Dirk Bogarde shopping alone. A dropped glove. The only person not laughing in an audience
July 12, 2013 § Leave a comment
For 50 days, Zannier recorded every website he visited, every chat conversation he had, every mouse movement. He even tracked where he walked and took a picture of himself using his computer every 30 seconds. He’s selling that trove of personal information for $2 a day or $250 for the whole lot.
“In the market, people are making money with my personal data, and as a provocation, I said, ‘OK, I want to try to make money with my own data.’ ”
He’s not expecting any marketers to pay up. This is a thesis project for his New York University grad program. Although, more than 115 people have already bought some of his data .
So, is $2 a good deal? Zannier isn’t sure.
“I don’t know. It just was a random number.”
But Jaron Lanier, the author of Who Owns the Future? says he thinks Zannier is undercharging. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Alexandra Auger
“Nay,” said I, “I come not from heaven, but from Essex.”
January 30, 2013 § Leave a comment
So the first question is this: when everyone is continuously looking for ways to secure their data, to make it more reliable, authoritative, to reduce noise & spam, why would I want to introduce less reliability and additional noise? Because I want to be the one that determines how reliable or unreliable my information is. And because much of the information about us out there festering in databases is unreliable – I want to manage my unreliability. (And yes I understand this is mostly impossible, like controlling the weather, but read on)…
A loose analogy is one of adding audio effects to an audio track, a vocal track for example. You can add equalization, reverb, pitch correction, and so on. The source sound is non destructively altered and the effects can be automated and changed as needed. Similarly, for data, I’d like to be able to add controls that allow my information to change over time. I want bugs in my own information.
These data effects would allow information to decay, to be fallible, like memory. It would allow some control over how data lives in the network over time, frustrating efforts of those who would use it for commercial purposes, for example. So instead of my information becoming some else’s market intelligence, it becomes market disinformation. I become: just not worth it. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Chris Berthelsen
my nerves are bad to-night 