A friend of mine sent this link to me. I was incensed. (I think he knew I would be). In turn, I sent this link into an Internet Identity community I belong to and asked : "How many different ways is this wrong?"

Amazon To Pay Consumers For Their Shopping Data

People First Podcast Guest Tim Walters was quick to reply (the link takes you to the podcast - the show has not yet gone live).

The great and sadly late European Data Protection Supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, said it all in 2014:

"There might well be a market for personal data, just like there is, tragically, a market for live human organs, but that does not mean that we can or should give that market the blessing of legislation. One cannot monetise and subject a fundamental right to a simple commercial transaction, even if it is the individual concerned by the data who is a party to the transaction."

If I thought it was worth $10 a month, I'd go to a shopping district and gather discarded receipts to scan for Amazon. After all, "That data will be used anonymously, the company says." But . . . if it is genuinely used anonymously, why doesn't Amazon just collect and study discarded receipts themselves? They could certainly find a way to do it at far more scale -- not to mention, actually anonymously -- than a cumbersome mailed-pictures-of-paper-receipts-for-Amazon-credit scheme. (S&H Green Stamps, anyone?)

The company says it deletes any sensitive information such as prescriptions from drug store receipts and allows panellists to delete their own information whenever they want." Oh, not so anonymous after all.

Tim Walters / Giovanni Buttarelli

What do you think?

Thinking Allowed

• More about People First
• Other People First Posts
  (not just from the ‘other domain’ … all of them.)

Community mind you ... not Network - is a yet to be developed space/application that will serve to provide a fabric that wraps so many people, organizations, books, papers, applications etc. My observation is that in any initiative you find parallel organizations that seem to relate and compete and yet essentially are discussing the same topic. Think 'not-for-profits' fighting each other for the same funding to solve the same problem.

People First is not the only organization in this space - so in one sense we are another node on the network. No argument. BUT. What [peoplefirst.community](https://peoplefirst.community) will do is provide a network map of anybody and everybody related to and working with the challenges we are identifying.

No need to click through by the way - nothing there - yet - move along. It for the moment remains the vision.

DigLife and Generative Identity

Once such organization, lead by Philip Sheldrake is The DigLife Collective - of which yours truly is a founder member. Their observation says it all;

COOPERATING AT GLOBAL SCALE IS HUMANITY'S PRIMARY CHALLENGE

DigLife Collective

DigLife has in turn recently spawned another initiative that explores Generative Identity. It's new thinking that I wanted to capture now. It's an important message. To me the first time that I am aware of the world of technology that in talking about identity, they are not just talking about the 'ID' - but also starting to think of the 'entity' of Identity.

For those keeping track, you will recall that it is a significant stone in the People First canon.

Whenever we contemplate human dignity and well-being, social inclusion and equity, economics, education, democratic process, peace and justice, whenever we contemplate many of the sustainable development goals and corresponding targets, we inevitably contemplate the question of human identity in the digital age.

Anyone who has worked on projects in areas such as these will vouch that questions of identity are integral to their research, their analyses, and their designs.

The term generative identity is used to refer to research and thinking and designs that prioritise psychological, sociological, and ecological health in their approach to digital identity. The interdisciplinary working group on generative identity exists to encourage such work and, by corollary, to highlight the innate dangers of approaches to digital identity that do not qualify as generative.

https://generative-identity.org/about-generative-identity/

Funny, just today, I published the weekly newsletter referencing a quote from Douglas Adams. There must be something in the ether. Over on the DigLife site, I found this image of dolphins.