We're in the final stages of prepping for our June Futures Consortium event this Thursday, where we'll explore the future of transparency and it's impacts on consumers and organizations. We've got a great event planned and will look at a range of topics including:

• personal medical transparency (one of our team will report out on what kinds of info a $1,000 genetic test actually yielded about him)
• the hype and reality of consumer data collection services
• the future of transparency technologies

We'll also present some consumer personas, developed to express different viewpoints on transparency, and explore the future of transparency via scenario archetypes. We'll have more on this after the event, but all of these workstreams have us tracking transparency closely and have yielded some interesting scanning hits.

One I found particularly interesting was this mention of a transparent newsroom on the the Guardian's greenslade blog. The Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review webcasts its editorial conferences publicly, invites local bloggers to critique its work, and has a journalism professor review its reporting. The paper's editor reports it has "improved the newspaper's credibility and made it more relevant to readers' lives."

Could this be the future of all news organizations? If this move towards transparency is improving the experience for readers, it's definitely worth considering, given the deep uncertainty about the future of newspapers (as in this post from Jeff Bercovici's Mixed Media blog). 

Image: James Abbott (www.sxc.hu)

"Online privacy? You must be joking!"

Such was the gist of some polite water cooler discussion with some of my coworkers, following my post about Facebook's Beacon service and what it meant in terms of transparency and the erosion of digital privacy.

From my curious coworkers: Didn't I use Google search? Wasn't I aware that Google’s policy was to hang onto every scrap of personal search data for as long as legally permissible? How is that substantively different than what Facebook is doing?

It's true--I confess, I use Google search for most of my searching and have for quite some time.

Thus, I had to admit that I was seemingly out in the digital wilderness ... until, by happy chance, I came across this article on a new feature from Ask.com, an admittedly minor player in the search business (accounting for about 1/12^th as many Internet searches as Google).

Ask.com is trying to appeal to Internet users concerned about their privacy--they’re now offering a search service called “AskEraser” that allows users to search in relative privacy, with a single click. Essentially, AskEraser discards all the data--search terms, links to your IP address, etc--produced by your searches. Though, in a rather ironic rub, as the New York Times put it,

"The information typed by users of AskEraser into Ask.com will not disappear completely. Ask.com relies on Google to deliver many of the ads that appear next to its search results. Under an agreement between the two companies, Ask.com will continue to pass query information on to Google.”

Still, it is a start. And enough for me to give Ask.com a second look.

A few weeks ago, I spoke to a reporter from 1to1 Media's Inside Privacy about the future of privacy. One of the points I stressed is that the proliferation of private and public-sector surveillance (mall security cameras, subway and highway cameras, as well as archiving of email and Internet searches) is inuring people to the introduction of new security or tracking measures that intrude even further on the traditional privacy space (domestic wiretapping, for instance).

There are increasingly fewer times and spaces where you won't be subject to surveillance, but the news isn't all bad. While surveillance can be abused by people in positions of authority, the increased transparency that comes as a result of such a system can also work against those who would abuse it.

With this in mind, I recently came across a trailer for the movie "Look," a fictional feature film told through the eyes of security cameras. From the film's website:

The Post 9/11 world has forever changed the notion of privacy. There are now approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States generating more than 4 billion hours of footage every week. And the numbers are growing. The average American is now captured over 200 times a day, in department stores, gas stations, changing rooms, even public bathrooms. No one is spared from the relentless, unblinking eye of the cameras that are hidden in every nook and cranny of day-to-day life."

Check out the trailer:

What are our futurists reading? The following are some sources that are sparking the interest of Social Technologies' analysts at the moment:

Image: Social TechnologiesJohn Cashman:

• China CEO: Voices of Experience from 20 International Business Leaders, by Juan Antonio Fernandez & Laurie Underwood -- I’ve been slowly picking my way through this fine collection of insights, anecdotes, and advice from leaders of prominent multinationals such as Carrefour, BP, Unilever, and GE. They share their experiences, good and bad, on entering into China’s complex business landscape. The advice ranges from practical discussions on how to choose expatriate staff with the temperament for China (hint: don’t forget the effects of relocation on the employee’s family), to advice on the best strategies for entry into the Chinese market (Go it alone? Joint venture? Strong or weak joint venture partner?), to creating the proper incentive structures for managing Chinese staff (education and training opportunities, rapid advancement, and impressive-sounding titles seem to be a good place to start).

