Sunday, Oct 12 2008

Distributed control of demographics

• All "personal information" (name, address, phone, perhaps income, family info, etc) is acquired by individual, affiliated Clickshare Service Providers, and not by the Clickshare Service itself (that is, distributed across the Internet).
• Billable access information does reside with the Clickshare Authentication and Logging Service, or licensees, (and a local copy of some of this information is received by the user's "home-port" Clickshare Service Provider as well). The Clickshare Authentication and Logging Service has only the global Clickshare user ID (unique to each user) and csp-id (unique Clickshare Service Provider ID) as the "correlation points". Personal information is never maintained by centrally.

At the start of a Clickshare "session", the user's Clickshare Service Provider passes to the Clickshare Service preference information for the user, in addition to information about that user's service class -- again, keyed only by unique user ID. The Clickshare Service stores this information only for the duration of that session. There is no permanent record of even this preference information stored by the Clickshare service.

Why distribute sole ownership of name-and-address information out to potentially thousands of Clickshare service providers rather than maintaining it in one place?

• It creates the incentive for the local service provider to build a user base which he can serve on a very detailed basis (from information users give as their preferences, known only locally), and because the provider knows that he may derive secondary income from selling personal information to advertisers (when permitted by the users). At the same time, the system architecture allows these independent "audience owners" to participate in the service confident that critical information about their users does not have to be shared except with the explicit permission of them and their customers.
• It provides a better opportunity for personal privacy because the user has a direct relationship only with one service provider. Misuse of personal information can be traced directly to one source.
• This distributed system is "manageable" in every sense, which lowers the cost to everyone.

Demographic information (that which is directly available only from the end-user's service provider) is not, however, of tremendous utility alone. It needs to be accompanied by the "global" usage information assembled (but not owned) by the Clickshare Authentication and Logging Service to really be of any use -- because together one gets the "global profile of use". So, there is a built-in incentive for local PMs to "play ball" with Clickshare at all times -- each needs the other.

The Clickshare distributed-demographics design respects users -- and that is where the rubber meets the road. In an age when many consumers are getting increasingly worried about the ways in which their personal information is used and sold by people they don't know, this design (in combination with the features below) ENABLES privacy without demanding it or excluding it.

For example, a Clickshare Service Provider may charge a user a higher rate, if they desire, to maintain a user's privacy. Further, a Service Provider could (in association with an advertiser) give away free subscriptions (subsidized by the advertiser) in return for the user's participation in, say, "ads in all his email". Thus, the user is in control to either reduce his cost or increase his privacy.

What is known "globally?"

In the current design -- which has a great deal more room for enhancement -- Clickshare passes the following information among all Content Providers in the "User Profile" whenever the user accesses a site:

	PRIVACY 1:	do not correlate user ID with usage
	ADULT CONTENT:  do not allow access to content of adult nature
	AD CONTEXT:	(1) no ads (2) sponsorship only (3) all adds
	CUSTOMER GROUP: 16 groupings in which to "parcel" users

	SERVICE CLASS:	16 classes
	PAGE CLASS LIMIT: allow (or not) access to "premium pages"
	PAGE # LIMIT:   limit access by number of pages sent
	SERV. PRIORITY: 16 priority classes (probably for audio/video usage)

	MALE/FEMALE USER
	AGE RANGE	 (1) 5-10 yrs (2) 11-15 yrs (3) 16-19 yrs ...

The Clickshare Digital Calling Card (SM) -- an open "box car" to carry preference information

The important points here are:

• We have not yet solidified what preference information is "globally useful" to all content providers.
• Preference information is ignored/used at the Content Provider's peril (mis-use will cause him to lose users), while service information is used to his benefit (to save himself money, or to enable a premium service.

Within these broad ranges, many details can be specified by our providers and technical partners. However, in the current design, no entity other than the user's chosen independent Clickshare Service Provider can directly correlate a given user-id to an actual person, even though lots of "not-too-specific" information can be made available about that person's preferences.

Opportunities for audience-measurement services

The "settlement" process, whereby all PMs are distributed compensation for all "foreign access" is a "many to many" problem -- straight forward but massive data processing.

Since both of the above activities produce correlated records of transactions, some audience-measurement reports can be generated directly from this work. Other, more sophisticated reports will require MUCH more data processing (e.g., "How many users in all customer groups used premium pages in March?", or "What percentage of users with the adult-content flag turned off actually visited sites that advertise adult-content?")

One reason the latter is difficult is that you'd be dealing with a complete census of all activity, not a statistical sample - the equivalent of the Nielsen rating service having a counter on every TV set.