(personal) data + ownership = (personal) working asset

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Adriana Lukas

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May 20, 2013, 6:28:56 AM5/20/13
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This is from a VRM mailing list that I am on as well, a discussion touching on personal data and QS. Said by Adrian Groper: 

"It's as simple as wealth. Data is a working asset and if I have it, it works for me.

If I have data and can cause the apps to come to me, then I extract the maximum value. If the company* has data then the apps come to them and I get relatively little.

In the days when computers were expensive and networks were slow, distributing apps seemed inconceivably impractical and a business model developed that valued software over data. Now that the most valuable apps are open source and bandwidth is almost free, moving a copy of the apps to where my data lives becomes an option.

Privacy is the key enabler for this shift. Apps that allow me to develop an online reputation and to add the value my data to the worldwide collective while at the same time minimizing the leakage of my asset will rule the day."

*If you substitute 'any 3rd party platform that wants my data' for 'company', this statement very neatly summarises my position. With which, most of you here are already familiar. :)

Adriana

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Maarten den Braber

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May 20, 2013, 5:13:01 PM5/20/13
to Adriana Lukas, Self-hacking
Adriana thanks for bringing this up. How to view data is an interesting discusison. I'd like to add some thoughts of @alper here who has written the following on his blog a while back (summarizing another article by Nicolas Colin): http://alper.nl/dingen/2013/03/taxing-data-is-not-crazy/:

"Data is hazardous waste material and as such its production and storage should be discouraged (the CO2 tax was given as an example in the Forbes article). Cory Doctorow compared personal data breaches to nuclear disasters, because the fallout is so tremendously hard to contain and control. Whoever collects large amounts of personal data treats the privacy damage caused by breaches as an externality. As such the storage of such data should be discouraged with a tax.

Data is capital and should be taxed as all capital is. Storage, mining and arbitrage using data can generate revenue for sophisticated market actors (those that Lanier terms as those with ‘the biggest computer on the network’). Data is a value adding asset that generates wealth and more data for those who already have it. If we don’t want a situation where a small group of people get richer at the expense of everybody else, we should tax it."

I'm very curious where this discussion can take us. What I think is dearly missing from most discussion about data is a good vocabulary to be used. We need a better vocabulary just as e.g. Strategic Design needs a vocabulary as proven by Dan Hill in http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Matter-Trojan-Horses-ebook/dp/B0085KEVO8).

I greatly appreciate this topic to find new and better ways to talk about data in the future - thank you.

Maarten


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Maarten den Braber

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May 20, 2013, 5:16:09 PM5/20/13
to Adriana Lukas, Self-hacking
Adriana - on a side-note, would you care to share at which VRM-mailinglist this discussion happened?

regards,
Maarten


On 20 May 2013 12:28, Adriana Lukas <adrian...@gmail.com> wrote:

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