Lumi
Martin Stiksel and Felix Miller, creators of Last.fm, are again trying to take data users don’t care about and do something useful with it:
“Usually the only interaction people have with their browsing history is deleting it,” Miller said. But he and Stiksel said they hope Lumi changes that. ”Browsing history gives us a great picture of what people like, without them having to do anything,” Stiksel said.
However:
… the success of Lumi will depend on users being prepared to allow the service to interpret their browsing histories in order to provide them with recommended news stories, reviews and blogs. “The browsing history is owned by the user and securely put onto our platform, only the user has access to it,” Martin insisted. “We are not interested in the data from a commercial point of view.”
This is the problem. Lumi has arrived at the worst time possible. The majority of every interview piece on the service is made up of the creators reassuring us that Lumi is private, safe and secure.
When it came time to upload my browsing history to Lumi I paused… and left. Uploading that data to a web service in this post-Snowden world doesn’t feel right.