Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks out on data ownership by Alex Hern.
From the post:
The data we create about ourselves should be owned by each of us, not by the large companies that harvest it, the Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, said today.
Berners-Lee told the IPExpo Europe in London’s Excel Centre that the potential of big data will be wasted as its current owners use it to serve ever more “queasy” targeted advertising.
…
Berners-Lee, who wrote the first memo detailing the idea of the world wide web 25 years ago this year, while working for physics lab Cern in Switzerland, told the conference that the value of “merging” data was under-appreciated in many areas.
Speaking to public data providers, he said: “I’m not interested in your data; I’m interested in merging your data with other data. Your data will never be as exciting as what I can merge it with.
No disagreement with: …the value of “merging” data was under-appreciated in many areas. 😉
Considerable disagreement on how best to accomplish that merging but will be an empirical question when people wake up to the value of “merging” data.
Berners-Lee may be right about who “should” own data about ourselves, but that isn’t in fact who owns it now. Changing property laws means taking rights away from those with them under the current regime and creating new rights for others in a new system. Property laws have changed before but it requires more than slogans and wishful thinking to make it so.