Theo Bass: European laws have ushered in a new era in how companies and governments manage and promote responsible use of personal data. Yet it is the city that looks set to be one of the major battlegrounds in a shift towards greater individual rights, where expectations of privacy and fair use clash with ubiquitous sensors and data-hungry optimised services.

Amid the clamour for ‘smart’ new urban infrastructure, from connected lampposts and bins to camera-enabled phone boxes, a And how do we ensure that its generation and use does not result in discrimination, exclusion and the erosion of privacy for citizens?

While these new sources of data have the potential to deliver significant gains, they also give public institutions – and the technology companies who help install smart city infrastructure – access to vast quantities of highly detailed information about local residents.

A major criticism has been a lack of clear oversight of decisions to collect data in public spaces. US cities have deployed controversial police technologies such as facial recognition without elected officials, let alone the public, being adequately informed beforehand – something which academic Catherine Crump has described as “surveillance policymaking by procurement”.

Meanwhile the digital economy has flourished around urban centres, with new digital platforms creating rich trails of information about our daily habits, journeys and sentiments. Governments often work with app-developers like Waze, Strava and Uber to benefit from these new sources of data. But practical options for doing so in a truly consent-driven way – that is, not simply relying on companies’ long T&Cs – remain few and far between. There’s no simple way to opt-in or -out of the smart city.

Given the increasing tension between increasing ‘smartness’ on the one hand, and expectations of privacy and fair data use on the other, how can city governments respond? In Nesta’s new report, written as part of our involvement with a major EU Horizon 2020 project called DECODE, we looked at a handful of city governments that are pioneering new policies and services to enhance digital rights locally, and give people more control over personal data.

City governments such as Seattle are improving accountability by appointing designated roles for privacy in local government, including both senior leadership positions and departmental ‘Privacy Champions’. The city’s approach is also notable for its strong emphasis on public engagement. Prior to the approval of any new surveillance technology, relevant departments must host public meetings and invite feedback via an online tool on the council’s website.

Elsewhere cities are becoming test-beds for new technologies that minimise unnecessary data collection and boost citizen anonymity. Transport for New South Wales, Australia, collaborated with researchers to release open data about citizens’ use of Sydney’s public transport network using a mathematical technique called differential privacy – a method which makes it difficult to identify individuals by adding random ‘noise’ to a dataset.

Other experiments put more control into the hands of individuals. Amsterdam is testing a platform that allows local residents to be “authenticated but anonymous”. The system, known as Attribute-Based Credentials, lets people collect simple and discrete ‘attributes’ about themselves in an app (like “I am over 18”), which they can use to verify themselves on local government services without revealing any more personal information than absolutely necessary.

Not all the policy measures we came across are about privacy and anti-surveillance. Local governments like Barcelona are fundamentally rethinking their approach to digital information in the city – conceiving of data as a new kind of common good.

In practical terms, the council is creating user-friendly ‘data commons dashboards’ that allow citizens to collect and visualise data, for example about environmental or noise pollution in their neighbourhoods. People can use the online tools to share information about their community directly with the council, and on their own terms: they decide the level of anonymity, for instance.

Local authorities are more nimble, and in a better position to test and develop new technologies directly with local residents, than other levels of government. As the tides in the personal data economy shift, it will be cities that are the real drivers of change, setting new ethical standards from below, and experimenting with new services that give more control over data to the people.

Theo Bass is a researcher in government innovation at the innovation charity Nesta.

Photo by Cerillion

The post Essay of the day: Data by the people, for the people: why it’s time for councils to reclaim the smart city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At the end of October, I wrote an article entitled “Evgeny Morozov and personal data as public domain” .
I got a lot of feedback, including from people who had never heard about these kinds of theories, trying to break with the individualistic or “personalist”  approach based on the current law about the protection of personal data, to think/rethink about its collective dimension.

Actually, there are many theories which, I think, can be divided into four groups, as I tried to show with the mindmap below (click image for full mindmap).

