The apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.
René Magritte
Although trust frameworks and permissions are a powerful and flexible concept in data-driven interactions, they are also sometimes challenging to visualize in the abstract. The following screenshots are taken from a calendar and location sharing demonstration app shown at the World Economic Forum, Davos 2012. Here, data flows from external sources to a locker, is filtered through trust wrappers, and ultimately is leveraged to book calendar appointments.
You See Me – I See You
One of the unique features of the platform is the “You See Me – I See You” interface. With this feature, you are able to curate the flow of information between yourself and every individual, or group of individuals, in your network. You are in ultimate charge of how much information is shared with others.
Each of your groups is assigned certain levels of permissions and trust as a result of mining your data. You can always adjust these settings and set parameters for certain individuals and groups.
In the first screen you see a synopsis of your locker. Scroll over different external application icons to see a brief summary of your information on each of these networks, or click on them to get more detailed information about the specific personal data that has been loaded into your locker.
A critical missing component of much web data today is an intuitive sense of the visibility of personal data to others. At the bottom of the screen, data views are represented by Groups, Individuals, Global and Me. These enable you to see different groups of people and how they see your information.
For example, if you click on Mint, you are able to view the role “Accountant” and to view your data exactly as it appears from your accountant’s view.
For an example of how your family might see your information, scroll over different external application icons in your locker to see a brief summary of your information. The bar at the bottom of the screen enables you to see how others in your network see your information and enables you to customize how they view your information.
One of the most intimidating barriers for effective and trusted social networking applications is for you to know when and how to appropriately share information about yourself and others. It simply is not practical to be manually sorting and tagging your contacts around different “permission levels.” Rather, a key advantage of having your own personal data locker is that it can be safely mined to automatically tag and sort your contacts according to your patterns of interaction, affiliation and intimacy. Furthermore, data mining will allow these categorizations to naturally evolve with time as the real relationships do. You can always use manual forms of tagging and editing, but over time as the data about your interactions become richer, we expect that data mining techniques will prove indispensable.
Notice in the Groups screen that there are groups labeled as “derived” from data mining, while others are manually “user created.”
You are given an invitation to join Snooki for coffee. Want to (understandably) limit your window of time with Snooki? You are able to see your own entire calendar, Snooki’s calendar based on the permissions she has set for you, and how your calendar looks to Snooki based upon the permissions you have set.
Snooki is only shown that you are available for a limited time on one particular day, while your calendar still might appear open to other viewers with higher levels of your trust.
The calendar is viewable both from your perspective as well as Snooki’s through the same Groups-Individuals-Global-Me interface as shown in in the locker view. You can confirm that the permissions granted to Snooki mean there is only one day available on the calendar for a meeting, even though you actually have significantly greater availability this month.
Since Snooki, along with many other friends and contacts, also has a personal data locker and is part of the trust framework, it is possible to query her data locker to check her availability over space and time. Hence, the calendar application is able to discover that Snooki is indeed in Davos and she is also staying at the Belvedere Hotel, and a meeting is proposed, accepted and booked.
What was not shown in the groups screens are the “trust wrappers” that control how information can be shared, stored, and used. The wrapper is represented across different attributes (location, calendar, messages) with “trust” sliders. By shifting these sliders, you control how you are seen in space (location coordinates and names) and by time (calendar times and activities).