Taming the Wild West

Leila Trilby
Nov 6 · 2 min read

The online ‘consent model’ is broken. The MadHATTERS Editorial, 6 November 2019

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A UK government inquiry has called for more ‘robust regulation’ and ‘stringent enforcement’ of personal data use in the online ‘Wild West’. The inquiry, led by a Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), looked into whether new safeguards were necessary to protect human rights by regulating the personal data conduct of private companies, saying that ‘rights are meaningless if not enforced.’

The inquiry also found that too much onus is being put on individuals to be technical experts in understanding how our data is used — we should be able to easily see what data has been shared about us and with whom, and to prevent the sharing of our data if we choose to. Their conclusion was that the online ‘consent model’ is broken.

Better-regulated data conduct with transparent data transactions make new data-sharing models possible. “Society needs a better model for exchanging data, one that’s not merely consenting to let others hold and exchange it on their behalf,” Irene Ng wrote in a briefing paper to the government earlier this year.

Rights are also meaningless if they are too narrow, such as the access and consent-based data rights currently afforded to individuals under the GDPR. But while stronger regulations and their enforcement are important, we can’t just rely on regulators. There’s a better model, surely. And the one that we believe in: if organisations can just ‘query’ our data, we can share only a bit of our data for 5 minutes, 5 hours or 5 days, using our HAT Microserver. It would be a start to slowing the ‘collecting’ mentality (catch Snowden’s 2019 Web Summit speech about this) that’s so pervasive across the Web.

This is building the decentralised Internet. Making centralised data-sharing (and duplication) obsolete (as well as just inadequate).

So write to your MP. Take to the streets. Chain yourself to rails. Storm the barricades at Facebook, Google, Amazon. And build more apps on the HAT and get others to do the same.

Whatchu waiting for?

MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com

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