Philip Sheldrake. For Rebooting Web of Trust, 1-3 March 2019.
A precis of a three-part series, published on the AKASHA Foundation blog, January 2019: The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of “personal data”
We believe that humans are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold. This is why we nurture projects helping individuals amplify their potential through open systems that expand our collective mind at local, regional and global scales.
We have a problem and an opportunity currently labelled "personal data".
The opportunity encompasses nothing less than a complete redesign of our lives and societies and our collective ability to grapple with complex adaptive systems including super-wicked problems — but this will remain elusive until we've wrestled with the "personal data" problem, including the problem of the way we frame the opportunity and problem.
Simply speaking, the problem is this ... the I and the we are not really separable.
For social philosophical context and brevity, it’s sufficient to note that I’m locating this between the extremes of fanatical individuality and the total subjugation of the individual in favour of the collective. It feels to me that this is compatible with the majority view, at least in terms of the European cultures with which I’m most familiar.
It turns out that there is very few data that may be described as purely personal data. That lunch date, that genome map, those photos, that joint bank account — all turn out to be interpersonal data. In fact, a personal bank account also records the relationship between two parties / persons (the bank and its customer), and lists transactions between the account owner and other parties / persons.
We are actually contemplating interpersonal data.
The prefix inter is familiar and requires an apparently simple shift in locus, and yet deeper down it offers a way forward to engineer the complexity needed to respond to the complexity (per the law of requisite variety).
Maintaining the word person just about stretches to our needs in terms of personhood, encompassing legal persons (organizations recognized as having privileges and obligations under law) and quite reasonably transhumans. To press the point home fully however, any organizing (assemblage, however ephemeral or enduring) would also need to be a person.
- I am a person
- Alphabet Inc. is a person, as are its subsidiaries, e.g. Google
- Her Majesty's Government is a person, as are its Departments
- A family is a person of persons
- Molly Millions is a person
- Hawking Incorporated was a person.
Now let's consider persons living, i.e. relating, interdepending, responding, learning. In other words, exchanging information — interpersonal data.
We are contemplating interpersonal data with no scale at every scale.
Data is data.
While accepting that language is metaphor, there doesn't appear to be a wholly useful metaphor that can apply to anything but a fragment or two of the required architecture. It seems that there's never been anything like personal or interpersonal data. No metaphor can be extended to analogy that's for certain. I review five common attempts.
Property is rivalrous. Property is monopoly. Property, unlike human rights, is not universal, indivisible, or inalienable.
Personal data is not property.
Personal data isn’t money as we know it. Simplistic. Transactional. Binary. It is more akin to the rich, varied and complex information flows present in rainforests, in oceans, in human cultures. It is worth a lot more than six cents a day Facebook makes out of you when markets don’t reduce it and its application to a mere transactional exchange.
At the very moment we might conceive an awesome, distributed and continuous crystallization of collective knowledge, the signalling known as price entails monumental information loss and inevitable consequential inequalities.
Data-as-labour is effectively a rebadging of data as property — one owns one's labour after all. Labour is remunerated based on time and/or output at a market value. Here, the value is contingent on factors way beyond any conceptualization of work that I know. The shoehorning simply serves to connect the treatment of personal and similar data to concerns for the impact on employment of all variety of digital technologies, not least artificial intelligence. That might be honourable, but it’s also tenuous at best.
Programmatic quantification of reputation is an inevitable evil due to the unavoidable self-moderation and modulation it inflicts on its subjects beyond that which might be argued as 'good for society'. To be clear, the social accretion of local, contextually relevant reputation with forgiving opportunities for reparation has served communities for millennia. We are however considering universal, non-contextual and irremediable scoring and algorithmic assessment.
Context is a keyword. I want to know if Alice is trustworthy to drive me safely from A to B. I couldn't care less if she's up on her mortgage payments, or has been dropping litter (I do care about that generally, but not in this context), or has been 'dutifully' supportive of the current government, which of course would be an abhorrent context here and one we must ensure we don't engender accidentally.
If you resist censorship, it seems you must also resist reputation scoring.
Fortunately, we're not actually interested in reputation per se, only as a proxy for trustworthiness and accountability. With some forethought we can engineer our way around these challenges and avoid a (Black Mirror) Nosedive. I suspect the architecture will resemble the past in terms of our having to re-engineer appropriate contextual and social frictions.
Academic authors such as Mariana Mazzucato and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger grapple for ways to regulate the run-away oligopolistic success of the centralizing data-hungry behemoths such as Facebook and Google — getting them to share some of their informational hoard.
There responses predominantly take a regulatory form. And yet at the end of the day market regulators can only regulate markets, and markets are dedicated to property ownership. Data can be a public good, of course!, but this doesn’t strike me as anywhere near an optimal way to go about it.
Informational privacy requires radical re-interpretation, one that takes into account the essentially informational nature of human beings and of their operations as informational social agents. Such re-interpretation is achieved by considering each person as constituted by his or her information, and hence by understanding a breach of one's informational privacy as a form of aggression towards one's personal identity.
Luciano Floridi
This is an exciting vista. Nevertheless, it requires some modification to encourage the emergence of collective intelligence and our anti-rivalrous flourishing.
How might we realise this value while respecting personal dignity and agency? Indeed while respecting personal privacy, because what agency can anyone be said to have if they cannot maintain personally desired and contextually appropriate privacy?
- Humans, not data subjects as the GDPR has it
- Edge-centric, not node-centric, as this is interpersonal
- Agency, not control as it seems nearly everyone would have it!
- Rhizomes, not trees as our sciences know it
- Cache, not facsimile as ‘stores’, ‘vaults’ and ‘wallets’ would have it.
On that last point, if we get this right, your bank's cloud (should they continue to maintain one, and should banks continue to be necessary to banking) will be the facsimile.
We are dealing with a phenomenon here that appears atomistically simple but in fact forms, informs and infects everything. It's the original complex. Identity is information (and, I suspect, digitally emergent from interpersonal data). Relationships is information. Reputation is information. Exchange is information. Organizing is information. Life is information. We should then proceed with due caution — ethically and technically. Ethically, we need to take appropriate time for due diligence. Ethically, we cannot delay and allow the data-as-property protagonists time to establish the mother of all Nash equilibria.