Data Dignity

Technology companies wield highly concentrated power over the way peoples’ data is used, and make enormous profits from it. They can do this because we “bargain” for Big Tech services as if we were all isolated individuals, with “personal” datasets. In fact, the data we produce is always deeply social. Sharing it affects our friends, families, and communities as much as it affects us.

People should be able to exert democratic collective bargaining power over their data, in order to make joint decisions controlling its use, and negotiate appropriate compensation.

Further reading

A Relational Theory of Data Governance - Salome Viljoen

A View of the Future of Our Data - Matt Prewitt

The Automation Charade - Astra Taylor

Beta Shapley: a Unified and Noise-reduced Data Valuation Framework for Machine Learning - Yongchan Kwon, James Zou

Bottom-Up Data Trusts: Disturbing the ‘One Size Fits All’ Approach to Data Governance - Sylvie Delacroix. Neil Lawrence

Data Dignity at RadicalxChange - M Eifler, Vi Hart

The Data Freedom Act - RadicalxChange Foundation Ltd.

Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies - Nicholas Vincent, Hanlin Li, Nicole Tilly, Stevie Chancellor, Brent Hecht

The Data Station: Combining Data, Compute, and Market Forces - Raul Castro Fernandez, et al.

Data workers of the world, unite - The Economist

Don’t give OpenAI all the credit for GPT-3: You might have helped create the latest ‘astonishing’ advance in AI too - Nicholas Vincent

Chapter 5 of Radical Markets - Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl

Society Runs on Information Flows - Johannes Stutz

Solving the Social Dilemma: The Data Freedom Act - Matt Prewitt, Leon Erichsen

Who Owns the Future? - Jaron Lanier

Tools

Maskbook - Maskbook is a browser extension that enables you, all people of the Internet, to create encrypted posts on your favorite social network sites, including Facebook and Twitter. Your can choose who is able to see them and who is not.

Ocean Protocol - Ocean Protocol is a digital infrastructure to power the web3 data economy. It is the root for applications such as data marketplaces, crypto-secure data custody and data management, as well as easier to implement data unions, trusts, and cooperatives.

OpenMined - OpenMined is building software that makes it possible for one person to answer a question using data owned by another, without ever seeing or acquiring a copy of that data. OpenMined calls this process Remote Data Science. The advent of remote data science means that, in a huge variety of domains across society, current tradeoffs between sharing data and protecting that data will be broken.

Pool - Pool’s purpose is to redistribute power, value and control in the data economy. Pool’s platform supports organizations called Data Unions, who enable ordinary people to monetize and share their data. Because those people are positively engaged in sharing their information, data products on Pool’s platform are richer, more relevant, and far easier to license.