However, I’m concerned Solid is ill-equipped to tackle the challenges of the data ownership space and deliver impact. This article explores some of the problems PDSs face and suggests we need a strategic approach that’s user centered, systemic and allows for a diversity of approaches to overcome centralisation.

Can we sell privacy?

The scandals over Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of Facebook’s app privileges, and the implications in terms of political influence and the spread of disinformation, has led to a significant rise in interest in the decentralised web. People increasingly distrust Facebook which shares your phone number with advertisers to target ads and Google which tracks your location even when tracking is explicitly disabled. More recently, the unwitting exposure of at least fifty million Facebook profiles to the prying eyes of random hackers will only increase the pressure on companies to demonstrate that they can be safe custodians of personal data. So earlier this year, myself and Simon decided to explore the personal data store space to assess the effectiveness of the approach Solid takes.

How does a Personal Data Store work?

Solid’s model is typical of a lot of the PDSs we looked at. User data lives in a datastore. The user either self hosts, or pays for someone to securely host a PDS on their behalf. Applications read/write to that data through user controlled granular permissions.

In the best case scenario of this model, app developers simply provide the interface and functionality of, for example, a calendar or journal app. The data always lives in your datastore. When you browse your journal or calendar in a web or desktop/phone app, the data from your datastore is displayed in the interface, but it’s securely transmitted between you and your datastore. No other parties are able to access it. This would be game changing.

But there are challenges

1. Most digital transactions require verified claims

Much of Tim’s narrative assumes that there is clear ownership of data, which is far from straightforward. Different entities are looking for different kinds of data:

• For the majority of digital transactions and interactions (buying things online, applying for services, booking a flight, proving my age), the most valuable data is data asserted about me from an authoritative source. For example, that I have a valid driving license or verified address, bank account, passport.
• For advertising, it’s what I bought and where I clicked as well as profile data (email address, demographic and interests info). This data is generated by the services I use (e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter).
• For AirBnB and Uber it’s the ratings that other users have given me that’s important, which isn’t data I obviously ‘own’.

Yes, some of this can be self-asserted, but organisations often want objective data based on behaviour and decisions made about us not what we say is true. Mortgage brokers don’t just want my assertion that I have income, they want proof.

This means that Solid’s use cases will be limited unless it partners with institutions like banks and governments to assert and verify such data. Luckily there are standards being developed in the W3C to facilitate this, but we still need good frameworks and incentives for why such institutions will spend the time/energy to share and verify data about us, how this happens securely and how GDPR requirements are met.

2. If we narrow the market, the value proposition is hard

Putting aside verified claims, we then have the potential market of apps or services which only need self created data, preferences or quantified self data. This could be my calendar, todo list, journal entries, emails, messages, Apple/Google health app stored data, Fitbit data, what websites I use, time spent online, and so on. This is still a major market, but one already well catered for.

What’s the offer to users?

I want to see user research that identifies real problems users have with the current status quo which Solid will solve well enough to overcome switching cost and inertia. Most privacy concerns are centered around Facebook — but people are not on Facebook because they lack alternatives. There are numerous well designed, encrypted, decentralised and privacy preserving, even blockchain-based, alternatives. However, your current social network isn’t portable and the value of Facebook and Twitter comes from the people using it. The way we tackle this is to push for regulation around open protocols, not by expecting everyone to switch.

So if we can’t sell privacy as a product in social media, we need evidence of where else these priorities will bring users. Alternatively, decentralised or PDS-integrated tech must deliver novel and valued functionality or be solving major problems users have with existing centralised solutions.

What’s the offer to companies and app developers?

For companies, service providers and app developers the value proposition is hazy. I have yet to come across a PDS provider with an impressive or long list of partners and companies. Most existing business models depend on controlling the data and using it to improve a service and provide valuable analytics to up-sell paid plans or directly monetise the data collected through advertisers and third party data marketplaces. Giving this up requires incentives or regulation.