Click image to view full mindmap

The four groups of theories are as follows (some make a direct link between personal data and commons, while others establish an indirect link):

• Free software theories (indirect link): personal data are not directly connected with common goods, but digital commons should be developed (particularly free software) in order to regain control of them. Furthermore, we must go back to a decentralised framework of the web and encourage a service-based economy if we want the Internet to be preserved as a common good, to prevent abuses of personal data and to limit the ascendance of state supervision.
• Collectivist theories (indirect link): personal data are not directly connected with common goods, but we have to allow people to pool and share them safely or to implement collective actions in order to defend individual rights (class action lawsuits, specific unionism, etc.).
• Commoners theories (direct link): the legitimate status of personal data has to be changed to secure its collective dimension and recognize it as a common good (for example, grant a common good status to “social graph” or “network of related data”). This will make it possible to rethink the governance of personal data as a “bundle of rights”.
• Public sphere theories (direct link): the legal status of personal data has to be changed to recognize its nature as a public good. This will enable states to weigh on digital platforms, particularly by submitting them to new forms of taxation, or by creating public organizations to enhance collective control of data.

I tried to make sub-divisions for each of those four theories and to give concrete examples. If you’d like more information, you’ll find links at the end of every “branch”.

I’m not saying this typology is perfect, but it has allowed me to better apprehend the small differences between the various positions. It can be noted that some of the authors appear in different theories, which proves that they are compatible or complementary.

Personally, I tend to be part of the commoners’ family, as I have already said in this blog.

Feel free to comment if you think of more examples for this map or if you think this typology could be improved in any way.

Photo by Sarah @ pingsandneedles

The post Personal data and commons: a mapping of current theories appeared first on P2P Foundation.

originally posted on the blog of Aral Balkan

18 Feb, 2017 Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto outlines his vision for a centralised global colony ruled by the Silicon Valley oligarchy. I say we must do the exact opposite and create a world with individual sovereignty and a healthy commons.

Mark Zuckerberg has released a manifesto titled Building Global Community in which he details how he – one of the top 8 billionaires in the world – and his byzantine American/multinational corporation, Facebook Incorporated, are going to solve all of the world’s problems.

In his grand vision for humanity, Mark keeps returning to how Facebook fundamentally “brings us closer together” by “connecting friends and families.” What Mark fails to mention is that Facebook does not connect people together; Facebook connects people to Facebook, Inc.

Facebook: the myth
Mark wants you to think Facebook connects you to each other.

Facebook: the reality
Facebook connects you to Facebook, Inc.

Facebook’s business model is to be the man in the middle; to track every move you, your family, and your friends make, to store all that information indefinitely, and continuously analyse it to understand you better in order to exploit you by manipulating you for financial and political gain.

Facebook isn’t a social network, it is a scanner that digitises human beings. It is, for all intents and purposes, the camera that captures your soul. Facebook’s business is to simulate you and to own and control your simulation, thereby owning and controlling you.

Where Mark asks you to trust him to be a benevolent king, I say let us build a world without kings.

I call the business model of Facebook, Google, and the venture-capital-funded long tail of Silicon Valley startups “people farming”. Facebook is a factory farm for human beings. And Mark’s manifesto is nothing more than a panicked billionaire’s latest sophomoric attempt to decorate an unpalatable business model grounded in the abuse of human rights with faux moral purpose to stave off regulation and justify what is unabashedly a colonial desire: to create a global fiefdom by connecting all of us to Facebook, Inc.

Avoiding a Global Colony

Mark’s manifesto isn’t about building a global community, it is about building a global colony – with himself as king and with his corporation and the Silicon Valley oligarchy as the court.

Facebook wants us to think that it is a park when it’s actually a shopping mall.

It is not the job of a corporation to “develop the social infrastructure for community” as Mark wants to do. Social infrastructure must belong to the commons, not to giant monopolistic corporations like Facebook. The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.

Facebook wants us to think that it is a park when it’s actually a shopping mall. The last thing we need is more privately owned centralised digital infrastructure to solve the problems created by an unprecedented concentration of power, wealth, and control in a tiny number of hands. It’s way past time we started funding and building the digital equivalents of parks in the digital age instead of building ever-larger shopping malls.

