Jen recently blogged about AttentionTrust and made the same mistake that most people make when they decide that it must be a good idea.
While I agree that some of their goals are excellent, I have to take issue with some of the things they are saying.
Let’s look at the AttentionTrust principles and see where I think they break down.
AttentionTrust and our members believe that you have the following rights:
Property
You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
Mobility
You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
Economy
You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
Transparency
You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.
Property
It seems obvious that “you own your attention“. However, I think that the truth is more subtle. Attention - like many things in the digital age - isn’t something that should have exclusive property rights associated with it. For instance, when you visit this blog, I get to see what you looked at and (possibly) where you came from. The fact that I know that does not reduce the value of own attention in anyway, but it lets me provide services better.
Mobility
This means that you should be able to let other services know the details of your operations with my services. While I don’t have a problem when you are reading this blog, I can think of times when sharing interaction infomation is something that both sides of the service should have to agree with.
Economy
I think AttentionTrust has been very mainipulative with the wording of this principle. Who would dare to disagree that “Your attention has WORTH“? It’s the first part of the statement that I think is harmful: “You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return“. Some AttentionTrust advocates use that to argue that companies like Google shouldn’t be allowed to keep logs on who searches for what. I’d argue that the service they provide is “value in return“, and that companies need to keep attention data themselves to improve their services.
Transparency
I mostly agree with this principle - but I think that website privacy policies provide for it.
2 Comments
“companies need to keep attention data themselves to improve their services”. I guess that depends on how you define “improve their services” and how much data they actually need to collect in order for this improvement to occur? Is there a direct relationship between the data and the improvement? Is it really necessary for Google to know what you have searched for in the past in order to deliver search results relevant to your query?
“Is it really necessary for Google to know what you have searched for in the past in order to deliver search results relevant to your query?”
There’s plenty of evidence that personalization in search is the technology likely to deliver the next large step forward in search results. It’s certainly a technology worth investigating, and I can’t blame Google for keeping that data.
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[…] I’ve written a piece on my work blog which may interest some readers: AttentionTrust: why not everything that seems like a good idea is. In it I argue that many of the principles set out by AttentionTrust.org are not the wonderful ideas they seem. […]
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