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In the story, Ki Mae examines the issue of online personal data from many angles.  She examines companies who collect data anonymously and sell it to marketers for targeting purposes, and the consumer and regulatory backlash that has resulted from this increasingly creepy practice.

More importantly, for us at least, she also profiles a few companies who are trying to restore control for consumers to share their personal data only when there’s some associated benefit.  Azigo is featured prominently.  The money quote:

“Facebook is where you go to manage social relationships; LinkedIn is for keeping up with professional networks,” says Steve O’Brien, Azigo’s handsome head of marketing.  ”We think there’s room for a third place online for people to consolidate all their commercial relationships.”

Ask anyone walking down the street if they have a personal data store (or data wallet or data locker or …) and they’ll likely answer “Huh?”  Once you tell them what you’re talking about, you’ll find they don’t know why they would need one, or what they’d do with it if they had one.  That doesn’t make it a dumb idea.  It just means that the personal data store needs a raison d’être … a reason for being … a purpose.

So at Azigo we’re no longer just building the world’s best personal data store.  We’re building a killer app on top of the world’s best personal data store, leveraging many man-years of development embodied in the Higgins Project.

We’re building a platform to help simplify people’s digital lives.  We call it a lifestream for commerce.

It sounds cliche to say that we manage more of our lives online every day, but it’s true.  We book dinner reservations through OpenTable so we can redeem that Groupon we bought last week.  We pay with a credit card that accrues frequent flier miles, and later go online to pay the bill or check account balances at the credit card, bank, or airline site.  This season Cyber Monday displaced Black Friday as the most important single day for holiday shopping.  More commerce is done online, more accounts are stored online, more of our lives are managed online.

And yet the tools to help us manage all this activity are pretty crude.  Every brand, store,account, daily deal site, and loyalty program sends us an email.  Seemingly every single day.  It’s hard to filter out the unimportant stuff from the important stuff.  To take any kind of action we’re usually directed to a web site where we’re forced to remember our username (is it my e-mail address?  which one?  maybe it’s my frequent flier number?), password, etc.  Every account is managed at a different site with a different set of credentials and each has a different subset of information about me.

Making all this easier – making it work better – would be a great service for consumers.  Putting the power of a personal data store into a service that’s as easy and fun as Facebook will be a challenge.  But that’s exactly what we’re working on here at Azigo —  a lifestream for consumers.

We’ll be writing more about it, what it is, how it works, and how you can get it (hint: it’s free) in the coming weeks.

• You’ll never have to repeat yourself. Today you endlessly repeat yourself. How often does your first name change from being Carla? Never. So you might ask, with all this technology why are you asked for your first name more than once? The answer is architectural. You lack an agent (e.g. a data wallet etc.) that works on your behalf. If you had one, your agent could make direct observations (e.g. that we typed “Carla” in answer to the question “first name?”). It can remember your answer to “window seat or aisle?”. And it can holds all this information securely and entirely under your control.
• The wallet will bend the Internet around you. The data wallet is a rich, digital version of you. It can be queried automatically by sites, and the sites can organize their content around you. Your interest, your passions, your needs, your friends.
• You will be delighted more, disappointed less. Why? a digital agent is always on. Always working on your behalf, always looking for the best deals, the most relevant content. This is all only possible if it knows you well–and it does. It knows you better than any single site or silo ever could.
• It will enable the most efficient model of commerce. When each person has a data wallet, markets and marketing can largely be inverted. Whereas there will still be a need for broad, brand marketing, most demand can be satisfied by your agent signaling intent and relying on the natural economic market forces to dynamically assemble supply chains to meet that demand. A far more efficient solution than today’s paradigm of supply spending marketing dollars trying to find demand.
• It won’t sacrifice your privacy to get personalization. Your personal agent can be architected such that only you and whoever else you wish but not your agent service provider has access to your personal data. Despite how we’ve always done it, the reality is that almost all brands, manufacturers and service providers don’t in really need to know who you are (i.e. your real world identity). They only need to know what is needed. And they need to get paid. Nothing more. With trusted agent intermediaries, all of this is possible.
• It will keep you more secure. A trusted agent can make assertions about you, and can convey assertions made about you by third parties that are cryptographically verifiable. It can do so while minimizing disclosure. It can authenticate you (vs. someone masquerading as you) with a simple, convenient set of knowledge-based, physical and biometric challenges of various kinds. These characteristics enable far higher security than exists today while eliminating any need for passwords and other shared secrets.

The current public debate over behavioral tracking often pits personalized service and targeted advertising as incompatible with protecting users’ privacy. These are not, however, dichotomous rivals invariably to be traded one for the other.

I believe that it is possible to provide both–giving users the substantial benefits of personalization while protecting their privacy. By adopting “user-centric” solutions to protect privacy while preserving the ability to provide highly targeted content, relevant advertising and special offers, web publishers can enhance their users’ web experience, build a trusted relationship with their audience, and improve their own position vis-à-vis third-party ad networks in the online advertising ecosystem.

Currently, web publishers place their own or third-party tracking cookies or web bugs on visitors’ computers to track user behavior across the web. This practice powers the multibillion dollar web ad industry but increasingly puts users’ identity and behavior data at risk for identity theft and unacceptable intrusions of privacy.

In 2010, Congress, the FTC, various state attorneys general and consumer plaintiff’s lawyers have increasingly focused attention on this issue, and the industry has begun to respond.

Unfortunately, most current proposals to address the problem, including Do Not Track legislation, and simple disclosure, labeling and cookie blocking, will not provide effective privacy protection while still enabling robust advertising supported services. Both the industry and consumers need a better solution.

For the past several years, I’ve worked with leading software companies at the forefront of efforts dedicated to designing and building an open, user-centric identity layer for the web. There are now viable identity solutions targeted at the online marketing and advertising markets that empower users to own and control their online personal data while still benefiting from personalized services by sharing data selectively across devices with authorized parties.

With open data everyone wins: publishers strengthen their position as trusted intermediaries, consumers gain control over their data and knowledge of with whom and for what benefit it is shared, and advertisers gain access to higher quality opt-in data than that currently available through third-party tracking cookies.

By reconciling privacy concerns with targeted personalization, open data supports a robust advertising-supported online publishing industry for the benefit of publishers, consumers and advertisers alike.