
The Internet Must Change – Start with the Data - peter_d_sherman
https://shift.newco.co/2019/01/28/the-internet-must-change-to-get-there-start-with-the-data/
======
ergl
This proposal, like many others, tries to make the "information wants to be
free" meme a reality by making data "about us" a commodity that can be
purchased and sold in the market.

But it misses the important question of why we, in the first place, are
allowing personal and behavioural data to be a commodity. It's not, and should
not be: not everything needs to be a good to be traded, in the same sense that
we have decided that you can't trade ownership of a person in the free market.

~~~
ScottFree
> [personal data is] not, and should not be [a commodity]

I'm dubious that banning the sale of personal information is going to have a
huge impact. Google and Facebook already violate laws as they please with the
knowledge that they'll have to pay the fine. They seem to be ok with that
arrangement.

From a technical perspective, I don't think it's even possible to prevent the
collection and use of personal data. I like the idea behind Tim Berners-Lee's
Solid[0], but it suffers from the same flaw as video game copy protection and
movie DRM. At some point, you have to decrypt the data and let a webapp have
access to it. The only way to avoid that would be to go all the way back to
using native apps for everything and ditch the web altogether.

[0]: [https://solid.inrupt.com/how-it-works](https://solid.inrupt.com/how-it-
works)

------
tannhaeuser
Rather than pave the way for the data economy, we could ask who's benefitting,
and if we indeed want to buy into a naive/dystopic future that just creates
data monopolies and wealth for very few, to the detriment of eg established
retail, ad, media, finance, telco industries.

------
peter_d_sherman
Disclaimer: I am neither for nor against anything which might be explicitly
stated or implicitly implied by this article, I merely thought it had an
intereesting intellectual character, and thus it was worthy of a HN Post...

I'm guessing that points made by this article may be hotly debated by the HN
Community... which is healthy...

