Facebook and Whatsapp, why worry?

The deal of the year, Facebook buys Whatsapp. And even before the dust settles, the privacy world is screaming murder. The privacy denying company buying a private messaging company spells doom for the privacy of hundreds of millions of users. You are warned to leave Whatsapp if you care for your privacy...

But is your privacy really at stake? Is the merger a new threat?

Facebook knows a lot about you. It knows your friends and relations, your likes, your updates, your whereabouts and it even knows what you would like to post but never really did. Facebook not only has access to your metadat, it has all content as well.
Whatsapp knows a lot about your telephone number. It knows the telephone numbers your phone number connects with and it has an enormous amount of metadata of all connections made.
And since both companies are American, you can bet that the NSA and it's friends have access to these (meta)data too.


But, and it's a big but, as long as a Facebook profile doesn't contain a telephone number, Facebook has no way to connect a profile with all Whatsapp metadata. There is no way to correlate a human profile with a phone profile.
It's a big but, but Facebook and Whatsapp live in different worlds en never the twain shall meet. So in my opinion there is no new privacy risk. If you really care for your privacy surely you would have left Facebook a long time ago?
So as far as I 'm concerned there is no need to dump Whatsapp. There are bigger threats to your privacy.



There's a second but, and that's a bit more tricky. A Facebook app and a Whatsapp app on a smartphone are different apps and they don't share between them, the operating system of the smartphone takes care of separation. Unless the operating system doesn't. I would say, stay away from any Facebook marketed phone...

So, until Facebook asks for your phone number, or you provide your phone number to Facebook, don't worry.

Identity Management and CRM

The use of digital identities for internet users has been discussed in many places. And plenty solutions have been developed. There are lots of identity providers that offer (open) standards based digital identities that can be reused.
For companies the use of digital identities is only part of the problem, the use of external identities is just becoming a necessity.

Apart from offering access for external identities, organisations also have to cope with the internal identities of their customers. The more (legacy) backoffice systems organisations use, the more difficulty they have in identifying the value of their customers. Nothing new here: this problem is solved in Customer Relation Management (CRM) and Master Data Management (MDM): we create a 'Golden Record', a unique internal representation of a customer, that is related to all coupled internal backend systems.

Master Data Management is an area with specific problems. How do you connect customer accounts in different backend systems with different identifiers. Backend1 customer A1 can be the same as Backend2 customer R2D2 and may not at all be Backend3 customer A1, but ASDFG9 instead. Master Data Management uses intelligent rules engines to connect Id's and knows some trics, like deduplication. I will not go into detail (I don't know this kind of process well enough).

In a sense both identity related problems look alike, although they are mirrored. Let me show it in a simple picture and await your reactions...:

Personal digital lockers and standards

A new trend is born, the secure personal digital locker. It used to be called the Digital Vault, but locker feels a lot more personal.

What's the purpose of a locker? It's a storage area for your personal data. The principle behind the locker (as defined by Google's Schmidt) is that you are the owner of your data.

Interestingly, now I know of at least 4 dedicated cloud based locker systems: Qiy, Digidentity, Singly, Azigo. And of course there is Google, iTunes, Amazon
And it will not end here, many more will appear, multi platform tools and apps, and, of course, the inevitable patent wars will happen too. Nevertheless, it seems a nice concept.

But having a locker is only the start. You have to get your data in there. And using a web form to upload is not very practical. Automatic interfaces will have to appear that enable upload from service providers to lockers of their customers, thereby transforming physical output on paper to digital output for delevering and storage in digital lockers.
Interesting, especially for those service providers, it will save massive amounts of paper, quite some business case!

But how will this end? Will everyone have just one locker? Or do we split risks and have separate lockers for different aspects of our lives?
And how can service providers know which locker to use to send data to? And which digital identity is required to open a locker? What legislation is there, can governments open my locker? And what if I die?

Plenty questions and hardly any answers yet. But I know for certain that we need open standards, at least locker provider should use open standards. Standards to be able to send data, upload, standards for identity.

[rant mode]And puhlease, get rid of those patents in order to make this new ecosystem work. Long time ago I had a Compuserve account and I feel that all current patent discussion can be stopped by pointing as Compuserve as an example of prior art.[/rant] (sorry about this)