Cause-Oriented Efficiency
By David Blane
Cause-Oriented EfficiencyAug 05, 2020
5. Troy Doucet - Customer Data & Privacy
I00;00;01;14 - 00;00;21;21
DAVID: Right, Troy. Well, here we are. We're doing this consumer data podcast. Thank you for being here. It's an honor to have you, and I really appreciate you being available. I guess to get things started, maybe just tell me your background, what you've been up to for the past little while, and then I can tell people why I reached out to you and go from there. 00;00;22;12 - 00;00;42;20 TROY: Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, DAVID:. And thanks for having me on. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this a little bit. I'm a lawyer. I'm a consumer protection lawyer located in Ohio. Most of my work is in the finance, mortgage, real estate, and finance-related areas, although I do a fair amount and I have done a fair amount with general consumer protection. 00;00;43;05 - 00;01;01;16 TROY: My background is in the mortgage business before I went to law school, and then when I went to law school, it was about learning everything I could about litigation and consumer protection and then coming out into practice in 2010. It's all been about consumer protection, and some business litigation as well. But for the most part, it's how consumers are protected. 00;01;01;28 - 00;02;28;20 DAVID: So it's very interesting. And that's pretty much exactly why I reached out to you. I'm fascinated by well, first of all, just the acceleration of technology that is allowing misuse and use of consumers' data. And to me, there are three primary, I guess, stakeholders that are involved in that. And why I reach out to you is because I wanted to hear it from your perspective, like how it's all been going. And so the whole podcast and the series is going to change and become whatever it needs to become to address the right issues. And so talking to you and then deciding where to go from there, we'll change the topics that we end up discussing. But for me, I'm like personally just really curious how it all fits together, the landscape from a law perspective, but also from just the everyday Joe kind of perspective. And also like how do businesses react to this? Because they're going to be primarily driving a lot of the technology that is used to access data. That all being said, I'm ready to jump off into this because I'm excited to hear your whole take on everything. So let's just start from the very beginning sure. Could you try to, I know it's impossible to get it all, but could you try to paint a picture for me and then everyone else as well? Just the history of consumer data. And then also just from your perspective from the law, how it's gotten to where it's at and like how did it all start? Why do we even call it consumer data protection? 00;02;28;28 - 00;05;30;29 TROY: Well, good questions. It actually all started, I would say in 1805. There's this [laugh] and I'll tell you why in just a second. But I think with this with data, you really have two areas of the law coming together and butting heads or controlling data in general, and that's property law and contract law. The question really is about first I'd say property; What is property? What is the data who does it belong to? How is it created? When does the transfer from one person to another and who ultimately owns it? Ultimately, the question is who gets to make money on it, right? I mean, it all comes down to money. But outside of that, the question is, is property 1805 there's this case Pearson V Post that all law students just about every law student in the United States will stu4. Adverteering - Healing Marketing Through Better Data Trust And Governance
Two Main Problems
- An increase in data accumulation without permission from the individual.
- Simultaneous rise in compliance enforcement from government bodies.
Both trends lead to increased data management difficulty for companies and individuals, increased abuse of the individual’s data property rights, and most importantly, distrust of marketing messages due to their roots in data being mined from the individual without their permission.
SolutionBecome an adverteer.
Summary
Problem: White-hat data management by advertisers is increasingly expensive and difficult.
Solution: Advertisers don’t need to store data.
Problem: Regulatory complexity causing expensive compliance by the networks.
Solution: Individuals own data and control it. The network does not see data.
Problem: Distrust of advertiser networks.
Solution: Compensation of voluntary data access to ad networks feels good and improves trust with individuals. Individuals’ data are recognized as property by law while the incentives repulse creeping data mining.
Problem: Increasing expensive ad inventory on digital channels
Solution: DTC marketplace ensures quick easy communication. Eliminated compliance costs previously levied on the network.
There were quite a few assumptions made to come up with this solution to an increasingly difficult problem. It comes after managing ads and data professionally in my career for 12 years. My interests have also been in technology that gives individuals more control.
There were implications and questions not addressed. Such as, what if someone wants to set up unlimited time-frame data streams and never purchases a product? Meaning, no return on investment for the company. A solution might be an anonymous review system that describes the customer as only having very low engagement or purchasing fewer products than others. What I am demonstrating is that there should be continually addressed issues with incentives the right incentives. This adds flexibility and anti-fragility to the network.
I’d like to close by asking you to think seriously about the following. What data in your life do you want to control? How much is it worth to you? And, how would you solve a problem like this?
3. Human Rights As Super Powers
Why is this Important?
I'd like to continue discussing human rights as super powers. It's the idea of marrying trends and progress in sync with Western values and globalization with where how we evolved from 1776 in terms of how we perceive ourselves and our rights as individuals in contemporary times. I realized we needed, not only the language to describe our individual rights in light of how we live and behave now, but also discussing what it means for the future to avoid a potential catastrophe in what it means to protect individual rights and sovereignty.
