This week really has been an interesting one with two big stories hitting the news both relating to personal data and privacy. The first was this story “Tim Cook blasts Silicon Valley companies for ‘gobbling up’ your personal data” and that was followed up with this article today in the New York Times “Mark Zuckerberg, Let Me Pay for Facebook“.
Both of these articles have one thing in common. Personal data, control of that data, use of the data and ownership of it. Tim Cook rightly reminds us all that our personal data is incredibly valuable and important. Too important in fact to let other companies take ownership, control and use it. Tim Cook is fighting for you to own your data, control and use it how you see fit. Some people have argued that we already do that and have made the trade off between personal privacy and service access with services like Facebook and Twitter however where do the boundaries sit? At what point is a line crossed where we are no longer happy with this?
Taking this one step further New York Times writer Zeynep Tufekci believes that companies like Twitter and Facebook should actually be paying us to be on their platforms if they are selling our data or if we choose for them not to we pay to access the platform. That actually doesn’t sound like an unreasonable compromise. Times are changing and as we start to understand more how valuable and useful our data is to us and others we may choose to take more control over it.
What are your thoughts on the issues raised in these articles and where do you see the power and control of your personal data in the future?
We here at digi.me want to place that firmly in your hands in a way that you can easily understand and with the ability to revoke access and control of your data from any platform or service as you see fit.