It must have been about five years ago or more I blogged about my thoughts on user data and it should be a user defined hub which was replicated to competing services which would prevent lock in. I didn’t have too much concern for privacy at the time as I didn’t understand databases nearly as well & I didn’t understand RDF (semantic data) as well as I do now. I didn’t do research and totally understand that the mobile and location based world would trump the sitting at my publishing computer world until some time in 2004. Later on (a few years ago) I tried explaining to my company that this was going to happen and how digital advertising was about to get a shot of mobile & user relevancy.

One of the things I started pondering before I quit Facebook & giving a lot more thought to the future of Privacy was getting my blog going again. I’ve been a blogger for the better part of a decade now. In Retrospect, my biggest regrets were letting Facebook fool me–I sincerely thought it would always be private for some reason. I thought now here is a company that has things right, slowly let people into little bubbles with only relationship data & location data connecting them and keeping all of the juicy details of the person private so that the same users would have a safe haven to share their inner lives with their inner most circle. I always framed my concept of privacy around the fact that I really don’t have anything to hide. Then I became a father & I realized that my ability to control my digital self had slowly been on a disastrous decline & I worried about my (now 19 month old) son’s future in a world where you increasingly don’t have to be a sociologist to understand and respect the fears & concern that were being placed on the world at the expense of compromises to freedom.

The hardest part of leaving Facebook is I do genuinely trust and look forward to communicating with my network. I even had no problem with keeping my account open until some point, web spiders do not scare me as much as the transfer of ownership and pure power of my information to a company who was perhaps founded on premises which remind me of everything which is wrong with capitalism today. Capitalism without integrity or morality–if you subscribe–is that it can be the lowest common denominator of these values which is also the most successful. I had no idea how my data would be used with applications. I had no idea what would happen to these companies with someday decades of information about my friends, family and myself should they go belly up. That’s a huge difference from about a year ago when I had started working on documents & written concepts on how a kitchen’s tablet PC configuration would be set up differently than the same sofware when you took your tablet with you.

The largest threat to digital privacy in the long run is not just Facebook, a user’s privacy is most protected if that same user owns their data. Microsoft wanted to be a part of the solution in China. Many companies willingly have handed over data which has lead to life in prison for speaking one’s mind & even most likely death. At least at Google the founders have first hand experience with no freedom of expression and how awful that is to a society. Over two years ago I set out to start a web company which would let users define what they like and dislike. I was going to start with concerts & other interests. I had two friends from work who were all going to start on this start-up with me. I thought long and hard about it and in the end I didn’t pursue the because of lack of time with all three of us and some thought in the back of my mind that I would be under great pressure to share great bits of this info with just about everyone.

Today I did a reboot of jasonbogovich.com and for the time being I’d like to concentrate on a series of ideas which I think can foster even greater innovation without sacrificing privacy and user lockin–in what I call the geo-semantic-meta-verse. Augmented reality will be like this but I think users should have ownership and ability to control how this forms. Facebook probably understands least of all that if you build it and give users ownership and build trust, you will be able to build the best open communications model. Instead either Facebook will suffer and/or the entire world will suffer.

Without further thought I’d like to ask for feedback on my thoughts. I can’t state how much this (privacy) could end up meaning to the world & I can’t do this alone.