Controlling Your User Data

The recent Facebook kerfluffle (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) over it’s “Beacon” technology, has brought new light to some interesting projects on data portability—

VRM: Vendor Relationship Management.

VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.
CRM systems until now have borne the full burden of relating with customers. VRM will provide customers with the means to bear some of that weight, and to help make markets work for both vendors and customers — in ways that don’t require the former to “lock in” the latter.

Dataportabilty.org: Developing standards, protocols and formats for data portability.

Standardized Data Portability is the next great frontier for the web. As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors.

AttentionTrust: Owning your data.

AttentionTrust is a not-for-profit organization that puts the user in control of their Attention data. Until now, only companies on the other side of our clicking captured the value.