Matt Sollenberger:

• "The End of Cheap Food," in The Economist -- The Economist argues that higher food prices are not a spike but are, in fact, here to stay due to a collection of underlying factors they lump under the term “agflation.” However, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and the IMF tell a slightly different story.

Gio Van Remortel:

• “A Lush Business,” by Vitisia Paynich in Electronic Retailer magazine -- Lush founder and CEO Mark Constantine discusses the business approach of his wildly successful soap and cosmetic store. The company uses organic ingredients for its products and also employs a strategy of transparency and interactivity with its customers. The story piqued my interest not only because ethical consumption and transparency are trends that we monitor, but also because a colleague expressed such enthusiasm on seeing the story headline and mentioned how much she loves their store. The article confirms that this type of customer enthusiasm has much to do with their growing success.

Image: Paul Keller (Flickr)While it makes an amusing title, "Matt has purchased condoms" isn't something I'd like broadcast to the world (at least, without my consent). Yet, that could've very easily happened with the launch of Facebook's Beacon program.

As it was originally designed, Beacon surreptitiously planted tracking cookies in the browsers of Facebook users; when interacting with a site that had partnered with Beacon, Facebook proceeded to publish an announcement of this activity for all of your friends to see--whether you're buying movie tickets or shopping for personal items that you'd rather not have your friends know about, let alone your younger siblings.

Click to read more ...

What will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025?

To begin to answer that question, S)T's Technology Foresight program conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy. The group included experts from the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, and Oxford University, among others.

After consolidating input from the expert panel and analysis by Social Technologies' futurists, what emerged was our list of top 12 areas for tech innovation through 2025:

Click to read more ...

Want to know what product transparency will look like in the future? Check out Patagonia’s website, The Footprint Chronicles. On the site you can learn about the journey of five products and discover the transport, CO2, waste, and energy impacts of each item.

Image: Screenshot of www.patagonia.com/usa/footprint/index.jsp  So…say I’m thinking of buying my brother-in-law a Wool 2 Crew shirt this Christmas. Well, thanks to Patagonia I can integrate some pretty amazing info into my decision process, such as the fact that each shirt:

• travels 16,280 miles from the sheep in New Zealand until the finished product hits the distribution center in Reno, NV
• creates about 47 pounds of CO2 emissions due to manufacturing and transportation
• generates 9 oz. of waste as the fiber is created and the shirt is sewn, which is “2 oz. more than weight of the final garment”
• requires 89 megajoules of energy to create the shirt, “equivalent to powering the average American household for 20 hours”

Click to read more ...

In addition to the obvious inconveniences of last week's Skype outage (no IM chat, no long distance voice chat—a major headache for a company like ours, with staff scattered around the country and around the world), there was a secondary effect for us here at S)T and likely for others as well: our online networks went from translucent to opaque. For those non-Skype users, let me explain. When you log on to Skype, a box with all of your Skype contacts pops up. At its most basic, this box shows you who among your network is online and who is not. But users can tweak their profiles to provide more information about their situation. There are icons that a user can select to indicate whether one is busy, or away, or not to be bothered. Furthermore, a user can add one or two sentences to their profile that gives more information to other users about their current status, such as “Working from home,” or “Out for an hour, back at 4pm.” This phenomenon is known as presence. For an organization like ours, translucency into the lives of our colleagues, is quite helpful. One glance at my Skype window tells me if someone is working today,or is available for a brief chat about a project, or indicates why they’ve not yet responded to an email I’ve sent. With the Skype service offline, I was flying not quite blind, but perhaps with cataracts.

Increasingly, online services are providing users with greater translucency into the lives of their friends and colleagues: Google allows the sharing of online calendars, while music services such as Pandora let users share their tastes via public playlists, and services such as Twitter promote outright transparency. As this functionality is added to more services, it will be easier to keep track of our friends, and more difficult to find some peace and quiet when we won’t be bothered. In the end, the Skype outage proved the old adage: you don’t know what you’ll miss until it’s gone. I was prepared for the obvious inconvenience of the lack of communication, but what surprised me was how much I use the service to just keep track of people. (Image: Andreas Hagerman, Flickr)

My computer with its 17 inch flat-screen is just a few feet away from the kitchen. The kitchen being control central of my home (I need a lot of food to command and control), the proximity make sense.

