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| The primary task of service providers, especially those associated with e-commerce, is to use personal data for end-user benefit through personalized services, streamlined operations, and market research. |
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Personalization is the process of altering the presentation and behavior of a service to optimize for the preferences of the user. Personalization can be used to make more targeted product recommendations, provide more interesting content, and generally provide a more effective service. The key to personalization is knowing what the user wants, which requires knowing a high quantity of high quality personal information about that user. An example of personalization is a news service using knowledge of a user’s reading history, stock portfolio, and book buying habits to determine what subset of the day’s news is the most interesting to the user. |
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Similar to personalization, services can streamline operations to accelerate and simplify their use. When cost is no longer the driving factor in the eyes of the consumer, speed and simplicity provide key competitive advantages. The classic example of a streamlined operation is Amazon’s one-click checkout system: Were this feature integrated with a streaming music player (perhaps through a “buy” button on a satellite radio for automobiles), the time between making a purchasing decision and completing the purchase could be vastly reduced. |
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Finally, all businesses rely upon market research to understand the needs of their customers. Market research consists of understanding the habits and interests of various demographic groups, defining products for each of these groups, and then targeting products and advertisement to those groups. The value of this market research depends heavily upon the volume, accuracy, and timeliness of data – attributes directly improved through Talisman. |
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| All of these benefits depend upon access to personal user information. However, the mere existence of these data collections creates the possibility of abusive privacy violations. Thus, as a cost of doing business with personal user data, services must have secondary tasks associated with abiding by realm oversight. These oversight tasks, along with the tasks associated with storing and hosting the user accounts, are left to the service providers to perform. |
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| Before service providers can gain access to user data collected within a particular realm, they must become participating members of that realm. This participation is the result of three primary steps: getting a public key from a major Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) provider, negotiating with the realm for active certification, and then installing Talisman technology itself. |
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| Some subset of service providers will choose, for whatever reason, to host user accounts. Account providers must provide, on top of their existing services, the following features to users: unified data review and correction, usage tracking, and fine grained access control. |
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| The ultimate purpose of the system is to allow services to access personal information in an environment that protects user privacy. This process is broken into the three major steps of getting permission, accessing the data, and logging the operation. |
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