Others have written detailed critiques of Mark’s manifesto. I will not repeat their efforts here. Instead, I want to focus on how we can build a world that stands in stark contrast to the one in Mark’s vision. A world in which we – individuals – instead of corporations, have ownership and control of our selves. In other words, where we have individual sovereignty.

Where Mark asks you to trust him to be a benevolent king, I say let us build a world without kings. Where Mark’s vision is rooted in colonialism and the perpetuation of centralised power and control, mine is based on individual sovereignty and a healthy, distributed commons.

Individual Sovereignty and the Cyborg Self

We can no longer afford the luxury of not understanding the nature of the self in the digital age. The very existence of our freedoms and democracy depend on it.

We are (and we have been for a while now) cyborgs.

We must resist any attempt to reduce people to property with the greatest of fervour.

In that, I don’t mean to conjure up the stereotypical representation of cyborgs as prevalent in science fiction wherein technology is implanted within biological tissue. Instead, I offer a more general definition in which the term applies to any extension of our minds and our biological selves using technology. While technological implants are certainly feasible, possible, and demonstrable, the main way in which we extend ourselves with technology today is not through implants but explants.

We are sharded beings; the sum total of our various aspects as contained within our biological beings as well as the myriad of technologies that we use to extend our biological abilities.

We must constitutionally protect the dignity and sanctity of the extended self.

Once we understand this, it follows that we must extend the protections of the self beyond our biological borders to encompass those technologies by which we extend our selves. Wherefore, any attempt to own, control, and trade in these technologies by third parties is an attempt to own, control, and trade in the constitutional elements of people. It is, in short, an attempt to own, control, and trade in people.

Needless to say, we must resist any attempt to reduce people to property with the greatest of fervour. For to not do so is to give our tacit consent to a new slavery: one in which we do not trade in the biological aspects of human beings but their digital aspects. The two, of course, do not exist apart and are not truly separable when manipulation of one necessarily affects the other.

Beyond Surveillance Capitalism

Once we understand that our relationship to technology is not one of master/butler but cyborg/organ; once we understand that we extend our selves with technology and that our technology and data lie within the boundaries of the self, then we must insist that the constitutional protections of the self that we have enshrined within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and implemented within our myriad of national laws are extended to protect the cyborg self.

It also follows, then, that any attempt to violate the boundaries of the self must be considered an assault on the cyborg self. It is exactly this abuse that constitutes the everyday business model of Facebook, Google, and mainstream Silicon Valley-inspired technology today. In this model, which Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, what we have lost is individual sovereignty. People have once again become property – albeit in digital, not biological, form.

To counter this, we must build new infrastructure to enable people to regain individual sovereignty. Those aspects of the infrastructure that concern the world around us must belong to the commons and those parts that concern people – that make up the organs of our cyborg selves – must be owned and controlled by individuals.

So, for example, smart city architecture must be in the commons and data about the world around us (“data about rocks”) must belong to the commons, while your smart car, smart phone, smart watch, smart teddy bear, etc., and the data they collect (“data about people”) must belong to you.

An Internet of people

Imagine a world where everyone has their own space on the Internet, funded from the commons. This is a private space (an organ of the cyborg self) that all our so-called smart devices (also organs) link into.

Instead of thinking of this space as a personal cloud, we must consider it a special, permanent node within a peer-to-peer structure wherein all our various devices (organs) connect to one another. Pragmatically, this permanent node is used to guarantee findability (initially using domain names) and availability (as it is hosted/always on) as we transition from the client/server architecture of the current Web to the peer-to-peer architecture of the next generation Internet.

An Internet of people.

The infrastructure we build must be funded from the commons, belong to the commons, and be interoperable. The services themselves must be constructed and hosted by a plethora of individual organisations – not governments or corporate behemoths – working with interoperable protocols and competing to provide the best service possible to the people they serve. Not coincidentally, this severely limited scope of corporate function marks the entirety of a corporation’s role within a democracy as I see it.

The sole purpose of a corporation should be to compete with other organisations to provide the best service to the people it serves. This is in stark contrast to the wide remit corporations have today to attract people (whom they call “users”) under false pretences (free services wherein they are the product being sold) only to addict them, entrap them with lock-in using proprietary technology, farm them, manipulate their behaviour, and exploit them for financial and political gain.

