Tainted Money?

What if we started tracing how money moves around in our economy, in an open and transparent way?

Hypothetically, Practically (see below(!)), I can start voluntarily taint money that goes through me. Publicize how much money I got from who, and to who do I give it. An extreme way of “voting” with every economic transaction I make. What if organizations started to do this in a standardized way?

Could this make some money worth more than other money?

Could this make our economy more “compassionate”, as Daniel Goleman would put it?

Technically, we can very easily start doing some things in this direction. Open a free account, and start logging our transactions over the net.

Decide that the money I got from here, is going in this direction – and see how it goes (or get stuck) from there on…

A proper meta-data would allow us to ask some interesting questions.

Was a shady business involved in the sources I got this money from?

How is my donation being used?

Did the government just “taint” 1 trillion USD last month??

“I only accept money from vegetarians…”

Stuff like that

Sounds easy to implement, and could be tons of fun, don’t you think?

Disclaimer:

<Transaction>

<id>1</id>

<source>http://www.semantinet.com</source>

<target>http://www.eburcat.com</target>

<amount>12</amount>

<date>March 31st, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>Salary</comment>

</transaction>

<transaction>

<id>2</id>

<source>http://www.eburcat.com</source>

<target>http://www.istockphoto.com</target>

<amount>1</amount>

<date>April 16th, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>That photo you see up there </comment>

</transaction>

Update: a more appropriate representations…

<Transaction>

<id>3</id>

<source>http://www.eburcat.com</source>

<target>http://www.gov.il</target>

<amount>1</amount>

<date>March 31st, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>Income tax…</comment>

</transaction>

Control the access to your own data...

Some incidents that happened lately led us to think quite much about the control of our data:

• In the past couple of months, Facebook had decided to disable the accounts of a couple of friends of ours.
• In 1999, some very important files of mine were hosted on a “Free 50MB storage” service. A year later I found out that my files were taken hostage, and in order to bail them out of that company I had to pay $10.
• Censorship is another concern. I’ve given YouTube and Flickr the liberty to censor my movies and photos. Sometime in the future, they might decide to shutdown their service, clean up their servers, go bankrupt, become a racist totalitarian, or who knows what.
• Some very important accounts of mine are authenticated against my GMail. If someone somehow breaks into it – I can lose control over some Very important accounts of mine.

These are a couple scenarios that happen when we give the control over our own data, to some 3rd parties who might someday betray our trust.

Very annoying.

Very disturbing, when I came to think of it.

Giving the control over my data to some company, suddenly sounds insane. Why should I trust Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft and Google – with access to my personal data? Why are we forced to trust these companies, when another, very elegant solution is now possible?

Tal Muskal has urged me to think about cloud computing in the past couple of months now. Amazon, Microsoft and Google – all started to offer some cloud storage and computing solutions. These resources are quite cheap, and always available. Together with some open-source development, these solutions can be turned into something very neat.

Imagine that you pay for some storage and CPU time in the cloud. You have full control over the data, and the APIs needed to access this data. All the code is open-source, and the data is encrypted so that you are the only one who controls who gets to see what.

With this scheme, I can control exactly who is permitted to access my pictures. I can allow my Facebook-friends access to my future events, without allowing Facebook-the company access to my list of favorite songs. I can store some audio-clips, and pay $0.17/GB/Month, without the concern that a service will sometime decide to take it down.

This approach is much healthier than the current state we’re in. It removes the need to trust 3^rd parties with some very important data. I believe that the ability to have full control over his own data is something that every heavy Internet user should strive for…