Our founder and chairman Julian Ranger is the subject of an excellent new interview.
Taking a look at the war between those who want to take our personal data and those who want to use it to track and target us with ads, the first paragraph eloquently sums up the situation: “Starting wars is easy. It’s finishing them that’s difficult. What exactly is peace going to look like? How do you repair the damage? Can life really be the same again?”
It’s a fascinating look at a difficult and tricky situation – and Julian explains why some vaunted ‘solutions’ just won’t work and why the digi.me-supported Internet of Me vision and forum based around the same ideas, where the interview appears and which we started and support, is the only way forwards.
Some choice quotes to whet your appetite:
“There’s this strange paradox where people seem to care about privacy but carry on doing things that compromise it,” says Julian. “I think that’s because it’s all too difficult. People turn away and pretend to ignore it – we all do it.”
“At digi.me, when we talk about what the Internet of Me means to us we talk about utility — utility to you the individual getting your data back and then utility to businesses, government and society as a whole when we share it.
“We say that by doing it the way we at digi.me propose it is 100% private and it will enable a more private world. But there is this huge body of people who are not going to come to that way of thinking because they want to fix today’s privacy problems. I want to tell them this: we can’t. We can’t fix all those problems with a load of different point solutions. The model is so broken and busted that you can’t do it.”
“I see a true Internet of Me as being where I own and control my data and companies knock on the door to ask for it and I get to control who gets it — that’s all open and transparent. It’s the light side.”
Click here to read the interview in full