IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

The release of ”The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe”, a report produced by IDC and sponsored by EMC, is fascinating on several levels. First, the fact that someone is trying to quantify the digital universe is an interesting and welcome exercise. Second, the extent to which the size of the digital universe is consumer generated is gratifying. Third, the extent to which enterprises exercise control over digital content is disconcerting. Fourth, the growth of your “digital shadow” as IDC calls it is more than disconcerting. And fifth, you realize after reading the report that we have not developed any coherent public policy to govern the digital universe.

To the first point, putting aside the obvious self interest EMC has in publicizing the extent of digital storage, it is a very useful exercise to capture the growth of the digital universe. Information is the key to successful management and studies such as these add to our understanding of the broader trends and dynamics taking place in the digital universe.

The second point and third points are in reaction to this statement in particular –

"While 70% or more of the digital universe is created,
captured, or replicated by individuals — consumers and
desk and information workers toiling far away from the
datacenter — enterprises, at some point in time, have
responsibility or liability for 85%."

It is great to see that individuals are the primary generators of digital content and that the production of digital content is not concentrated in the hands of the few. This makes sense since the tools required to generate digital content are much more democratic than the tools of the last century. Today someone with a computer, web camera and an iPod can create halfway decent content. Add in an actual video camera and some editing and mixing software and you can pretty much create high-quality content that used to require full-blown production studios. Now you can simply upload that content to the Internet whereas in the past you had to either be a broadcaster, publisher or movie distributor.

The scary part is that 85% of that content falls under the control of enterprises at some point. While for the most part these enterprises have refrained from exerting control over the content there have been cases where they have tried. The good news is those attempts largely failed. The bad news is they only failed because they became public and public opinion was quickly marshaled against the efforts. That is not a sustainable process in the long term and soon enough the public is going to grow tired of these spontaneous crusades.

Where things start to get scary is the notion of a “digital shadow”. As defined in the IDC report, your digital shadow consists of “digital images of you on a surveillance camera and records in banking, brokerage, retail, airline, telephone, and medical databases. It is information about Web searches and general backup data. It is copies of hospital scans. In other words, it is information about you in cyberspace. Your digital shadow, if you will.”

IDC estimates that your digital shadow comprises roughly half of your digital footprint. In other words, half of your digital footprint consists of content you created and half consists of information about you that is collected from a multitude of sources. It is this latter aspect, and particularly the ability to aggregate that information, that really scares me whether such aggregation is performed by enterprises or government.

Which brings me to my last point. There is no coherent public policy governing the generation, transfer, use, and disposal of digital information. European regulators have made some attempts in this area, most notably with the Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data as well as Directive 2006/24/EC on the “retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC.” Nothing comparable exists in the U.S. unless you count the disclosure statutes of numerous states.

What concerns me is that the approach of the U.S. government is to encourage enterprises to establish their own policies that they will enforce through the control they exert over 85% of the consumer-generated content. These policies will serve the enterprises well and give them access to a treasure-trove of personal information that they can do with largely as they please especially if they share it with law enforcement. This Administration’s efforts to collect calling data and credit card data attest to that.

But what about consumers? Don’t they have a right to this information? Indeed, don’t they have a property right in their information? In the United States we allow citizens to kill an intruder in our home. Shouldn’t we have some equivalent right (albeit less severe) for intruders into our digital “home”? What we are seeing develop is an information gap between what enterprises know about their customers versus what customers know about enterprises. A similar gap is widening between what the government knows about you and you about your government. That gap has to be closed and the quickest and most complete way to do that is to acknowledge the property interest that individuals have in their digital information. Once acknowledged, we can then begin to apply traditional property law and policies and close the information gap that is widening all too fast.