The WSJ recently has being having a massive kerfuffle over data mining and tracking. Their most recent targets in this WSJ escapade: The fact that kids are being tracked.
When I saw this article, I realized most major media and technology pundits are going to get into the following argument:
Jeff Jarvis crowd- This is a form of reefer madness. The cookies don’t tell them anything important. Hey the WSJ has my credit card information, in comparison, the cookies are nothing.
The Project VRM/Doc Searles people- We will tell you what we want, when we want to. Stop intruding on us.
Written into both of these assumptions is that
A) People can tell you precisely why they do the things they do (in fact, they can’t, which is why the web is full of Interactive Designers coming out of schools of thought of observation because people do all sorts of things they don’t know about and can’t tell you about)
B) The things that that they can’t describe about why they do, aren’t all that important (in fact, it could make the difference between a crummy object and a great one)
Therefore if you want to make something or sell something to other people, it is best to hook into behaviors that it is hard for one average human to describe. Your;’re probably getting at something elemental about being human (see, games as an example)
children, this problem gets more pronounced. Children don’t have the cognitive capacity of adults, their brains in comparison are still bowls of mush. We do need tons of data about how to get their brains out of the mush stage. Some children in some families (this is dependent on the child and the family structure) are old enough to make independent decisions about objects they want to buy, games they want to play, foods they will eat. Marketing data is indispensable for both the marketing and the creation of that product. And some of those products do actually enrich children’s lives.
The question really is the following: BlueKai anonymize the data and groups it. It creates an auction between buyers and sellers of all types to sell off this data. I can’t tell you if the person who wants to buy your children’s data is a game company which specializes in creating toys that promote problem solving and strategy skills or people who want to sell more corn syrup containing products (or the firms representing such people). And that is where everyone gets skittish. Who is behind the closed doors of these auctions anyway. especially when it is children’s data?
It is effectively a stock market of hopes and dreams.
I feel complicated about it. Data isn’t inherently wrong to sell, as it isn’t inherently wrong to sell a gun. It should be wrong to shoot the gun (and the data) for the wrong reasons (a tautology, I realize). And I think that is what society has to comes to terms with- the regulation of who we want access to the markets of our data. Maybe it should be self-policing, maybe not. Either way, Not everyone should know every bit of me and you..
The thing no one will say about banking and the web
After looking through a ton of material (including tweets from the likes of Mark Suster with the following article, stuff about Basel III from Felix Salmon, a bit about the S & L crisis of the 80s, and even finishing a book about the Gold Standard and the Great Depression called Lords of Finance
) I have come to a NEW POST 
As we’ve all probably c0me to the conclusion of already, banking is a serious, life-deadening mess.
Already we have groups like BankSimple (hi guys! I just got your update email, and your post about Basel III is fab), SmartyPig, Venmo, MobilePay, etc. Most of these startups aim at the last mile of consumer finance, our immediate banking, credit, and saving needs.
Reality, however, is that 80% of all transactions are DEYY (Dollar, Euro, Yen, Yuan). Most of those transactions are institutional sized, and are already handled by great big banks. Some of these are part of the vast landscape that is Wall Street. Another reality, unrealized, is that large chunks of America already uses massive amounts of computing already (online billpay, anyone? or how about the centralization of credit cards over, dare I say it, networks)
In that light, most of the innovations I see out there are about the last mile of credit and cash. Meanwhile, I doubt most understand that to really innovate in banking, one has to play the bankers game. It’s, for the record, a game about taking information, splicing it, and making money on top of it. Computing power only is interesting if it augements that power. (which is why some of the last mile is interesting, it speeds up the last mile of spending in the economy and its patterns)
With that in mind, it’s much more probable that what will change banking are databases and information processing. It’s not going to be what is or is not in my wallet (banks accept the reality that there will always be some cash on hand, and perhaps you should too. What happens if all the electricity goes down for a day or two..). Giving everyday users access to that sort of power that banks have is much more innovative than giving me the power to spend or save (it gives me, average person, more economic choice. Hence the power of Mint.)
So I really don’t “get” what is the deal with innovating banking. Most don’t feed into the need to count every penny, every little gloss on information.
You can’t innovate anything (really) without understanding the source of all our problems in banking innovation. Banks’ balance sheets are essentially the reverse of your own personal balance sheet. Too much debt for them is good (to a point). Too much debt for you, well I can’t help you there. They own part of your stuff. Meanwhile, too much cash that they have to protect- that’s expensive (though good for you, person who doesn’t sleep with money in a sock, I mean creating more central institutions to protect your money so that cost isn’t as expensive from diffusion). Your cash becomes their loans. Hey, guarding that money is expensive- loans are cheaper.
In order to really innovate, someone has to be interested in aligning personal finacial interests with banks. And the only way to do that is to open up the information about how caustic your relationship with your bank is. As supreme overlords of investing money (your money) that relationship is not clean. And even Mint.com doesn’t hack it. When push comes to shove, the only way to effectively manage your money is to put said money under the same scrutiny as your bank will. Down to the tools used to scrutinize (hello, Bloomberg terminals). Where/when can I see the infromation around my money to make sure it is safe? Nowhere.
There is very little recognition that each person is a minibank. I’ll come looking at startups when we change the conversation.
Just saying, and waiting.