Icentered Building Trust and Privacy of Users
What is Icentered?
Icentered means the individual user is at the center, with the wheel in their hands, a personal vantage point on a web that is personalized, trusted, contextualized, private and safe – a truly user centered web.
Icentered view on trust can be summarized as; Icentered focuses on trust, privacy and new web ecology.
It’s a reversal of trust empowering mechanisms – Instead of providers asking us to take a leap of faith in their protection of our privacy and data management, and claims of preserving an ethical code and transparency as trust building mechanisms, Icentered will look at trust from different aspects, as a new mindset, a new web paradigm.
The prevailing paradigm driving web interactions today is based on a silo approach where the context of sites, providers, and platform is the key. Users are required to adapt to the provided scheme. Site centered leaves users no options. They depend on one-sided privacy and trust management policies of providers can choose to agree to these policies, and enter the site – or decline and go away. Most trust related discussions are centered on how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting information sharing and relevance enhancement.
The basic questions at the heart of trusting site centered paradigms are:
• Do I trust them? Am I relieved with privacy assurances provided by the sites with which I interact
• Do they abuse this trust?
• Do I have any means to check?
• Do I really know what knowledge they accumulate about me?
• Is the bargain of sharing information for receiving targeted offers or expose information for free services a bargain from hell?
• Am I in any real position to verify that the privacy policy stated is actually preserved?
• Do they save records? Track movements? Follow my activities?
• What security measures can I take?
• How paranoid should I be?
Shouldn’t I at least be in a position to proactively manage my privacy and trust relationships? It is my data, my privacy!
From an Icentered view, you are no longer the “user” as defined by web site owners and digital merchants. In all three spheres of interaction (people, content and services), there is one holistic harmonious “you” interacting with all of “them”. It is you driving all such interactions, in your context, from your point of view, under your control and you direct proactive management
The essence of the Icentered trust and privacy paradigm is that you, the user, you have the wheel in your hand and you master the process. Your data will be kept at your end and not within the walled servers of the providers. You will expose/ share/hide as much as suits you personally. There is no need to pay 3rd party companies to monitor you, invade your social graph and provide tools to lure you.
This article belongs to Icentered. Author frequently writes about user privacy, Icentered,social web and social marketing. To know further about Web 2.0, internet, web marketing, new business models, digital advertising, and user centered initiatives from Author see – http://www.icentered.com/trust-the-icentered-way
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