Our Data Future
It’s 2030. You’re living in your ideal world. How does it look like? What role does data play in this future?
This is an open invitation to go on a journey and explore four speculative scenarios about what the world might look like, depending on the way we choose to govern our relationship with data.
Our Data Future is meant to spark meaningful discussions around the possibilities that lay ahead for our digital future and the potential implications. For example, in Scenario 1, we see a future where data is treated like property. In Scenario 2, we’re being paid for data as labour, earning our monthly wage for the data we generate. In Scenario 3, we store data in national funds, managed by both citizens and governments. Companies pay access fees if they want to use data for building services. In Scenario 4, we have rights for our data, allowing us agency and autonomy over the data we generate.
Given today’s digital challenges, we need a comprehensive system of protection and a better-designed framework. I believe our best candidate is a data rights model, but a lot more work needs to be done on this front. It’s up to us to choose the future we want to live in and build a collective roadmap that takes us where we want to go.
What’s the future you want to see? Enter the imaginarium here.
I am a former Mozilla Fellow embedded at Privacy International and a core member of ApTI Romania. Learn more about my work here.
