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Hannes Grassegger contemplates the themes of Big Data and the price of free in this essay (and his book). Probably most of that will be familiar to fellow Soylentils but I think it made a surprisingly refreshing read anyways. Now would be a great time to cut the cord, stop feeding the monsters.
Privacy. Transparency. Surveillance. Security gap. I can’t stand to hear the words anymore. They simply downplay a radical new condition: We no longer own ourselves.
You want proof? If personal data is the oil of the 21st century—a commodity companies pay billions of dollars for—then why aren’t we, the source of such data, the oil sheiks?
This new oil, this content, big data, it’s personal data—it's me. My digital personality. Today "going online" is no longer a choice or a potentiality, but rather a necessary condition of existence. It is essential. Part of me. I spend at least half of my time online: both professionally and privately. As Artie Vierkant recently said, we live in a “post-internet” reality. The internet is not a separate realm anymore, it’s become an integral part of life. My identity remains unified, but it’s become partially digital. We’re made of atoms and of bits. The internet is the externalization of my inner world. And this inner world is clearly linked to the rest of me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday November 20 2016, @07:28AM
If personal data is the oil of the 21st century—a commodity companies pay billions of dollars for—then why aren’t we, the source of such data, the oil sheiks?
It's not. Oil is trillions of dollars not billions of dollars. The author rhetorically is a few orders of magnitude shy of the necessary level of analogy. Sure, the real world market for personal information is a bit larger, but I think that's overvalued by unrealistic future expectations which isn't a problem for oil companies.
And ultimately, our personal data is valuable because we are valuable. Nobody will bother to spend such sums for the personal data of the billion or so people who are at subsistence level of poverty.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday November 20 2016, @11:56AM
More than that, not only is the oil worth more, but the riches from personal data are spread across orders of magnitude more people. House of Saud is maybe 20k people, Facebook user base is close to 2 billion people.
The real answer is that we already got rewarded for our data by getting free email hosting, free apps, free networks etc.
You can set up your own cloud and be as private as you like, but you'll find it's a little more expensive...
Pays your money, takes your choice.