The Future: Data Accessibility
There is a change coming to the way that we, as people, interact with technology. For years, many companies have been collecting vast amounts of data on us and using that data, combined with machine learning, to create an understanding of who we are that often surpasses our own self-awareness. That understanding is then used to predict our behaviours, both online and offline and more often than not try to sell us things or influence our behaviour.
The most notable case in recent years where this has happened is the case of Cambridge Analytica, who created a simple ten-question quiz that was used, via Facebook and their fairly open data platform to create a vast swathe of behavioural information on the majority of Facebook users within the United States. This modelling was then used to create advertising targetted at individuals to influence their voting in the 2016 US Presidential Election and was revealed in full in the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack and even more clearly illustrated in a piece from Channel 4 news in the UK: Revealed: Trump campaign strategy to deter millions of Black Americans from voting in 2016, with another Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, provided a broader picture of how behavioural data aggregation and modelling is used.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the father of the Web), through his company Intrupt, has been working for a few years on a way of creating data silos for us as individuals, where were are able to control the data we share with companies and improve the overall privacy we experience as individuals when we interact with digital services. This is a great idea, but it's missing something: data accessibility.
Do you remember 2013? The first reporting of possible life on Mars? A Royal baby? How about Edward Snowden's NSA leaks? Maybe that last one was memorable.
In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked a huge amount of highly valued, above top secret information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US which described, in great detail, how US foreign policy influenced the world and how the US sped on both its own citizens and those abroad. This series of leaks became global news and had a lasting impact on how that goverment was able to operate in the future.
Data Accessibility
What is data accessibility? Well, the simplest way to describe this is an old English saying "out of sight, out of mind", mean thing that if you cannot see something, you won't think about it.
This is exactly what is happening with the data companies are collecting about you. In other words, how can you protect a thing if you can't see what that thing is?
Data accessibility is the solution to this: a mechanism for allowing ordinary consumers to see the full set of data a given company stores about them, what that data means and who that data is shared with.
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Within the European Union and in the UK following our departure, we have legislation in the form of the Data Protection Act 2018 (GDPR) which gives citizens a right to access the data held about them from any body (with a few exceptions) using a Subject Access Request.
The Future Vision
Being able to submit a Subject Access Request is a legal right, but it's not straightforward nor automatic and has time delays and fees associated with it, mostly because the entities which hold your data have to do work to provide it for you.
The vision of Data Accessibility is to have a standardised framework which allows citizens to see their data on demand and in a way which is meanful to them, together with information about how that data is used by its holder, what it means to them and who they share that data with.
Currently, if I submit an SAR to, say, Facebook, I will get an archive which contains a segment of the data they store about me, but without a way of understanding how they use this or where it goes.