AttentionTrust – Returning Attention to its Rightful Owner: You
Herbert Simon famously once said:
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
This quote is turning into one of the mantras of our times. We all deal with our own poverty of attention, whether we realize it or not.
Yesterday, when I asked if there were any products out there that were attempting to approximate our personal value by recording our attention, I completely missed the obvious connection with what the AttentionTrust folks are doing.
AttentionTrust promotes the rights of attention owners
AttentionTrust is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners. (read: everybody). Their goal is to do exactly what I was talking about: to give us tools to track where we pay attention so that one day, when the economy of attention has flipped the control back to users, we can leverage that with those organizations who want it.
The organizations who want to know what we pay attention to are advertising companies, for one. They spend billions of dollars trying to get our attention, and they can’t really tell if they’re getting it, other than by looking at a crude measurement called sales. In many cases they may very well be getting our attention, but their message is off, so they get no sales and assume they didn’t get our attention.
Controlling our own attention metadata
So how would this work? How would we be in control of our own attention? Well, here’s a basic scenario. Imagine that I can track my own attention. (AttentionTrust is working on a browser plugin that tracks where we surf to). I track my attention with various software tools that somehow aggregate my email contacts, the places I visit on the Web, the people I chat with, the people I talk face-to-face with, the people whose blogs I read but never comment on, etc. There are A LOT of places I pay attention to, and I’m sure you do, too.
So, we take this attention metadata, as it’s often called by Steve Gillmor (the President of AttentionTrust), and we sell it to the highest bidder. We sell it to the company (or companies) who are willing to pay us the most for it, presumably without being evil or without exploiting our attention metadata for uses that we are unaware of. So, maybe I sell my metadata to a company that I appreciate, like Apple Computer. Or I’ll sell it to a company who can offer me something that I want, like, say, free downloadable TV shows.
This would be a win-win, because the company who I sold my attention metadata to would have much more accurate information than they currently have, and I would be in control of that data, as well as getting some cash or prizes in return.
Do you know who’s recording your metadata?
So this sounds OK so far, right? The problem with this is that companies are each and every day trying to replicate your attention metadata without your help. This isn’t bad in and of itself, so long as you know that it’s going on. Unfortunately, you don’t always know that it’s going on.
For example, do you have any idea what Amazon/Microsoft/Google knows about you? Any idea at all? Let’s start with all the searches you’ve ever done on their site, and assume they’ve got those. They’ve also got your email, if you use Hotmail or Gmail. They have your credit card information, too. Now think about any plugins you might have installed. How about the Google or Alexa plugins? And the IE browser is Microsoft’s own, of course, so it isn’t far fetched to think they know where you go.
We’re giving it away
So, without much work these companies have access to a large portion of our attention metadata: where we go, what we buy, and who we talk to. This scenario can turn scary at any moment, and it’s a big reason why Microsoft long ago lost the trust of people like me, and why Google is starting to face some of the same issues.
However, right now we are somewhat (and I say somewhat lightly) protected because our attention metadata is relatively spread out over many sites. But the longer we are on the Web, and the more loyal we are to one domain over another, the more attention metadata companies have about us, and the more valuable it is…to them.
The AttentionTrust is aiming to make it valuable…to us.
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Comments
1. Prentiss Riddle 12:02pm, Thu 3rd, 2005
I’m skeptical: why is the collection of my user behavior suddenly being called an issue of “attention” instead of the long-standing issue of “privacy”? Doesn’t that confuse the matter with other abuses of my attention that don’t necessarily involve recording my behavior, most notably spam but also other forms of intrusive advertising and bad web design in general?
Furthermore, what does the AttentionTrust pledge accomplish? When I read their site I can’t even tell what they’re talking about; I can’t imagine their effort in its present form will successfully get anyone in the industry to take the pledge and clean up their act.
I think this whole topic would be better served by recasting it in the language we’ve been using for years: privacy, including the privacy of my surfing behavior; and attention, including the abuse of my attention by spam and other noise.
