Transparency

Transcript

(applause)

Jamie

Hello. OK, my name's Jamie; I work for a sort of platform app organisation called Citizen Me. I'm a designer and I've come to talk to you a little bit about transparency in how the project that we're working on ties into that.

So we live in an amazing age, we really do; we should be excited by it. There are already more connected devices than there are people on the planet. By 2015 there will be five billion devices connected to the internet and this internet doubles in size approximately every five years. With all these devices and the scale at which things connect, kind of the remit of the internet is kind of finally becoming the kind of its ability to do good finally becoming kind of realisable, I think.

But all this comes with a cost: we're all becoming digital by default. We are signed up to and into countless things without ever knowing about it. We all have a digital reflection; it's the fragmented pieces of information that sit across different services and we don't control that reflection, but people make billions a year out of that reflection.

So, this is the idea and this is coming out of the darkness and this is Citizen Me. This is kind of what we want to do. We want to give…our ambition is to give everyone a personal view of their digital personalities and the relationships that they have through these personalities. We've just yesterday released our first iOS app onto the App Store, so have a look at that when you get a second.

The app is the first step; we have other platforms in the pipeline. The app will start to give people visibility and control of their personality profiles and privacy and I'm going to kind of go through those three areas in the next few slides to show you how that works.

So, this is the privacy area, this is your terms of service monitor. Do many people sign up to things without ever reading the terms of service. I'm sure everybody in this room is probably guilty of the same thing; it's too long, didn't read. And we go through the terms of service in the networks that you use or you choose to add into this app. We rate these terms of service with some simple traffic lighting, some simple good, OK, really bad, and then we display it to you in a kind of sort of visual way. I think this is the first time I can think of the terms of service being displayed visually but these are…we then give you the opportunity to dive into your terms of service on different networks. We kind of highlight the stuff that we think you want to, should look at; not want to look at; definitely should look at. And we give you the opportunity to take action. And that action can be a variety of different things. At the moment we want you to vote and we're collating the kind of votes and we're going to use these votes to name and shame on the website when that launches and in other ways, but also we're giving the opportunity to take to the setting to remove yourself from the network altogether if you want to.

The other part of the app is the personality thing. This is how Facebook for starters sees your personality. It's a series of characteristics, we've worked with Cambridge Univeristy to break this down into a rating system. There's a few other kind of…sort of services or apps you've probably seen that do a similar type of thing, but what I think is important about this is we've got what Facebook thinks, but then we've also got the ability to change it. that's what we want. We want you to say, you know what. I am more Liberal than Conservative and Facebook thinks I'm Conservative because of a series of Likes and a series of bits of text I wrote on Facebook. That's false; I want to edit this, I want to kind of curate this information myself. And then we're going to display that in the app, so we say OK, this is what Facebook says, and actually this is the real you.

And this is finally the profile section. You probably use multiple different fragments of profile information across all of your services. Each one asks for something different; a profile pic, a background banner, schools attended, birthdays, phone numbers, email addresses. By adding in all of the social media, at the moment we're working just with social media; all the social media networks that you add, you can start to see all the information in one place that these companies have on you and it's quite surprising sometimes.

And then we want to give you the opportunity, which is key, to curate this data; to create your own Citizen Me, because this is the important stuff. It's like Hannah [Pernille] was talking about earlier, where she was like she has different personalities, and she was saying it's quite hard work to maintain all this. Well this could be the way to keep a track of what everyone's got on you and also to kind of create this uber citizen profile.

We're not interested in random data from anonymous sources. If we want to know something, we're going to ask you. We call this Me Data. It's data driven from the ground up and not harvested anonymously from the top down. But this is just the beginning for us. We want to add in more data, life satisfaction, IQ levels, browser history and with this, we can give you more insights, better insights. With this we can give you back the control that other people have over your information and kind of give you a better experience.

Thanks for listening. Download the app, it's on the App Store now; Android and others are coming soon, and come and tell us what you think, good or bad, it all makes for a better product.

Thank you.

(applause)

Aral

Jamie. Before you go, thank you, before you go one question; so, is all that data local to you. You guys don't see that, right. Let's just make that clear.

Jamie

Yep.

Aral

Because otherwise it could be…oh well Facebook thinks you're this; we really want you to tell them, you know, if that's correct or not. No, it's all just for your eyes only?

Jamie

Yep, just for your eyes only.

Aral

OK, that's great.