For many years, Doc Searls and a group of technologists have worked to develop Vendor Relationship Management tools that put customers in control of their data. They came up a new name, CustomerTech. The idea is a big, important one with applications across all aspects of daily life. It recognizes that the ubiquity of communications must be accompanied by new controls over personal data. Like Hannah Arendt, who argued that the private is essential to public personas, CustomerTech acknowledges the control we have over own data is the key to how we share and collaborate publicly, whether as customers or citizens. Just a few of the things Doc calls out as opportunities, all of which are important to the storyteller:

“With customertech, we can—

• Make companies agree to our terms, rather than the other way around.

• Control our own self-sovereign identities, and manage all the ways we are known to the administrative systems of the world. This means we will be able to—

• Change our email or our home address in the records of every company we deal with, in one move.

• Pay what we want, where we want, for whatever we want, in our own ways.

• Call for service or support in one simple and straightforward way of our own, rather than in as many ways as there are 800 numbers to call and punch numbers into a phone before we wait on hold while bad music plays.

• Express loyalty in our own ways, which are genuine rather than coerced.

• Have an Internet of MY Things, which each of us controls for ourselves, and in which every thing we own has its own cloud, and we control as well.

• Own and control all our health and fitness records, and how others use them.

• Help companies by generously sharing helpful facts about how we use their products and services—but in our own ways, though our own standard tools that work the same for every company we deal with.

• Plus lots more you’ll see in the works here.

Source: Not Just Data