My Digital FootPrint

Been looking at Flux . Simple proposition.  Aggregation of all your receipts and loyalty into one place. #loveit The power; [in terms of control of your data and what happens to it, how gets to exploit it and what rights you have] shifts from one silo ( the retailer and the bank) to Flux.  It moves from the relationship collector (who you interact with) to a new third party. (intermediary) So here is convenience for you, as these services improve your customer experience, at the expense of data, it is trade we make with having to determine the consequences.  Your data is spread out to a new layer who now needs to monitise  data  to thrive.  The players who now have access to and want to monitise your data goes up.  More competition usually means a lower price, in this case to access your data.   Given some of the players have a direct business relationship with you for products and services ( how your data is generated)  - reselling your data is incremental.  However for the

This post is not should Amazon create a bank, just would BigTech companies do better at the retail FinTech/ banking functions because of the data they hold on you and me? --- All of Amazon’s reporting data is here , Q4 will be released on 31.1.2019. We know from the existing reporting that they have passed 500,000 employees, added $5Bn to cash and sales income of over £200bn. Whilst the Q10 reporting give numbers, facts and a short section on risks there is no mention of data. Can AMAZON or any other BigTech buy an existing international retail bank in cash – yes, but would they be able to do any better? Ignoring the specific relationship that customers have with Amazon and these same customers with their banks, the regulation frameworks and that Amazon has a range of credit/ gift card offers right now; the question:- “Is any of the BiGTech’s data set on me (and you) provide an advantage insomuch that it would enable them to make better decisions as a “bank” that say y

I love my weekly email update from Nir Eyal and his post on Nir and Far - he writes on behaviour, habits and How to Build Habit-Forming Products.  He always brings up some interesting fact.   This week Nir was writing about the screen time problem, this is coupled with what Fred Wilson has been writing about on screen time trackers  made me think about my own FOMO with tracking. I used to have a fitbit, my phone and lots of devices to track me as I started on the ideas of quantified self  way back in 2008 - which feed into My Digital Footprint. I left "on" a wide range of trackers for location, heart, paces etc and tried to build a model.   Well I kind of got board and slowly the devices broke for a stack of reasons.  Rock Climbing and diving among the most obvious ones that some devices stopped functioning as well as they should.  Many have been upgraded and also gone to my overflowing man draw of one-day recycling for a project.  However, I now getti

We are all aware of the response that when a digital or Internet service is Free; you are the product. It is most probably an adaption of a 1970 quote from the TV/media industry. Free to Air TV, which is advertising supported, means you watch for FREE in exchange for attention to watch adverts, as product and service owners hope you will buy. I want to explore this line of thinking a little further, as with the introduction of PSD2, GDPR and many other new regulatory frameworks from the US to Australia: the user/ consumer can now get their data back – aka #data_portability/ #data_mobility, so the model of FREE needs to be looked at again with our updated digital glasses on.  The purpose here to raise questions as I am thinking about BigTech and the reaction of companies to new regulations. Who benefits and who is threatened, specifically exploring if branded Banks / Fintech gain or lose with data portability?  The thesis is that the Free Facebook model breaks because this

The majority who read this will be aware of the response that when a digital or Internet service is Free; you are the product. It is most probably an adaption of a 1970 quote from the TV/media industry. Free to Air TV, which is advertising supported, means you watch for FREE in exchange for attention to watch adverts, as product and service owners hope you will buy. The idea of this post is to explore this line of thinking a little further, as with the introduction of PSD2, GDPR and many other new regulatory frameworks from the US to Australia: the user/ consumer can now get their data back, so this idea needs to be looked at again with our digital glasses on. The purpose here to raise questions with the hope others will help explore what it means through commentary.  Definitions for this post  Derivative : A derivative is a contract between two or more parties whose value is based on an agreed-upon underlying digital data asset (like your social media posts) or set o

This is Richard Holton (x MIT) discussing the classic philosophical problem of can data predict and free will --- that is, the question of whether we human beings decide things for ourselves, or are forced to go one way or another.  He distinguishes between two different worries. One worry is that the laws of physics, plus facts about the past over which we have no control, determine what we will do, and that means we're not free. Another worry is that because the laws and the past determine what we'll do, someone smart enough could know what we would do ahead of time, so we can't be free. He says the second worry is much worse than the first, but argues that the second doesn't follow from the first. The next problem is that this assume the mind and no body and when we realise that they are one ( the strange order of things) - and chemistry is a bigger controller of outcome than the mind ( the mind is flat ) - does knowing more data help or not?

Douglas Rushkoff ’s new book, Team Human Follow Douglas on Twitter  He has a FREE Book launch event at Civic Hall in New York City on Wednesday January 23 2019 Douglas kindly provided me with a pre-launch books and here is my review    SIMPLE - READ IT. Douglas spots a trend and writes a book about it. How do we put people back into the centre (tech). It has been a theme growing for a while but the sense is that it is now that we should refocus. I agree. Team Human is a manifesto, different to the policy ideals explored by say Paul Collier in The Future of Capitalism.  The structure is 100 (one hundred) essays or statements, where he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together — not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; educati