped to go back to this beautiful, remote volcano in the next year or two, but now it may have to wait, especially if the road and lodge have been damaged.