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Data as a Common Resource

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2025 4:17 am
by asimj1
For example, the #DeleteFacebook movement following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal may, in time, come to serve as an example of a proto-generator-centric data trust: users felt Facebook had violated some social (media) contract, and responded with a call to boycott.

So far, with data trusts, we can begin to see russia rcs data that as we relax the transactional idea of data, we can begin to build new ways of organising data ownership, data flows, and value flows.

To an extent, the functionality of a data common precedes any philosophy or political economy we might want to have.

Functionally, a data common is the idea that only one copy of a user’s data need exist, that this copy should be stored within the common, and that the user should be able to grant and withdraw access to other entities (be them users or platforms) whenever they desire.

In talking about data commons, the language is less about data as a common resource (though it may be), and more about interoperability in the language of academic Robert Grossman (and candidate for the democratic nomination for president Andrew Yang), or “digital citizen accounts” in the language of Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton of the think tank IPPR. In this sense, a data common may even double down on the idea of data as property, or at least something that can be owned (Yang even says as much).