Skip to main content

The Information Economy

I must apologize for my neglect of the blog. Preparing for an international move is, as my people say, "no joke." Nevertheless, the content must flow, so let me share with you a brief summary of my current work-in-progress.

Consider all of the pieces of information you acquire in your normal online life. The results of Google searches, status updates from social networks, email and calendar notifications - all of these can be thought of as informational goods. For the most part, you acquire them at no monetary cost, they appear to be free as in "free beer."

Still, if you think about it for a moment, there is something you've had to exchange for these informational goods. In particular, you have to trade some token of your own private information in exchange for these very convenient and valuable informational goods. In order to find out what your friends are up to, you have to reveal that you associate with those people. If you want Google to remind you of an appointment, you have to tell Google that you have an appointment.

For Shadowrunners, this is what it looks for for information to be a commodity. There is an exchange of value; you give something, you get something, but the only "thing" exchanged is not a thing at all. It's just data. This point becomes more clear when you think about the anatomy of the informational goods in question.

Specifically, the goods you want, the search results, updates, etc, consist of two parts: some more-or-less public (or otherwise available) information, and some private information. When the two are "baked" together, you get the informational goods that we go online to find. Let's think through one just one example.

Users of Google Now know that if you let Google crawl through your email, Google Now can provide you updates on things like travel reservations. Let's say you've booked a flight. You give Google Now permission to access your email inbox looking for tickets and other travel-related communications. That's the private information, held only by your and your airline. By giving Google access to that private information, Google can combine the private data with publicly available information about flight status and schedules to provide various notifications. You will get a notice that your flight is on-time, you will get a notice indicating your scheduled departure gate, and you will likely get a notice when you should leave for the airport so that you don't miss your flight due to traffic.

Now, since flight status, departure gates, and traffic information are all publicly available, you could put these informational goods together yourself. You can even use a non-tracking search engine like Ixquick or Startpage to ensure that no one knows you're looking up the information. Nevertheless, doing that takes time and effort, two things that are often in short supply when preparing for a trip. As such, the informational good you can get from Google in exchange for your private data is valuable to you.

That's how we've come to participate in a massive information economy where private data is the currency we trade in exchange for customized informational goods. Your private data is worth something to information vendors (or else they'd be asking for "hard" currency), but you often find it easy to trade that data for the immediate availability of something you could create for yourself. Before you write me off as technophobe, I don't think the information economy is bad all the way down. I do think that we need to reconsider privacy rights and protections to ensure that information vendors are not endangering us somewhere down the line.

Stay tuned for more on that last point as the article develops.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

RPG Systems: An Analogy with UI Design

The current game in our weekly role-playing group is Deadlands. The previous game was Shadowrun. Both rule systems lie closer to the “chunky” side of the spectrum. Shadowrun has a particular reputation for its complex and somewhat cumbersome rules, and while Deadlands has less overall complexity, the system has a degree of granularity that interrupts play more often than it enhances narration. I enjoy role-playing games because I like participating in a good story. The rules system provides a set of constraints for the characters, the setting, and the conflicts. They help give the narrative structure, a background against which the story will take place. Too few rules, and telling an interesting and well-developed story becomes difficult. Too many rules tend to get in the way of individual scenes or events. With the right balance, it’s possible for the game master, usually me, to be sufficiently fluent in the rules system to resolve any conflict without extended consultation of on...

The Incredible Lightness of Collaborative Consumption

Last week, we had to exchange our defective futon frame for a new one. The store didn't want to cover transport cost in either direction, so we had to figure out how to get our re-boxed frame from Mountain View to Los Altos. If we had a car, it would not have been very simple since we were aiming to buy a small sedan, nothing that can easily carry the frame and its box. Fortunately, we have a car sharing service that gives us access to a range of vehicles, including a van stored down the street from my building. After work, I grabbed the van, picked up the frame at our place, and then Tara and I drove to the futon to make the swap. I dropped off Tara and the new frame at our place, and then headed back to campus. On returning the van to its parking space, I hopped on a shuttle back to downtown Mountain View. We were able to do all of this because we're not tied to a specific vehicle for all of our transportation needs. The last car we owned was a van, and it came in handy o...

Carless in California

For various reasons, we do not own a car despite living deep in American car country. The reasons are largely financial; the cost of living in downtown Mountain View crowds car ownership out of our budget. We pay more to live in a pedestrian friendly neighborhood, so we are less able to afford a car. At the same time, I don't need a car to get to work, and Tara doesn't drive, so any car we had would sit in the carport most of the week. Combine that waste of resources with a reluctance to contribute to the Bay Area's traffic congestion, and forgoing car ownership doesn't sound all that bad. Car sharing services allow us to grab a vehicle as long as we plan ahead a bit. The Caltrain provides access to San Francisco. There are convenience stores and cafes in walking distance, so we don't feel the absence of a car too often. Last night was one of the few times where I did. After getting home from work, we wanted a dinner cheaper than nearby delivery options. The n...