Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”
I'd like to think I'm one of the good guys here. I was one of the inventors of RSS and Atom and worked to push open content and social media.I started a social data search platform named Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which is basically a petabyte-scale content indexing engine.We provide API feeds to search engines and social media analytics companies needing bulk data but don't want to have to build a crawler.For the last 5 years we've had major problems with customers coming to us asking for data which we felt was unethical (at best).We actually had Saudi Arabia approach us... It was clear that they were intending to something pretty evil with the data.Their RFP questions were a bit frightening:- can you track people by religion?- can you give us their email address?- can you provide their address?- can your provide their ethnicity?- can you provide their social connections?We're actually losing business to other companies that are performing highly unethical and probably illegal techniques.We just can't compete with data at that type of fidelity.If you're a researcher and you want to access bulk data for combating this type of non-sense WE WILL PROVIDE DATA AT COST.  We can provide up to 1PB of data but for now we have to charge for the shipping and handling of that data. We're reaching out to some other companies like Google and also the Internet Archive to see if we can provide more cost effective solutions.I'm working on more tools to give the power back to the users.Polar (https://getpolarized.io/) is a web browser which allows people to control their own data.  The idea is that I can keep a local repository of data and eventually build our own cloud platform based on open systems like IPFS and encrypt the data using group encryption.