If you’ve been here a while, you know TARTLE is all about focusing on the importance of source data, of going to the individual for their data. Well, at long last it looks like the rest of the world is starting to catch up to what we have been talking about for years.
This is in large degree due to the way the public has begun to push back on the massive invasions of privacy that most of the big tech companies have been engaging in without even thinking about it for well over two decades now. At first, that concern was brought to the fore by a few lone voices crying out in the digital wilderness. Now that the message has filtered into the mainstream, governments have begun to respond, proposing and enacting a whole raft of fresh privacy laws around the developed world. Thanks to the laws of cause and effect, the tech companies are starting to respond as well, spending a lot of time and money figuring out how to best deal with all of these new laws. Unfortunately, as one might expect, they are not always responding in good faith. Instead of trying to figure out how to change their business models in order meet the needs of their customers, they are often trying to figure out how to work around the laws, to find the technicalities that will still allow them to do business however they wish. Why?
The answer is that they grew up in the beginning of the digital age. The lack of laws and regulations led to a ton of innovation, but it also allowed for various abuses. A good analogy is the beginning of the industrial revolution when there was a flood of new products, technologies, and processes that completely transformed society. However, there was little concern given to the long term consequences of their actions. My favorite example is how the shoreline of Chicago is basically built on all the crap that collected there after people threw trash in the Chicago River for years. It got so bad that part of the clean-up effort involved burying the piles of trash and the Army Corp of Engineers literally reversing the flow of the river, sending a bunch of trash down to St. Louis.
The tech companies treated their customers’ privacy with the same disregard, tracking buying habits, browsing history, physical location, and, most notoriously, listening in on conversations and adjusting ads and news stories based on that. They did and still do all of this without anyone’s consent. Sure, it might have been in the fine print of the terms of service but everyone knows that no one reads those. It’s just an annoying legal loophole that everyone pretends accomplishes something. The point is, they got used to it and their whole business model is built on being able to do whatever they want to collect, use, and resell data. Their business models treat people like cogs in the machine rather that sovereign individuals. Now, just as we’ve spent the last few decades cleaning up the mess of the early industrial revolution, we’re starting to do the same thing with the privacy abuses of the digital age.
TARTLE is of course, already ahead of the curve. We started off wanting to return control to the individual, to let people, not corporations, or even governments decide what they should or should not do with their data. When you sign up with us and connect your various accounts, you are the one in control, able to share as much or as little as you wish. Yet, your data is still valuable to many companies around the world, which is exactly why there is a financial incentive for you to sell that data if you choose. We’re out there working with companies and governments, trying to impress the importance of not just the source data, but the humanity of that source on them, to remind that you are more valuable than ones and zeroes.
What’s your data worth?
