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| Your real digital future, don't kid yourself. |
"I am who I am today because of the choices i made yesterday" - Eleanor Roosevelt
Should one’s past be held
against you for the rest of your life, and beyond, or should you be allowed to
retreat into obscurity? This debate is a fascinating example of how far removed
most commentators, legislators and regulators are from the technology which is
driving the question in the first place. From the usual points of view this is
being driven by people who don’t want youthful and trivial discretions to be
held against people thirty years later. This is partially a red herring, there
will always be finger prints of past actions available, in the decades and
centuries before the internet it was called a reputation and no one was taken
seriously without one, for good or bad. What this particular legislative demand
is about isn’t the right to be forgotten, it’s about wanting to edit your past,
to edit your online reputation to remove the sleazy bits. Now various people
will champ at the bit and state that the right to correct errors is vital. But who
chooses what is an error and who chooses to edit it? the moment you open that
particular Pandora’s box a world of nasties can explode from political figures
editing their pasts to criminals attempting to slide away from the consequences
of their actions.
There is a fascinating adjunct to this debate, that it’s already happening.
But to me this whole arena is just a side show to the main event
and this is a lot more important and worrisome. In the end a few snippets of
unstructured data about me, or you, in photo or article form aren’t that
important to 99.9% of the population. The automatic collection of gigabytes of
structured data about you every day should be important to all of us. Especially
as that data is increasingly used to support automatic decision making about
you and the opportunities presented to you. From your credit and loyalty card
data to the once a second location trace from your mobile phone provider you
are a comprehensive data entity and that data is for sale. Everything you do,
watch, interact with and explore is recorded in exhaustive detail. Sure, some of
it may be anonymised data or even data with no identifier at all, but that is a
tiny fig leaf if that data can be combined with explicitly personal data and
the correlations teased out by cheap processor costs.
This data is being used to support decision making on a vast
scale, from which offers I'm presented with at the online supermarket to how
much my motor and life insurance coverage will cost. My access to government
services and even major life decisions are being made based on data sets which
are not accessible to the mark 1 eyeball. This data set and the analytics which
can be applied to it will reach further and further into your life. Next stop:
which articles are presented to you on your eNewsPaper, which adverts you see
on your IPTV. Soon which drugs you’ll get at hospital and how much your health
insurance will cost. After that; dynamic, interactive, fractional and nano duration contracts
which will automatically determine how your life and relationships with banks, service
providers and even the government are conceivable. How much you are worth as a
person, what you can do, determined by datasets. Your only defence? Make the
data and the analytics personal and accessible.
You
don’t have a right to be forgotten.
It’s impossible as well as being shady from an ethical and moral
point of view. You don’t own the data about you, the thing that recorded it or
where you chose to put it owns it.
You
should have a right to accuracy and to clarity.
Your data should be accurate. Any failings in how it was collected
or processed must be as accessible as the data about you and you should be
aware of pathways to correct that data if it’s wrong. Any decisions made on
your data must clearly state their methodology so that you can check the
validity of their outcomes. This should be part of your decision making as to
who and what you interact with.
You
should have the right to be aware of the value of your data.
Your data is valuable, the free stuff you throw onto Facebook is
worth at least $125 to them. How much is your credit card data worth? Your loyalty
card information? Are you being properly reimbursed for sharing data and when
that sharing is enforced or mandatory are they taking proper care of it. Again
that value should be stated and form part of your decision making.
In the end a few pictures of me drunk, semi naked wearing a tea
cosy with a busty blonde called Helen circa 1990* don’t mean very much to anyone in the long
run. Your past and opinions are yours, have the courage to stand by them and be
able to explain them. If you can’t then you won’t earn the last new information
right.
You should have the right to be forgiven.
It’s not just you whose youthful idiocy is open to search and retrieval,
it’s all of us, it’s him. It’s her. it’s them. We’re all at the same risk. Time
perhaps for us collectively to refrain from obsessively researching for personal data to support our personal interactions since
unless you lived in a cave in the hills we’ve all done things we’re not especially
proud of and don’t reflect on who we are now. If you did live in a cave in the hills do you really want people to know how weird that makes you?
* I’ll leave you with that lovely mental image, I'm generous like
that.
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