In the corporatocracy of today, we – individuals – serve corporations. In the democracy of tomorrow, corporations must serve us.

The service providers must, of course, be free to extend the capabilities of the system as long as they share their improvements back into the commons (“share alike”), thus avoiding lock-in. For providing services above and beyond the core services funded from the commons, individual organisations may set prices for and charge for value-added services. In this way, we can build a healthy economy of competition on top of an ethically sound core instead of the system of monopolies we have today on top of an ethically rotten core. And we can do so without embroiling the whole system in convoluted government bureaucracy that would stifle experimentation, competition, and the organic, decentralised evolution of the system.

A healthy economy built upon an ethical core.

Interoperability, free (as in freedom) technology with “share alike” licenses, a peer-to-peer architecture (as opposed to client/server), and a commons-funded core are the fundamental safeguards for preventing this new system from decaying into a new version of the monopolistic surveillance web we have today. They are how we avoid economies of scale and break the feedback loop between the accumulation of information and wealth that is the core driver of surveillance capitalism.

To be perfectly clear, we are not talking about a system that can flourish under the dictates of late-stage surveillance capitalism. It is a system, however, that can be constructed under present conditions to act as the bridge from that status quo to a sustainable, post-capitalist world.

Building the world you want to live in

In a talk I gave at a European Commission event in Rome recently, I told the audience that we must “build the world we want to live in.” For me, that is not a world owned and controlled by a handful of Silicon Valley oligarchs. It is a world with a healthy commons wherein we – as a community – collectively own and control those aspects of our existence that belong to us all and where we – as individuals – individually own and control those aspects of our existence that belong to our selves.

Imagine a world where you (and those you love) have democratic agency; where we all enjoy basic welfare, rights, and freedoms befitting cyborg dignity. Imagine a sustainable world freed of the destructive short-term greed of capitalism where we no longer reward sociopaths for finding ever more ruthless and destructive ways to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. Imagine a free world removed from the feedback loop of manufactured fear and ubiquitous surveillance that has us spiralling deeper into a fresh vortex of fascism. Imagine a world where we grant ourselves the mercy of an intellectually rewarding existence where we are free to explore the potential of our species among the stars.

That is the world that I wake up every day to work towards. Not because it is charitable. Not because I’m a philanthropist. In fact, for no reason at all other than because that is the world that I want to live in.

Aral Balkan is an activist, designer, and developer. He’s 1/3 of Ind.ie, a tiny social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age.

The post Encouraging individual sovereignty and a healthy commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Photo by FaceMePLS

One organization, Trackography, has created tools to expose the big data operations tracking you online. Even better, Trackography’s companion project, My Shadow, helps ordinary people control their own data.

Extracted from https://myshadow.org/trackography

What is online tracking?

Have you ever read a newspaper and noticed a stranger reading it over your shoulder? Reading the news online is like having Google, Facebook, or Twitter doing the same thing. Known as “third party trackers”, these companies collect data about who you are, what you’re reading and what you’re interested in, usually without you ever knowing it.

What is Trackography?

Trackography is an open source project of Tactical Tech that aims to increase transparency about the online data industry by illustrating who tracks us online and where our data travels to when we access websites. In particular, Trackography shows:

• the companies that track us
• the countries which host the servers of the websites we access
• the countries which host the servers of tracking companies
• the countries which host the network infrastructure required to reach the servers of websites and tracking companies
• information about how some of the “globally prevailing tracking companies” handle our data based on their privacy policies.

Extracted from https://myshadow.org/self-doxing-exploring-you-visible-data-traces

Self-doxing: exploring your visible data traces

Taking a deeper look at your visible online footprint can be a first step toward taking more control over your data and managing your online identity/identities

Most of us have probably searched our own name at some point. But search engines don’t pick up everything. Investigating yourself on the internet is also known as ‘self-doxing’, and it can be a very useful way to see what’s already out there about you, and make decisions for the future

Once you’ve doxed yourself, take a critical look at the data, think about what a stranger may be able to figure out with just a little effort. You might want to keep certain things private or separate your online identities.