Finding out what my spouse is doing at work or how many Weight Watcher points I just spent on my lunch is just a click away. This week, I came across a signpost of how transparency is integrating into our lives as consumers. On the peel of Dole’s organic bananas is a sticker with a “farm code.” If you want to know more about where your banana came from, you can enter the farm code number at Dole’s website.

Photos of smiling women packing away bananas in a warehouse became surprisingly personal when I looked down at the banana in my bowl…”did you once lie on that table in Colombia?” In addition to photos, a link to Google Earth will zoom in on the farm from above, and a listing of farm certifications, awards, and recognitions provides all the technical information you might need about how the your banana was grown. But it seems a smiling face was all I needed. 

Just so you don't feel, like, so 10 minutes ago, here's a tip about something that's coming -- short-term and long-term. Get to know the word "Twitter," both as a noun and a verb.

Twitter is what one might call an "instant presence" application. The general idea is that you set up an account, create a group with your friends, and pop in a short message whenever you feel like it, stating what you are doing at the moment. You can also have Twitter messages sent out to individuals or groups via SMS and instant messaging, and they can update you likewise.

Yes, this is what the Web has come to. Go ahead and laugh for a second, but Twitter has become the hot new meme at present -- as Jamais Cascio put it, Twitter has perhaps already traveled the full arc of the hype cycle, in just a short time. The company's own blog charts the trajectory. Democratic candidate John Edwards has already jumped aboard the Twitter train, using it to keep young supporters abreast of his movements and activities.

I first came across Twitter at LIFT07 in Geneva last month, which, along with Yahoo! Pipes, was making it up and down the rows of open laptops as the weberati in attendance used it to keep up with each other's activities at the conference in real-time. Last week at SXSW Interactive, where I hosted a panel, Twitter blew up (for you older readers, that's "got quite well-known, quickly"). Conference attendees seemed less interested in listening to great presentations and more worried about knowing what all of their contacts were doing in real-time. "Down on 6th Street," "On 3rd latte," "Checking out @ noon" -- all helpful indicators to those who want to know where you are or what your next move is.

Some call Twitter the next blogging. Maybe it is blogging for the time-poor. To me, Twitter is the next logical extension of three concurrent trends -- time compression, transparency, and the "cult of me."  Blogging takes too much time for most Twitterers, but the need to constantly share information about oneself is deemed a must (as with Facebook, Flickr, and MySpace before it), and the ability to see what people you know (and many you don't know) are doing, thinking, or waxing is an accepted norm for the Twitter demographic. It's further evidence of the generational digital divide. One generation's privacy is another generation's information blackout.

(Image: LoopZilla, Flickr) 

Participatory media -- the ability of ordinary people to engage with, create, and distribute media -- is an ever-growing trend.

I was reminded this week of a curious variant, which might be called participatory geosensing: deliberately using remote-sensing infrastructure to pursue one's own personal goals.

• A geospatial artist in Washington DC has put a "no war" message on his roof, spelled out in brick. (He will need some pretty high-resolution sensing, as the letters are only 1 or 2 bricks wide.)
• A blogger on the Google Earth blog claims that he has "been laying on my lawn for the last three weeks straight without moving. I hope that Google satellites will take pictures of me and everyone will vote it to be one of the seven wonders of the world," the Washington Post reports.

As for me, I wish to remain invisible at one-meter resolution.

In 1928 Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in defense of the Fourth Amendment that “the right to be left alone” was “the most comprehensive of rights and the most valued of civilized men.”

This right is in flux, as evidenced in a recent USA Today article by reporter Maria Puente. She asked Social Technologies analyst Josh Calder to comment on the issue of privacy after mildly risqué naked photos of American Idol semifinalist Antonella Barba turned up on the Internet.

Puente lamented: “Oh, for the good old days when all we worried about was Big Brother government watching us. Too late: Now we have Little Brother to contend with, too — and he has a camera phone.”

Calder had to agree. “The days when something happens in front of a crowd and it’s not captured on camera are over,” he shared. “We have to assume anything we can do in public is potentially going into the public record.”

This is a manifestation of transparency, one of the most important global trends tracked by Social Technologies. It will open up the workings of governments and businesses to scrutiny, but also continue to challenge our notions of privacy -- as poor Barba has discovered.

We are always on the lookout for subtle but important shifts in values. These values are often the filters consumers use to understand the world, and the framework of expectations they ultimately impose on it.

Discussion of a new value, which I would call "zoomability" has emerged recently, and was touched on recently by author Steven Johnson in an article for the  New York Times Magazine. 

