A friend of mine asked yesterday
Why would a user want to control her own data? Isn’t it more efficient to have the data hold by large companies and what do large companies do that is undesirable? Lastly, how would you control your own data?
So why would I want to own my own data? As the richest person in Japan, Softbank CEO, Masayoshi Son put it
Your data will worth more than your car or house.
Data is the food for AI. To raise a smart AI, you need lots of data to feed it. Big tech companies now have monopoly in AI, not because startups are not smart enough, but because only googles and facebooks have the data.
Big Data is precise fortune telling. By analyzing data big enough, you can make much more precise business predictions, and a lot of money. That’s why many companies would want to buy data. Besides, by owning data big enough, one can tell who is your potential customer. Report said Facebook makes more than two dollars with each user’s data through ads.
Your data on the Internet is a virtual you, the virtual you knows you better than yourself, you can not remember exactly what you did or bought last year, but the virtual you knows. You should the one owns the virtual you, not somebody else.
The companies sometimes sell our data without our permission. Take Facebook as an example, privacy leaking scandal leads to great danger to the company. Users got angry, and Zuckerberg afraid, so earlier this year, on F8 conference, Facebook announced all the IM messages will be encrypted in a way that no body except the parties of the conversation can decrypt, in tech term, it is called E2EE, End-to-End-Encryption. The fact shows a dilemma for tech companies, they have all the intentions and skills to sell and use users’ data, but the users and law makers won’t let them to do so. User’s want to sell their data but they don’t own the data. This slow down the trading of data.
If the digital property right is clear, the data trading market will be much more efficient.
The fact that large companies rather than us own our data cause lots of issues, one of them is censorship against open speech.
We are now living in a small number of walled gardens. The Internet and Web was designed as a decentralized infrastructure for open speech. But the current reality is that it is very much centralized. Most people spend most of their time on Wechat or Facebook and a few more other walled gardens. They are private for-profit companies, and that’s turn out to be problematic. These large companies are easily censored. They are afraid of the censorship form the entity much more powerful and therefore cast even more strict rules to censor users’ content. Freedom of speech is lost.
Now the one million dollar question is how to do it, how can I hold my data, so that I can own it and sell it.
First of all, we need open standards and freedom to exit. Nowadays, all the data are locked by certain app. Say, even Facebook make all the data easily down-able for me, It’s still very much meaning-less, since the data format is only for the Facebook App, startups can not build products to compete with facebook, since if I switch to another app, all my friend connections will be lost. Therefore, 2020 US presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s Data Property Right Policy mentions
The right to download all data in a standardized format to port to another platform
Then users won’t be under the dictation of a certain App, and user can own their own data in a real way, cause they have the freedom to exit.
What needs to be done is to build more open standards within organizations like W3C, and the whole industry needs to build more infrastructures to support edge computing as an opposite to cloud computing. Edge means users’ own hardware, like PCs, phones or servers.
It may takes years to build everything needed to enable users to hold their own data without losing all the efficiency the large tech companies provide.
So, I really believe next generation of the internet will be decentralized, we will no longer live in the walled gardens. We with have the digital property rights to our own data.
ref: