How do you feel about other people holding information about you? Do you think that the details are perfectly synchronised and up to date? We're talking here about your company, government departments, banks, the NHS, etc
When you are downloading information for sharing with your colleagues, how much trust do you put in it being accurate? What is the basis of that trust? Is it the publisher? The author?
And, in these days of genuine experts writing in blogs or on websites, mightn't they be more authoritative than conventional journalists?
But how do you separate the blog wheat from the chaff? Let me guess: you don't. You avoid this potentially rich source of information because you're not expert enough to judge what can be trusted and what can't.
In Q1 next year PAOGA, a deeply technical company, plans to start giving its customers the opportunity to store their personal identity information securely and control how that information is shared with the outside world. This could contain their credit, health, career and qualification information, for example.
Imagine if you could include an automatic authorisation check with searches for material from blogs and other unknown sources. PAOGA-using authors might say, "information managers can look at my name, my qualifications and my career history."
Wouldn't that take away the risk of dodgy sources?
It won't happen overnight, but expect companies like PAOGA to securely centralise personal information on our behalf, and put us in control of who sees it. This promises to transform our personal lives and introduce higher levels of trust into our business activities.