Ah, so that’s what we’re calling it. Personal Informatics. Catchy term.

I was recently thinking about this with respect to privacy, security, data ownership and portability, intellectual property, rights assignment, licensing, etc.

I resolved that although we can’t technically enforce how other entities use our information when it’s in their possession, we can at least endeavour to know what they know. Collecting copious quantitative data on our activities yields valuable feedback for sure.

Some obvious ones:

Your utility company knows how many kilowatt-hours of energy you’re using.
Your cellular provider knows how many minutes you talk a month (not to mention everywhere you go with your phone).
Your internet provider knows how many bits you move in and out of its network.
Your bank, credit card company etc. know how much they have charged you in fees and interest.

If these entities collect this information, why don’t we? — and this doesn’t even cover metrics that don’t involve other organizations, like some you mentioned in your other post.

Now, if only we had an effective way to aggregate and view this data…

@Dorian Quite right…what’s interesting with power companies (and telephone and…) is that they monitor this stuff like mad but provide almost zero insight into it for their customers. Almost as if they don’t want us to know, because they know we would take steps to be more efficient.

This might be a conspiracy theory, but when was the last time a company actually said “you know, we want to help you use our valuable resources a bit less, saving you money”. Just doesn’t happen.

I’m not sure if it’s conspiracy so much as force of habit.

My understanding is that the MO of industrial-age business is to keep everything secret unless some more compelling arrangement drags the information out of you (like the SEC). Your customers are buying stuff and things, not information, and as such there is no value in putting the effort into making such information available. In fact, there is a perceived liability in volunteering any information about anything, because that’s just less money your competitors have to spend to analyze you. In some ways, this perception is well-founded.

But, we’re now at a stage at which the cost of getting, storing, correlating, displaying and sharing bulk data is little more than a trivial investment of time and money on the part of an interested individual. Data collection hardware is cheap, storage is plentiful and visualizaton software is free.

I, for one, am really curious to see what the future holds for organizations that rely on uninformed consumers.

I, for one, am really curious to see what the future holds for organizations that rely on uninformed consumers.

Beautiful

Everyone seems to be on high spirits at this time but are we sure that we really need the promo codes. Well, there are many sites out there to help you

As an example (satirically) people who waste all of their money on things like CDs and clothes. This keeps them poor their entire lives and is a bigger piece of the pie than leaving lights on. Changing your habits for real can transform you financial situation and your happiness situation.

rifle scopes

Quote “you know, we want to help you use our valuable resources a bit less, saving you money”

@Josh porter : i say that would be the day when sun would rise from the west ;P

I am still taking in the new word personal informatics. As you say, simply put, they empower people. I don’t know why we need to follow daily activites…might just be a waste of time. Time will tell.

I think following daily activities can be a plus. I look at things I do now and wonder why I took the long route to solving a problem when I could’ve taken another path that would’ve been faster. This is how we get stuck doing the same thing for years when we could’ve considered something else that would’ve taken less time.