A window of opportunity for data democracy

One of the unanticipated consequences of digitization has been data feudalism. A major reason data feudalism was such a surprise was that society just didn’t anticipate how quickly online services could scale, or how quickly power would shift as more and more users spent more and more time online. Another surprise was how quickly the services they used would take advantage of the narrow window of opportunity that opened during the 2000s and 2010s to control and harness user data. Governments, caught flat footed, have yet to respond effectively to this development.

Beginning in the 2000s, the world saw tremendous growth in social networking services. With the commoditization of and improvements in distributed compute, networking and storage, each successful social network could scale out to serve hundreds of millions or even billions of users.

Owners of the controlling shares of such a burgeoning service became de facto lords and ladies of the manor. Through the 2010s to the present, the data farm surrounding each manor produced a more and more bountiful harvest with each succeeding year.

The contract users agreed to assigned provider’s rights to a continual stream of data each user was generating. In this way, each provider collected a tax of sorts in exchange for a service that was otherwise “free.” The tax was your data harvested from the provider’s data farm.

Those who signed up were presented with a choice: agree to the providers’ terms, or don’t. Those who didn’t stayed disconnected from the rich online communities that emerged.

Those who signed up (as most did) became passive data serfs of a sort. Each data serf helps seed, nurture, harvest and enrich the data from the farms surrounding these online manors. Meanwhile, each provider harvesting a user’s data maintained and interconnected it with others’ data–within the provider’s own data infrastructure. The power of most networked data is therefore now in the hands of the data gentry.

The laws enacted within the past five years to try to protect personal data–the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GPDR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) being examples–are well intentioned.

But data protection in the current IT environment is a Sisyphean task. Enterprise architectures have been designed to collect and strand data in silos, trap logic in applications, and encourage the creation of more and more silos. (See Dave McComb’s book Software Wasteland for a full exploration of how current app-centric architectures fail.)

As an unknown Scot from a past century observed, possession is nine-tenths of the law.