Wired: Personal data stores will liberate us from a toxic...

Andrew Watson · **Posted:** Thu, 31 May 2012 07:09:42 +0000

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201 ... ata-stores

Personal data stores will liberate us from a toxic privacy battleground
By Guest Author
30 May 12

This is a guest post by Alan Mitchell, a strategy director at Ctrl-Shift and a strategic advisor to the UK Government's Midata project

I love TED but when it introduced its TEDGlobal 2012 theme of "radical openness" something it said gave me the jitters. Radical openness, it declared with apparently consummate confidence, "implies a loss privacy".

Ah! The great P word. Scott McNealy famously declared "you have zero privacy anyway -- get over it". Eric Schmidt told us that anyone concerned about online privacy "had something to hide". But privacy isn't dying. It's being reinvented. It was 120 years ago that Harvard Lawyers Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis first suggested a legal right to privacy: a right 'to be left alone'. In the same sentence they suggested that privacy is a form of property saying that "the term 'property' has grown to comprise every form of possession -- intangible, as well as tangible".

That's really what the privacy debate is about: property rights. Whose data is this? Is it Google's, Facebook's, Twitter's -- the property of anyone who happens to be able to collect it? Or is it the individual's?

There's a growing view -- increasingly supported by the UK Government's Midata programme, by the World Economic Forum's 'rethinking personal data' project, by the EU with its new proposals for data protection and by a growing range of entrepreneurs and innovators -- that personal data is a personal asset. The full potential value can only be realised if individuals are able to control what personal information they share with who, for what purposes, under what terms and conditions; and if they can realise the benefits (including financial benefits) of doing so.

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David Moss · **Joined:** Sat, 07 Apr 2007 10:29:05 +0000 **Posts:** 2842

The following comment has been submitted to Wired magazine but not published yet:

Quote:

It is questionable whether personal data stores would deliver the benefits suggested by Mr Mitchell.

Before that question is debated, he and his business partner William Heath must demonstrate that individuals can control their personal data in the ways described by Control-Shift and their related company Mydex.

That control doesn't exist. Like unicorns. Unicorns don't exist. Messrs Mitchell and Heath are effectively saying that if there were unicorns, then the economy would expand. No unicorns, no expansion of the economy.

Please see The case for midata – the answer is a mooncalf, http://www.dmossesq.com/2011/12/case-for-midata.html

The UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) blogged on the subject of midata. About half a dozen commenters asked the Department to explain how individuals could control their personal data. There was no answer.

Please see Ed Davey, problem-solver – midata, http://www.dmossesq.com/2011/11/ed-dave ... idata.html

BIS and Mr Mitchell are talking about something that doesn't exist.

cloudstarer · **Posted:** Sat, 02 Jun 2012 10:37:41 +0000

I don't think they are going to publish your comment, they don't like links to other sites for one.

NO2ID

Wired: Personal data stores will liberate us from a toxic...

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