Happy Hour for Datavists™

By Sabine Seymour 

Before we get to the fun bits of describing how to make money with your data, I’ll tell you about my journey that led me to create a new data economy – and to write a book about it as an economist and technologist: Notes from a Social Datavist™. For the past 25 years, I have focused on the intersection between technology and science around the body in my capacity as an entrepreneur, professor and investor in the USA and Europe. AFK I’m a serious athlete. My interest in sports led me to found SUPA, a way to democratise healthcare data and pay people for access to their lifestyle data for healthcare and sports applications. Being Austrian-born but having lived most of my adult life in the USA, I had this crazy idea of using decentralised technology to build a data co-operative model. So, in May 2018 I moved back to Europe – a move that coincided with the advent of GDPR – to set up SUPA as a data co-operative model. In short, order was introduced to Polypoly in the autumn of 2019.

As a result, I’m now vice-chairperson of the Polypoly Co-operative and managing director of its first subsidiary in Austria. The economist in me had always been searching for a data economy of scale where individual users were equal partners rather than collateral damage. And the technologist in me had been looking for a viable solution that played to the Internet’s original, decentralised strengths. Again and again, I kept running into the same problem, the behemoth of all data behemoths: data monopolies. 

If you put a pie-eating contest together with the fine print of a second mortgage, you’d get a data monopoly. The pie (read: your privacy) disappears at an alarming rate; the fine print (read: their privacy policy) is intended to stupefy. It’s a marriage made in grift heaven. But personal privacy isn’t the only victim. Let’s make a quick count of the fallen. The central offer of most data monopolies is a so-called ‘free service’. With Google it’s search or email; with social media platforms like Facebook, it’s a free account. And just as the saying goes, ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’, there’s no such thing as a free service. We pay individually and collectively.

Data monopolies can extract profits from user data without paying a fair market value. This disproportionate economic power can be leveraged into political power. The ability of Facebook, for instance, to affect political outcomes is staggering. Brexit and the 2016 American elections are cases in point. The social media giant was fully aware that Cambridge Analytica had hoovered up user data in an effort to rig the system. While publicly feigning ignorance – and privately being fully aware – Facebook accepted millions of dollars in advertising revenue. It’s not for no reason that data monopolies are being challenged in the European Union and United States with anti-trust legislation. The stakes are too high to be ignored. 

For every known virus, there’s a vaccine or one under development. It’s important to consider how the data contagion caused by monopolies can be neutralised. The first step is to recognise that we have a problem, which in fact many have already realised. Streaming services such as Netflix are showing documentaries like The Great Hack and The Social Dilemma. Data privacy – once the domain of legal scholars and academics – has gone mainstream. But what is not so apparent is how we can go about solving the problem. Anti-trust actions can only go so far. For the sake of argument, let’s say the United States Senate decided to break Google into smaller pieces to create a fairer market. We would then have a constellation of data scrapers doing more or less the same thing.The missing piece is the Internet itself. We are living in the death throes of Web 2.0, a term coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999 http://darcyd.com/fragmented_future.pdf. It broadly connotes a social web where content has been produced by users on centralised cloud services. This vision has been challenged by World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee.

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