2. Josh 12:46pm, Thu 3rd, 2005
Prentiss, I think you bring up some great points. I don’t know exactly how this relates to privacy, but I do know that AttentionTrust is about empowering people, about people controlling their own attention metadata. I suppose you could equally say that it’s about people controlling the appropriate level of privacy they wish to enjoy.
3. PeteCashmore 3:06pm, Thu 3rd, 2005
I think we’ve got to accept that privacy doesn’t really exist in the form it did ten years ago. In order to benefit from the wealth of information and connections out there, we’ve got to sacrifice a lot of what we used to call “privacy”. Ever posted on a forum? What about a job posting, or a comment on a blog? And if you have your own blog, you’re throwing all your thoughts out into the world, accompanied by your contact details.
“Attention” describes what you do and what interests you – it is a part of your identity. So if Amazon has a database on all your product choices (from which they can infer your interests and future purchases), it could be argued that they own your identity.
I think Prentiss is right to be skeptical, and I’m not even sure myself what the difference between attention and privacy might be. But here’s a suggestion: attention refers to implicit data. It’s only recently that we’ve had the ability to record data about users that is not explicitly stated through a submitted form – this act of entering data allowed the user to know exactly what information he was submitting. With implicit data, we have no idea what is being recorded. But this answer is fairly insufficient – I’m sure Ed Batista of Attention Trust could do a much better job!
By the way, did you see the article about MSNad Center? It seems to be related to all these attention ideas. More here:
http://mashable.com/2005/11/01/should-search-engines-log-your-search-history/
4. Ed Batista 8:23pm, Thu 3rd, 2005
Hi Joshua,
I’m the Executive Director of AttentionTrust. Great post, and thanks for the thoughtful consideration. I just pointed to it from the AttentionTrust blog.
I appreciate Prentiss’s comment above. Our site and our message definitely need work. (Any Drupal experts want to lend a hand? Please contact me.) But we’re putting users’ rights on the agenda, and that’s a start.
I agree firmly with Pete that there’s a relationship between attention and privacy, but they’re really two different things, just as there’s a relationship between attention and identity, but they’re also distinct.
To oversimply things, the privacy debate is almost always framed as preventing Them (whoever They might be) from gaining access to our data. But They already have access to our attention data. Our search histories, purchase histories, our entire clickstream (and plenty of offline attention data as well) is all being used by marketers and pollsters and all sorts of folks.
AttentionTrust is trying to give users control over their attention data not simply to restrict access to it, but to enable users to participate actively in the “attention economy” by exchanging their data for something of value to them (as Joshua ably describes above.)
I’m just scratching the surface here, but I look forward to hearing more from all of you. Thanks again.
Ed
5. Noah Brier 12:28pm, Fri 11th, 2005
This is the best description of AttentionTrust I’ve read, thanks Joshua.
6. Chad Finsterwald 10:05am, Tue 15th, 2005
I think the difference between “Attention” and “Privacy” is the idea that “Attention” is a commodity. It is something you can sell, trade, buy, etc.. “Privacy,” on the other hand, is a right or, at the very least, cannot be sold.
I think this is an important distinction and I agree with Josh that the “Attention Economy” is a place where users need to exercise more control. Companies have been buying and selling our attention with no benefit or compensation to the user. To the contrary, we users often suffer when their attention is sold in the form of unsolicited telemarketing calls, spam, etc.
7. Mike 7:17am, Wed 19th, 2006
We eat, sleep, and breathe attenttoin data – or what we call “attention streams” – and the benefits to users will go well beyond better more targeted advertising. We are utilizing attention stream data now (a lightweight transient superset of what attention.xml is all about) and at the end of the day users will automatically get fewer, more relevant and re-prioritized articles (not feeds, ARTICLES) We chatted with Seth today and we support attentiontrust wholeheartedly.