Also excellent as your attention becomes currency (you pay your attention out):

In a nutshell, the idea is that your attention data - that is, data that describes what you’re paying attention to - has value, and because it has value, when you give someone your attention you should expect to be given something in return. And just because you give someone your attention, it doesn’t mean that they own it. You should expect to get it back.

I know that sounds a little weird - it took me a while to grok it, too. So I’ll use an example that’s familiar to many of us: Netflix ratings and recommendations. By telling Netflix how you rate a specific movie you’re telling them what you’re paying attention to, and in return they can recommend additional DVDs to you based on how other people rated the same movie. In return for giving them your attention data - which is of great value to them - they provide you features such as recommendations that they hope will be valuable to you. In my mind, this is a fair trade.

But what if Netflix collected this information without your knowledge, and rather than using it to give you added value they sold it to another service instead? I imagine that many people wouldn’t like that idea - chances are, you’d want to be given the opportunity to decide who this information can be shared with. This is one of the goals of AttentionTrust.org: to leave you in charge of what’s done with your attention data.

I might add that this is something which Google has not addressed so far in any of their products that I have seen. They are massively capturing and collating your attention data. When governments do this we call it surveillance and cry foul. When corporations do it, nobody even seems to notice. Certainly Google offers you something in trade for your attention data: the use of web services - some of which have very nice interfaces even. But there seems to be ZERO mobility with the attention data they are pulling out of your datawake. That is, you can’t download all the information Google has been collecting about you and have them delete it from their records, allowing you to retain full ownership of it.