Would you like intrusion with your pizza?

The ACLU has a hilarious Flash flick (seriously, check it out – you’ll never order another pizza) with a serious undercurrent: your private, personal information is being stored in a lot of government and corporate databases, and they’re starting to connect the dots.

That relates to a relatively new idea: that the information about what things you pay attention to is valuable, and you have the right to control it. And that’s the underlying principle behind the folks at AttentionTrust.org. They have a program that allows web sites to declare their respect for some basic online rights:

Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.

All well and good… but the cool part comes in with the Attention Recorder, a Firefox extension that stores your browsing history on your desktop and, if you wish, with an approved service that will allow you to decide how to share it and with whom.

The Attention Recorder is still in alpha (a testing stage that basically means it might cause earthquakes, plagues of frogs or, in extreme circumstances, Firefox crashes), so beware. But it’ll be interesting to see how all of this evolves.

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2 Comments

Ed Batista on 12 Oct 2005 at 07:01

Hi Rob,
I’m the Executive Director of AttentionTrust. Thanks for the post–we’d love to hear any further feedback on the AttentionTrust Extension and how we could improve it as an “attention recorder.” Also, please note that the Extension can now be found at http://www.attentiontrust.org/services, rather than the link in your post. Sorry for any confusion. Thanks again, and I look forward to staying in touch.

Ed Batista on 12 Oct 2005 at 07:05

Whoops–my bad. I see that the link in your post points to the AttentionTrust Extension FAQ. That’s a great place for people to start, obviously. The Extension itself can be downloaded from the /services page that I linked to. Thanks again.

Ed Batista on 12 Oct 2005 at 07:01
Hi Rob,
I’m the Executive Director of AttentionTrust. Thanks for the post–we’d love to hear any further feedback on the AttentionTrust Extension and how we could improve it as an “attention recorder.” Also, please note that the Extension can now be found at http://www.attentiontrust.org/services, rather than the link in your post. Sorry for any confusion. Thanks again, and I look forward to staying in touch.
Ed
Ed Batista on 12 Oct 2005 at 07:05
Whoops–my bad. I see that the link in your post points to the AttentionTrust Extension FAQ. That’s a great place for people to start, obviously. The Extension itself can be downloaded from the /services page that I linked to. Thanks again.
Ed