In his article, "The Long Zoom," a play on Brian Eno and Stewart Brand's concept of the Long Now, Johnson makes the point that cultures have a way of seeing that defines them, and gives the examples of fixed perspective as a defining value of the Rennaisance, or music video's quick cuts defining how we have seen popular culture in the West for the past 20 years, thanks to MTV. A new paradigm may now be emerging, he writes, around the aesthetic of zoom, being able to drill down from a macro level (typically visually), to very small or local detail.  His illustrations for this are the phenomena of Google Earth, and the coming video game from Will Wright, the creator of the Sims, called Spore, which allows the gamer to begin a single-celled organism, and work to evolve into a creature that ultimately acts at the intergalactic level. Zoom indeed.

My elementary-age children already take zoomability for granted, having experienced Google Earth early in their lives, and having the concept of hyperlinks among bits of information already embedded in their heads. They assume they can move mentally from the global to the local with ease, whereas my generation had to make the physical connections between levels of information and experience manually. This is a shift in the filters we talk about, the mental models we use.

Where will zoomability take us next? The first stop is in our access to information, and this is already happening with the evolution of the semantic Web. Device interfaces and architecture may not be far behind. What happens when we start to apply easily understood and navigated connections between global and local to areas such as politics, the environment, and economics, we can probably already guess at--amplification of local concerns to a global level and increased interest in sustainability are among the possible outcomes.

Watch out for where the linkages are made, and the new processes that emerge to enable zoomability--this may be the next barrier we jump in the way we not only see, but live.

For those not familiar with it, Google Earth, the Earth-imaging application distributed by the giant information and search company, isn't just a piece of software. It has attracted devotees of all kinds, assiduously providing annotations in the form of what are called KML (Keyhole Markup Language, after Keyhole, the mapping company that Google purchased) files, data files that include custom information about locations (Lebanon is a hotspot for KML file updates at the moment, as were the parts of South Asia impacted by the tsunami in 2004). Google Earth has created an army of armchair satellite photography analysts, out to find areas previously obscured from the average viewer's eye, such as Nevada's famous Area 51, or a possible nuclear installation under development in Pakistan.

With all of that real estate in view, not surprisingly a commercial angle on Google Earth has emerged. Some companies, such as Target, have even put logos on the tops of their buildings, initially to catch the eye of aircraft passengers, but by default also showing up in Google Earth (one notable Target example is on the approach to Chicago's O'Hare airport seen here).

These "hacks" are taking an interesting political turn, however. The most recent example comes by way of the Canary Islands, whose citizens have taken a recent interest in how their islands look from above. Accusations are now flying from local "green" groups who allege that a recent data file update actually replaced a satellite view from 2005 not with a newer one, but with one from 2002 with the express intent of obscuring recent beachfront development. They say the Canary Island authorities want the area to look more pristine than it is in real life. (More likely is that the older views offered better resolution.)

The precedent has been set by governments seeking to obscure various military installations or strategically important locations. With Google Earth and similar services becoming more popular, efforts to re-touch the Earth with political or commercial aims in mind are likely to proliferate. Google Earth may become a new battlefield for those seeking to redefine or clarify "reality".

We wrote nearly three years ago about recorded life, the emerging phenomenon whereby traces of our lives--images, e-mails, audio, phone messages, documents, blog entries, and other personal ephemera--are collected and indexed. Now a new Web service, Dandelife, has appeared to tie the traces of a person's life together into a "lifecast" or timeline of entries that can be updated, fed via Flickr and YouTube, and connected to other people's lifecasts. So, there it is, your life in Web 2.0.

While setting up a full lifecast for a grown individual would be tough, someone is undoubtedly spending this weekend setting up their unsuspecting newborn to live under the glaring view of the Web's panopticon.  This child will eventually discover that her life events, good and bad, are being broadcast to a judging or curious world, and may be dealing with the indelible data trail left behind for the next 90 years.

But why stop there? Surely it will be only a matter of weeks or months before someone sells Google ads on their lifecast (Dandelife execs, please send royalties for that idea to my home address). So, we will have not only a broadcast life, but a sponsored one as well. An interesting idea, but we might find out unpleasant things about how the world sees us once the advertisers start knocking at our door. Would I be sponsored by Hugo Boss and Bombay Sapphire, or WeightWatchers and Diet Coke? I'm not sure I want to know.