I am headed to this year’s Defrag conference and I pumped to do so. I didn’t get to go last year which I really regretted, and Eric hasn’t let me forget that either.
I will be moderating a panel called: Can identity be a filter for information overload? Eric and I are in search of interesting people and points of view to include on this panel.
On first blush, to me, this sounds like a discussion of the current state of personalization. Eric isn’t sold yet on that angle. I’d be interested to learn if/how personalization is moving from explicit declarations, “I like cake,” to something more implicit, “From examining your read RSS feeds, Computer thinks you like cake.”
Putting on my enterprise identity hat, I start to wonder if my role and relationship to my employer has a hand in this. Again, this ought to be an interpretation of pattern and not an explicit assignment. I am a senior analyst at Burton Group focused on identity and privacy. I share interests with my team. Collectively this blob of information (feeds, groups, sites, etc) is likely to be of interest to us. Further, I am curious how my role and relationship combined with a Google Search Appliance or SharePoint can act as a filter.
Finally, I can’t help but think of the privacy implications here. Traffic analysis can and will start to reveal my preferences, and there definitely are privacy implications to this. Add extra data to the mix, like location, and the privacy concerns grow quickly. (I swear there are moments that my iPhone seems eerily like HAL.) How does industry handle my contradicting desires to filter based on my identity (and here I am including preferences as part of my identity) while not revealing too much about me? What is too much anyway? Who gets to decide?
At any rate, if you’ve got some ideas on the matter, please send them to Eric and me – operators are standing by.