If Solid uptake is big enough to attract app developers, what stops the same data exploitation happening, albeit now with an extra step where the user is asked for ‘permission’ to access and use their data in exchange for a free or better service? Consent is only meaningful if there are genuine alternatives and as an industry we have yet to tackle this problem (see how Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon ask for ‘consent’). What’s really going on when users are asked to agree to the terms and conditions of software on a phone they’ve already bought that won’t work otherwise? Or agreeing to Facebook’s data selling if there’s no other way for users to invite friends to events, message them or see their photos if those friends are Facebook users? I wouldn’t call this consent.

The answer may lie in partnering with civic or NGO organisations that have different incentives, but many users. Organisations like the BBC, governments, local authorities, the charity sector, and even financial organisations like Funding Circle and other peer-to-peer lenders. This is a worthwhile avenue to explore, but it doesn’t feel enough.

Alternative approaches

It’s time to challenge the standard economic approach when it comes to digital. The economies of scale are fundamentally different and we need bold new frameworks to ensure that technology benefits and protects everyone in society. Governments could and should invest in open infrastructure so that the basics of communicating online or connecting with people, cannot be ‘owned’ by companies, but is a shared basis like the internet or email protocol.

I’m thrilled Tim is pushing forward with Solid, but we need to be thinking bigger. Let’s start tackling the broader challenges and opportunities for a decentralised web to deliver a better ecosystem for all. Solid and similar projects need user research, user centered design, marketing and coordination to ensure interoperability and a user experience that can compete with the status quo. Common authentication and authorisation standards for digital identity and login and communication standards that work across applications and services will help break down silos and create real benefits to users and companies to motivate the move away from digital monopolies. It’s time to push for serious funding and resources into such public infrastructure to create an internet and web that works for everyone, just like Tim’s original vision.

The post How solid is Tim Berners-Lee’s plan to redecentralize the web? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Part I: Data Collection

New technology isn’t disrupting power – it’s reinforcing it

Republished from New Economics Foundation

Duncan McCann: A new economy is emerging. And this new economy is powered by a new type of fuel: data. As the data economy becomes increasingly prominent, there are troubling signs that it is worsening existing power imbalances, and creating new problems of domination and lack of accountability. But it would be wrong simply to draw dystopian visions from our current situation. Technological change does not determine social change, and there is a whole range of potential futures – both emancipatory and discriminatory – open to us. We must decide for ourselves which one we want.

This is the first of four papers exploring power and accountability in the data economy. These will set the stage for future interventions to ensure power becomes more evenly distributed.This paper explores the impact of the mass collection of data, while future papers will examine: the impact of algorithms as they process the data; the companies built on data, that mediate our interface with the digital world; and the labour market dynamics that they are disrupting.

Our research so far has identified a range of overarching themes around how power and accountability is changing as a result of the rise of the digital economy. These can be summarised into four arguments:

• Although the broader digital economy has both concentrated and dispersed power, data has had very much a concentrating force.
• A mutually reinforcing government-corporation surveillance architecture – or data panopticon – is being built, that seeks to capture every data trail that we create.
• We are over-collecting and under-protecting data.
• The data economy is changing our approach to accountability from one based on direct causation to one based on correlation, with profound moral and political consequences.

This four-part series explores these areas by reviewing the existing literature and conducting interviews with respected experts from around the world.

The Facebook/​Cambridge Analytica scandal has made data gathering a front-page story in recent months. We have identified four key issues related to data gathering:

• GDPR will not save us: Although GDPR will be an improvement for data privacy, it should not be considered a panacea. Some companies, especially global ones, will structure their business to dodge the regulations.
• Privacy could become the preserve of the rich: The corporate data gathering industry may evolve to create a system where only the rich are able to afford the necessary tools and labour time to effectively maintain their privacy.
• Privacy is an increasingly unmanageable burden: responsibility for managing data falls far too heavily on the individual rather than those who want to use individuals’ data.
• Are we becoming a conformist society? Ubiquitous data collection, coupled with data never being deleted means we could be entering an era of self-censorship and ​‘social cooling’.

