Since the birth of the Internet, this platform has become more about web pages than people. CLOUD believes this must change, and that individuals must be put at the center of the Internet. Rather than Web 2.0, this means that a world of ME 1.0 is at hand, and a contextual markup language (CTML) for people must supplement the hypertext markup language (HTML) of web pages.
In the physical world, our information exists in unique spaces. In the digital world, information is free. We can exist in multiple locations and multiple communities simultaneously. Today’s Internet forces you to travel virtually to multiple destinations. We aim to make the Internet come to you.
MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Ebay, E*Trade, Yahoo, Google, and MSN don’t own your information. You do. Let’s make it easy for them to serve you and easy for you to get better services. Let’s improve the Internet’s connections. Let’s flip the Internet back to being about people—back to being about you.
Q: How is CLOUD, Inc. structured and supported?
A: CLOUD Inc. is the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data, a non-profit organization that has filed for 501(c)(6) status with the IRS and is open to people, companies, and other organizations. CLOUD has been formed to create standards to give people property rights in their personal information on the Web and in the cloud, including the right to decide how and when others might use personal information and whether others might be allowed to connect personal information with identifying information.
Q: That sounds complicated. How would it work?
A: The principle is simple: Before the development of powerful information and identification systems, people had a great deal of freedom to control what they told other people about themselves. In recent decades, technology has made it very easy for organizations to gather, use, and store information about people. However, the technology to allow people to continue to control their own information has not advanced as quickly. CLOUD believes commercial grade information standards can put people on an equal footing with organizations and that user friendly interfaces can make it easy for people to control the use of their information.
Q: Does the technology exist to make this possible?
A: Yes. Common examples of the technology that would support these standards are the controls on social networks allowing various people to see particular information while keeping other information confidential, encryption systems to protect content from unauthorized access, and mark-up languages that tell computers what to do with particular information.
Because of the high value of personal information, social networks typically aren’t or shouldn’t be trusted with particular information. However, integrating user friendly interfaces, encryption, and mark-up languages holds tremendous potential to continue to improve how people connect and communicate on the Internet. Before such technology can be used reliably across the Internet, information owners and users must create a network of trust and verification. A successful trust and verification network will require enforceable standards controlling how information is collected and what is done with the information. As standards are developed, CLOUD expects software creators to develop tools to implement the standards.
Q: Can technology really restore personal control over personal information?
A: Yes. Just as new Internet technology has simplified the process of comparison shopping for consumers, it can simplify the process of “information shopping” for producers who want to use information to serve consumers. In fact, there are far fewer consumers than the aggregate number of products and services for which consumers might shop, making it efficient for consumers to “let the Internet come to us.”
CLOUD also believes that such control over ME must be an open standard and a language rather than simply another ID. Privacy is ultimately a right and not a commercial service. CLOUD is a step beyond the “long tail.”
Q: So you’re turning the Internet “upside down?”
A: Yes. We believe that the metaphor of “visiting” Web sites is but one step in inevitable progress toward more efficient commerce for producers and consumers alike. Making individuals even more active participants in the fabric of the Internet will take us the next step beyond the HTML that drives the current destination approach of Web sites.
Q: What is the first step?
A: To be convenient for consumers and efficient for producers requires a technology that can be used across applications. CLOUD has chosen to focus initially on the health, education, and finance sectors. Siloed approaches to the problem will just exacerbate the problem.
CLOUD believes that a collaborative, relatively inexpensive process of exploring advanced software and service approaches to achieving the goal of local ownership and use of data is the first step. Companies and individuals who participate in this work will have the opportunity to shape the standards-setting process and be key participants in the development of preliminary standards.
Q: How do I get involved?
A: Drop your name and email address into the Support CLOUD widget and we’ll let you know as soon as there are more formal and interactive ways to get on board. If you are interested in sponsoring the various industry blogs that CLOUD is launching from health.cloudinc.org to education.cloudinc.org to finance.cloudinc.org, then download our sponsorship information. We’ll also be launching a wikipedia-style membership program for CLOUD in the near future.