Extracted from https://myshadow.org/trace-my-shadow

Trace My Shadow

Trace my shadow is a tool that allows you to get a glimpse into the digital traces you’re leaving – how many, what kinds, and from what devices.

Start by selecting the device and services that you use. See how many traces you leave and what you can do take control of you traces.

The post Project Of The Day: Trackography appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A very recent, stirring essay, written by Jérémie Zimmermann, co founder of Quadrature du la Net and originally published in Mediapart.

“Fortunately, Edward Snowden also showed us a pathway out. Governments can maybe made accountable, and mass surveillance can surely be evaded, and made much more costly. By moving away from technology that controls us, we can use, promote and develop technology that makes us more free. It is a long path, requiring efforts, to break away with the habits and the blind trust we placed in the Machine, and requiring an appropriation of technology by everyone. Through the use of free software, decentralized architectures and end-to-end encryption, we can –probably– take back control of the Machine.”

One year ago, Edward Snowden’s revelations make us learn and understand how our relationship to technology has changed forever, and how the trust we place in machines shall never be the same. Edward Snowden also shows us a path for taking back control of the machines, an urgent task that no one today can ignore. By Jéremie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.

© Caption by Terminator Studies

One year ago day by day, a courageous young man named Edward Snowden sacrificed most of his life and his freedoms to show us the crude reality of the world we are living in. His ongoing revelations make us learn and understand how our relationship to technology has changed forever, and how the trust we place in machines shall never be the same. Edward Snowden also shows us a path for taking back control of the machines, an urgent task that no one today can ignore.

We live already in the era of the Cyborg. Our Humanities are practically indistinct from the Machine. Functions of our bodies such as communicating, remembering, recognizing each other, our personal and shared memories and most of our works are now indivisible from the functions of the machines.

Computers, phones and servers are all interconnected through software and communication networks. This global interconnected Machine is increasingly merging with our global interconnected humanity – soon on faces, wrists and under the skin – and so far most of us trusted it with about everything.

Yet in the era of the Cyborg, what we see thanks to Ed Snowden is that this global Machine has been turned as a whole against us. It has been turned as a tool for global surveillance and for control of individuals, at the cost of massive violations of our fundamental rights. With many abuses already demonstrated, the Machine bears an immense, horrendous, potential for abuse and repression, from political to economic espionage. Any political movement, any revolution, any idea could potentially be crushed in a snap.

The Machine as a whole has been repurposed. From obeying us, its users, its owners, it has been reprogrammed to obey its real masters, comprised of an ill-defined alliance of some of the biggest companies in the world such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, of unaccountable spying agencies such as the NSA, GHCQ or the DGSE, and of thousands of their private or public partners (among which a myriad of private contractors and at least 950.000 US citizens cleared with a Top Secret clearance).

Many of us still find more comfortable to ignore the truth than to change their habits. Perhaps truth is so violent and scary that it becomes too difficult to admit. Perhaps the gap between reality and comfortable illusions is too big.

Still, we have an immense responsibility to ask ourselves questions that will shape the future of our societies, our relationship to power, as well as our relationships between individuals. Where is the boundary between our humanities and the Machine? Did we consciously accept it as it is? How can we take back control of that Machine, which is now part of ourselves?

What is at stake is the very definition of our humanities. For massive surveillance implies violation and potential annihilation of our intimacies, these spaces where we decide, in full trust –alone or with others– to be truly ourselves, to experiment with ourselves, to develop new ideas and theories, to write, sing and create. In these spaces we develop our identities, our very definitions of who we are…

Fortunately, Edward Snowden also showed us a pathway out. Governments can maybe made accountable, and mass surveillance can surely be evaded, and made much more costly. By moving away from technology that controls us, we can use, promote and develop technology that makes us more free. It is a long path, requiring efforts, to break away with the habits and the blind trust we placed in the Machine, and requiring an appropriation of technology by everyone. Through the use of free software, decentralized architectures and end-to-end encryption, we can –probably– take back control of the Machine.

It is our duty as a civilisation and as individuals. We must fight this Machine of oppression by all means, before it is too late, in order to reconquer and reclaim our humanity.

The post Essay of the day: Snowden, the Terminator, and Us appeared first on P2P Foundation.