What does it mean for users to be in full control over their data [pdf]
This strikes me as a well-meaning project which has utterly misconceived both the source of the problem, and its solution.<p>Apologies for length.  I&#x27;m thinking that privacy solutions need their own version of the &quot;why your anti-spam idea won&#x27;t work&quot; checklist, which would be shorter...<p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trog.qgl.org&#x2F;20081217&#x2F;the-why-your-anti-spam-idea-wont-work-checklist&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trog.qgl.org&#x2F;20081217&#x2F;the-why-your-anti-spam-idea-wo...</a>&gt;<p>I&#x27;ve written a bit on the hierarchy of failure, or reversing the sign, the requisite success chain, in problem resolution:<p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2fsr0g&#x2F;hierarchy_of_failures_in_problem_resolution&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2fsr0g&#x2F;hierarc...</a>&gt;<p>Schluss fails at stages 2 &amp; 3 (diagnosis and etiology), fails to clearly define  4 (objective), and embarks on &quot;garbage can theory&quot; solutionism in 5 (redress), a&#x2F;k&#x2F;a &quot;when you have a hammer, every problem is a nail&quot;.  Specifically Schluss is applying techno-solutionism to a problem which, whilst it has a technical <i>component</i> is fundamentally grounded in commerce, law, and risk.  Given these foundational failings, I&#x27;m confident in predicting that Schluss will fail in its (poorly-formed and poorly-communicated) objectives entirely.  I say this with absolutely no joy.<p>Furthermore, Schluss&#x27;s proposed solution fails <i>because data simply don&#x27;t work that way</i>.  The <i>way</i> information works is through records and transmission, where a record preserves a transmission and a transmission reads from and&#x2F;or generates a record.  The notion that a single canonical data store assures that <i>by technical means alone</i> further stores and transmissions don&#x27;t happen evidences a grievous failure to grasp the problem.<p>I&#x27;ve compiled a set of <i>early</i> concerns (largely pre-1980) expressed over computerised data, which are recommended reading.  In particular I point to the works of Paul Baran written whilst at RAND in the 1960s.  For those unaware, Baran is one of the co-inventors of packet-switched data routing, an essential foundation of today&#x27;s Internet.<p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rand.org&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;authors&#x2F;b&#x2F;baran_paul.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rand.org&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;authors&#x2F;b&#x2F;baran_paul.html</a>&gt;<p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;diaspora.glasswings.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;bf4f5f10f6120138799c002590d8e506" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;diaspora.glasswings.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;bf4f5f10f6120138799c00...</a>&gt;<p>Today&#x27;s extraordinarily invasive data-surveillance regime, in both its surveillance state and surveillance capitalism instantiations, arises from a set of factors:<p>- Data storage is cheap and immense.  Total data storage has been doubling every few years (2--4 by a quick search), <i>and has been for decades, dating to at least the 1960s</i>.[1]  Significant thresholds were crossed in the early 2000s when disk (&quot;spinning rust&quot;) storage crossed the 1 GB threshold, with the emergence of SSD storage after about 2010, and with the increasing prevalence of multi-GB <i>RAM</i> storage, with 24 TiB presently among the highest-memory tiers available on Amazon AWS.  Your Humble Correspondent recalls working on a shared-compute resource in the early 1990s with a score and a half other analysts which had an <i>aggregate</i> storage of about 2 GB, for a mid-sized data-heavy corporation.<p>- Legal theories, most especially &quot;Third Party Doctrine&quot; in the US, which holds that &quot;people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have &#x27;no reasonable expectation of privacy&#x27; in that information.&quot; &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Third-party_doctrine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Third-party_doctrine</a>&gt;[2].  Given the practical impossibility of conducting a normal life without use of such services, the doctrine effectively establishes a national surveillance apparatus and abrogates Constitutional guarantees of privacy.[3]<p>- A compelling commercial case.  There are critics of surveillance capitalism&#x27;s actual effectiveness, notably Cory Doctorow.[4]  His case boils down to 1) influences are at best marginal and 2) it&#x27;s a grift, mostly against advertisers.  To which I respond that margins matter and advertising is an $800 billion global industry, costing roughly $100 per head, most of which is actually allocated to the 1 billion richest people on Earth, so if you&#x27;re reading this figure your &quot;free Internet&quot; (and television, radio, and legacy print media) are costing you $800 per year, for each member of your household.  Free ain&#x27;t cheap.  And it&#x27;s remarkably corrosive in terms of privacy, manipulation, dark UI&#x2F;UX patterns, and shitty, shitty content.<p>- Legally-permitted data exchange.  Data-based credit risk assessment dates to the dawn of modern banking (a fuzzy line, as are most, but let&#x27;s posit 12th century Italy), with currently extant firms such as Dun &amp; Bradstreet tracing their origins to the early 19th century.[5]  Practices such as ethnic, religious, racial, and &quot;old-boy&quot; network profiling led to outcomes such as redlining (mentioned by Baran in his writings, again, highly recommended).  Modern data-based predictions utilising machine learning result in what Cathy O&#x27;Neil has colourfully termed &quot;weapons of math destruction&quot; in her book of the same name.[6]<p>- Effectively no liability for misuse, leakage, or exfiltration of data.  I&#x27;ve long since stopped tracking major commercial data breaches.  I strongly suspect Wikipedia&#x27;s list is grossly incomplete.[7]  The modern corporation is a liability-externalising engine, and there are few liabilities more effectively externalised than data loss, and its various fellow travelers of fraud, &quot;identity theft&quot; (that is:  fraud), phishing (that is, fraud), impersonation (that is:  fraud), social engineering (that is:  fraud), and ... well, more fraud.  Defences and consequences are pushed to the individual, precisely the level at which they are both most damaging and least-effectively addressed.<p><i>IF</i> we are going to tackle this problem, <i>THEN</i> these underlying foundations must be attacked.<p>Data exchange must be greatly limited.  Whilst data are cheap individually, <i>large scale data aggregation does remain expensive</i>, and if not justifiable based on commercial value, it will cease.<p>Liability for unauthorised disclosure and abuse must be entirely revised.  &quot;Data are liability&quot; has been my own watchword for much of the past decade.  Legally it has far less validity than I&#x27;d like.<p>Practices based on data aggregation must be both closely regulated <i>and</i> highly taxed.  The taxes serve <i>both</i> to reduce the profitability of such businesses, <i>and</i> to provide an additional legal tool for prosecution against offenders.  The old saw about Al Capone stands.[8]<p>Individuals must be granted strong legal protections to correct, or remove, data <i>absent a compelling public interest in that data being available.  I&#x27;m well aware that this sets up a conflict between privacy and free speech rights.  Those are inherent and unavoidable, the question is where one finds a balance.[9]<p>I also hold that </i>privacy is an emergent response to changes in informational landscapes and increased capacities in capture, storage, transmission, and processing<i>.  As such, evolution of privacy follows rather than leads such technologies, it is </i>inherently* reactive, no preemptive.  I&#x27;m not aware of an explicit similar statement from others though Jeffrey Rosen&#x27;s <i>The Unwanted Gaze</i>, much of the work of Daniel J. Solove and Helen Nissenbaum have struck me as above par. Harvard historian Jill Lepore has an excellent biography:  &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.harvard.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;jlepore&#x2F;files&#x2F;lepore_secrecy_bibliography.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.harvard.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;jlepore&#x2F;files&#x2F;lepore_secre...</a>&gt; (PDF).<p>Above all:  Privacy is fundamentally the ability to define <i>and</i> enforce limits on information disclosure.  Approaches to improving it must account for both elements.  Schluss&#x27;s proposal by contrast fails both.