The Rise of the Data Oligarchs: Power and Accountability in the Digital Economy Part 1: Data Collectionn shared by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Download the report

Photo by moleitau

The post Essay of the day: The rise of the data oligarchs appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I left Facebook in 2013, less for my own sake than for what my presence on the service was doing to others. I knew that anyone who “liked” my page could have their data harvested in ways they wouldn’t necessarily approve.

Over the past five years, people have not only become aware of this devil’s bargain but accepted it as the internet’s price of admission.”So what if they have my data,” I saw a graduate student ask her professor this week. “Why is my privacy so important?”

Bully for you if you don’t care what Facebook’s algorithms know about your sex life or health history, but that’s not the real threat. Neither Facebook nor the marketers buying your data particularly care about what you do with your clothes off, whom you’re cheating with or any other sordid details you may find embarrassing.

That’s the great fiction of social media: That you matter as a person. You don’t.

The platform cares only about your metadata, from which they can construct a psychological profile and then manipulate your behavior. They have been using and selling even the stuff you thought you were sharing confidentially with your friends in order to identify your neuroses and neurotic vulnerabilities and leverage them against you.

That’s what Facebook markets to its customers. The company has been doing it ever since its investors realized that, as owners of a mere social network, they would become only multi-millionaires; to become billionaires, they’d have to offer something more than our attention to ads. So they sold access to our brain stem.

With 2.2 billion active users, Facebook knew it had a big-data gold mine. While we’ve been busily shielding what we think of as our “personal” data, Facebook has been analyzing the stuff we think doesn’t matter: our clicks, likes and posts, as well as the frequency with which we make them. Looking at this metadata, Facebook, its psychologists and its clients put us into different psychographic “buckets.”

That’s how they came to be able to predict, with about 80% accuracy, our future behaviors, including whether we’re going to go on a diet, vote for a particular candidate or announce a change in sexual orientation. From there, the challenge is to compel the lagging 20% to fall in line — to get all the people who should be going on a diet or voting for a particular candidate to conform to what the algorithms have predicted.

That’s where companies like Cambridge Analytica come in. They paid thousands of people to take psychology tests and to surrender their own and their friends’ Facebook data. Then they compared all this data to infer how each of us would have answered that psychology test. Armed with our real or algorithmically determined psychological profiles, Cambridge Analytica surmised our individual neurotic makeups. And they figured out how to terrify each and every one of us.

That’s the greater collateral damage of social media. It’s not simply that they can get us to buy a particular product or vote for one candidate or another. It’s that their techniques bypass our higher brain functions. They use imagery and language specifically designed to evade our logic and empathy and appeal straight to our reptilian survival instincts.

These more primitive brain regions respond only to primitive stimulus: fear, hate and tribalism. It’s the part of us that gets activated when we see a car crash or a horror movie. That’s the state of mind these platforms want us to be in, because that’s when we are most easily manipulated.

Yes, we’ve been manipulated by ads for a century now. But TV and other forms of advertising generally happened in public. We all saw the same commercials, and they often cost so much that companies knew they had to get them right. Television networks would themselves censor ads that they felt would alienate their viewers or make fraudulent claims. It was manipulative, but for the most part, consumer advertising was aspirational.

Facebook figures out who or what each of us fears most, and then sells that information to the creators of false memes and the like, who deliver those fears directly to our news feeds. This, in turn, makes the world a more fearful, hostile and dangerous place.

To ask why one should care is a luxury of privilege. Data harvesting arguably matters most when it’s used against the economically disadvantaged. It’s not just in China that social media data are used to evaluate credit worthiness and immigration status. By normalizing the harvesting of data, those of us with little to fear imperil the most vulnerable.

When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, a friend of his expressed surprise that people were surrendering so much personal data to the platform. “I don’t know why,” Zuckerberg said. “They trust me. Dumb …”

We may have been dumb to trust Facebook with our data in the first place. Now we know they’ve been using the data to make us even dumber.

Reposted from the Rushkoff list, subscribe here

Photo by Book Catalog

The post How Facebook Exploited Us All appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This month’s revelations that Facebook had sold, released or lost control of millions of users’ data has left many people wanting out — but wondering whether they can leave the social media platform they and hundreds of millions of others around the globe depend on.