To come up with an exhaustive list of why our rights are of the utmost importance in contemporary times and how they are threatened would be extensive. The society we live in has created, for lack of a better illustration, a room. In the office building that is Western society, we've discovered a black hole of an empty room. It's vastness is unknown, but we know that there's a nugget of gold and that we need to find it. We're continually facing vast uncertainty and risk regarding how to protect our current ourselves from our future selves. The gold nugget of protection is the constitution with the Bill of Rights and its critical components of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Health care has increasingly become part of this equation by protecting your individual sovereignty and not allowing harm to come upon you. But who provides that protection? Even if a governmental entity promised it, how could they fulfill the obligation? Let's not think too deeply about that one in particular. We're striving toward our rights around health care, but in delivering it as a promise, it's not a necessary component yet.
What is an Individual?
If we're going to accept any of the premises of freedom, we have to define an individual as one who consciously controls himself/herself. Existence in a society means the ability to choose and every choice factors into the evolution of your life.
Choice is your individual sovereignty because it defines the being, which will continue to exist and go through the world.
The Sum of Our Choices
We all know companies and governments can track your actions with behavioral tracking software or surveillance that produces data about you to create a profile, which becomes an extension of you. Suppose you bought a house, business, and government entities track the fact that you made a purchase, and based on all the data that went into that purchase, they make predictions about your future behavior. Remember, without you; they cannot make those specific predictions.
Some individuals realize we are losing control of personal data and have applied protections as a reaction to behavior surveillance. The more your virtual and global data footprint expands, the more surveillance of your life grows prevalent, and predictions about your life will proliferate.
One of the key foundational pieces of any new society or future society is to remember that there is no society without the individual. If we don't protect ourselves as individuals, we lose autonomy and our ability to choose whether we lose that autonomy will be quickly lost as well.
Solutions
We need to have a Bill of Rights that makes it so hard for any government, even outside of our own governments, for any big businesses, any hackers or thieves, to be able to access or surveil individuals without their knowledge. If so, it would be severely punishable. You should be able to have a value structure for being able to accept the price that you would be exchanging your data for, and each data point created based on you must be reported into a central repository for all entities.
2. Complications When Choosing A Tagline
Hello, and welcomed to Cause-Oriented Efficiency, Episode 2. Today, we are talking about the tagline and the iterative process of getting the tagline, where it is, and where it's going to go in the future.
Check Out the Website and Subscribe
If you would like to learn more about Cause-Oriented Efficiency, the best way to do that is to visit our website at coefficiency.org, where you can contact me, you can read our blog posts and see some of the cases, causes, and solutions that are on the site. I will say it's pretty bare at the moment and we've got a lot of work to do, but that is where I plan to house things that we'll be referencing on the podcast and in other places throughout the building out of the idea. Remember to go to the website and also subscribe because I will be doing a lot of the announcements and future discussions through podcasting.
If you find the concept interesting and want to be a part of the conversation. be sure to subscribe. I will be posting podcasts regularly to give updates and to discuss the fundamental ideas around the system and changes, the philosophy, and the theoretical pieces, as well as covering news solutions to interesting causes that people will undoubtedly be very curious to learn about. All that to say, you can look forward to more episodes and I'm excited to hear from you guys. We will work together to make this realization come to fruition.
About the Book
What I'd like to cover today is the tagline just to give you an update on where I have been in the past month or so. I've been gathering feedback from some of the people who've read my book, C.O.E. Cause-Oriented Efficiency, and what I'm getting so far is really good. I tend to agree with the feedback, that the book does a good job of laying out some of the basics and the structure. I call it more of a manual or something with a lot of definitions and examples. It's not the narrative-driven style that a lot of people find useful when they're trying to learn a new concept. That is a criticism which I am not taking lightly, but in order to address it, some problems need to be refined further, so that we can use examples in the narratives to describe how the solutions would best be presented in the world. That would be an interesting way to demonstrate the concept and would probably draw more people in. The current layout is extremely helpful for people who want to bookmark certain areas, reference the definitions, and remember the formula. However, there will be so much more to add to the book once we've refined things like the weights, depending on the context, as I've only covered rough guesses of weights. There are so many potential ways to represent them.
The factors are similar, and there are a lot of factors that I've probably left out that might require further discussion. I have notes upon notes upon notes of things I need to cover and discuss and think through.
So, there is a backlog of things to get through. I find it's most important to figure out the best way to describe the concept to people as we are trying to recruit people to be part of the process, to make this a reality.
Refining and SimplifyingTo that end, I’ve been working on a presentation that simplifies and distills the way the book is written into a more streamlined narrative style. It’s still very much definition-oriented with one example and a lot of uses of structure and definitions. I’ve carved the books’ one-and-a-half-hour read to thirty minutes. Over time, I’ll get it down even further. The goal is to have a pitch that’s closer to 30 seconds
1. An Intro To Cause-Oriented Efficiency
We first discuss the premise of cause-oriented efficiency which can be summarized as the Information Gap. Then we discuss the goal which is to simplify complexity and information. What is it? 1.) It is a formula 2.) The score 3.) Implications of a better society. Why we need this? History of the idea. Touch on “truth".
More about Cause-Oriented Efficiency on the website.