I’m here to tell you can.

I left Facebook in 2013, declaring on CNN that “we are not the customers, we are the product.” And we now have proof this is true. Facebook was not breached or hacked by Cambridge Analytica. The Facebook platform was doing exactly what it is programmed to do: Harvest our data, identify our psychological triggers and then manipulate our behavior.

As users are finally realizing, neither Facebook nor the compliance professionals purchasing your data from them care about your secrets or your sex life. They care only about your raw data, from which they can infer your psychological vulnerabilities.

It’s not simply that they can get us to buy a particular product, or vote for one candidate or another. It’s that the techniques they are using intentionally bypass our higher brain functions. They use imagery and language specifically designed to evade our logic and empathy, and go straight to our reptilian survival instincts. Our neuroses are like blind spots. Once identified by the social media psychologist, they become access panels to the more impulsive parts of our brains.

Facebook can target and trigger us through terror. The network’s techniques don’t appeal to our logic or empathy, but to our deepest-held fears. Their tactics are aimed directly at our brain stems — the part of our brain that acts and thinks like a reptile: Fight or flight. Kill or be killed.

We’ve seen the impact of this technology on our social and political discourse. We may have real things to be angry about, but when these are the only stimuli delivered by our social media, we can end up living in a state of perpetual paranoia and rage. No, it’s not fun. But it’s also a tremendous public health hazard and threat to democracy. Democracy requires an informed, thinking public.

So, whether you want to be a more responsible citizen, or simply a happier person, you owe it yourself to get off Facebook any way you can. And I’m here to tell you, you can do it. You are going to be OK. It’s not so bad. In fact, it’s better.

First off, you won’t be pinged by those friends from second grade whom you have spent the last 40 years trying to forget. Is that sad? Maybe. Until we migrate to a less corrupted online directory of names and emails, people you no longer know may have a harder time locating you.

But that means you will be forced to spend your time and energy interacting with people who are in your life. Real world interactions allow you to establish rapport and bond in ways that just don’t happen online. Several hundred thousand years of human evolution have been dedicated to face-to-face interaction. That’s the only way for pro-social hormones such as oxytocin to get released into the bloodstream instead of the stress hormones, such as cortisol, which are released by social media use.

If the teenagers in your life can’t reach you through social media, they will ultimately use it less. The less they use social media, the less likely they may be to be depressed or commit suicide. Another great ancillary benefit of getting off Facebook.

Facebook’s useful function is that it lets us find and communicate with people — like an interactive phone book. Luckily, there are many ways to gain that same utility, without making ourselves so vulnerable to psyops.

If Facebook is the only way your relatives let you interact with them, then that’s already a problem. Accepting this restriction on your relationships is acquiescing to a system that values pings more than contact. You can still email, Skype and FaceTime, share photos through web pages, iCloud and photo streams, and create Google groups and live hangouts. But even more important and fulfilling, you should accept fewer substitutes for getting together with your loved ones in real life.

You also get your time back. Every minute off Facebook is a minute you can choose to spend with another person, forging psychologically healthy relationships instead of submitting to a company that is actively trying to undermine them.

Best of all, you get to live life free of the constant psychological abuse inflicted by companies that mean to undermine your social relationships, and governments that mean to undermine your faith in democracy, government and human nature. You get to leave the dark place, and step back into the light of day.

Pressuring Facebook in this way also serves those who may be less privileged than you — people whose home loans, parole hearings and immigration status is affected by the data they thought they were sharing in confidence through social networks such as Facebook. Recently, China revealed how their citizens’ social media connections and “likes” are used to determine their eligibility for jobs and visas.

You say, “That can’t happen here,” but it is already beginning. And if we are still a free country, then you should feel free to leave Facebook without consequence.

You can do it. I know you can.

Photo by clasesdeperiodismo
Reposted from the Rushkoff list, subscribe here

The post You can ditch Facebook. It’s OK. You will survive appeared first on P2P Foundation.