¶ Data Rights · 22 December 2024 essay/tech
Your data is yours. Data derived from your actions, your tastes, your active and passive online presences, is all your data. Your public life generates public data, which contributes to collective knowledge, but in addition to personal knowledge, not in place of it.
You are entitled to both your public and private data. Your public data can be used by the public without your consent, but not without your awareness and their accountability. You are entitled to an intelligible and verifiable explanation of how it has been used. You are entitled to be able to double-check the sorting of your Spotify Wrapped just as you can double-check the math for the interest payments from your savings account.
You may choose to share your private data with other people, or applications, or corporations, in order to let them do something for you, or to help you do something for other people. For this your informed consent is necessary, and thus you are entitled to an intelligible and verifiable explanation of how your data would be used if you permit. You are entitled to know what Spotify would do with your Wrapped before you decide whether to join.
This is the world we have now:
you < corporations > software > your data
This is the world we want:
you > your data > software > corporations
The actors are the same, but the roles and the power are not. Today most computational power is structurally centralized and hoarded, and thus its potential for conversion into human energy is constrained and reduced. Most software is made by corporations, formulated for their corporate goals, and sealed against any other access or experimentation. Recent developments like LLM AIs seem inertially on a path towards even more centralized power-control and thus individual and social powerlessness.
We want a future, instead, in which creative power is widely distributed and human energy is bountifully amplified. We want software creation to be democratized so that our sources of imagination can be more broadly recruited. We want people and groups to have the power to pursue their own goals, not just for our own narrow sakes, but for our collective potential.
For this world to exist, we must figure out how, both logistically and politically, to move the data layer on which most meaningful software acts into the computational and conversational open. We need not just data portability -- the right to chose between evils -- but a shared language for talking about algorithms and data logic like we use math to discuss numbers. We need to be able to talk about what we want, and test what we might have and how.
This is how the AT Protocol, on which the social microblogging platform Bluesky runs, is designed. Its schemas are public, its public information is public. Bluesky, the application, makes use of this protocol and your data to construct a social experience for you and with you, producing feeds and following and public conversations and personal data ownership. The Bluesky software is open source, and most of the data relationships that constitute the social network are derivable from accessible data in tractable ways. But the Bluesky application still conceals the data layer more than it exposes it, so I made a ruthlessly basic Bluesky query interface called SkyQ to try to invert this. You can see the data directly, and wander through it both curiously and computationally. You can build data tools for yourself, or for everyone, that everyone can share.
Current music streaming services, like Spotify, are not built this way at all. Your Spotify listening data is yours, morally, but so inaccessible to you that Spotify can make a yearly spectacle out of briefly sharing the most superficial and unverifiable analyses of it with you. And the collective knowledge that we, 600 million of us, amass through our listening, is so inaccessible to us that Spotify can passively deprive us of its insights just by not caring.
Curio, thus, my web thing for collating music curiosity, is both an experiment in making a music interface that does music things the way I personally want them done, but also a meta-experiment in making a data experience that uses your data with respect for your data rights. Every Curio page has data link at the bottom. Every bit of data Curio stores is also visible directly, on a query page where you can explore it however you like. I made a bunch of Spotify-Wrapped-like tools with which you can analyze your listening, but they do so with queries you can see, check, change or build upon, so if your goals diverge from mine, you are free to pursue them. The more paths we can follow, the more we will learn about how to reach anywhere.
There is a lot more to the human future of Data Rights than just microblogging and listening-history heatmaps, obviously. We are not yet near it, and we probably won't reach it with just our web browsers and a query language and a manifesto. Maybe no tendrils of these specific current dreams of mine will end up swirling in whatever collective dreams we eventually create by agreeing to share. I claim no certainty about the details. Certainty is not my goal. Possibility? Less resignation, more hope. I'm totally sure of almost nothing.
But I'm pretty sure we only get dreamier futures by dreaming.
You are entitled to both your public and private data. Your public data can be used by the public without your consent, but not without your awareness and their accountability. You are entitled to an intelligible and verifiable explanation of how it has been used. You are entitled to be able to double-check the sorting of your Spotify Wrapped just as you can double-check the math for the interest payments from your savings account.
You may choose to share your private data with other people, or applications, or corporations, in order to let them do something for you, or to help you do something for other people. For this your informed consent is necessary, and thus you are entitled to an intelligible and verifiable explanation of how your data would be used if you permit. You are entitled to know what Spotify would do with your Wrapped before you decide whether to join.
This is the world we have now:
you < corporations > software > your data
This is the world we want:
you > your data > software > corporations
The actors are the same, but the roles and the power are not. Today most computational power is structurally centralized and hoarded, and thus its potential for conversion into human energy is constrained and reduced. Most software is made by corporations, formulated for their corporate goals, and sealed against any other access or experimentation. Recent developments like LLM AIs seem inertially on a path towards even more centralized power-control and thus individual and social powerlessness.
We want a future, instead, in which creative power is widely distributed and human energy is bountifully amplified. We want software creation to be democratized so that our sources of imagination can be more broadly recruited. We want people and groups to have the power to pursue their own goals, not just for our own narrow sakes, but for our collective potential.
For this world to exist, we must figure out how, both logistically and politically, to move the data layer on which most meaningful software acts into the computational and conversational open. We need not just data portability -- the right to chose between evils -- but a shared language for talking about algorithms and data logic like we use math to discuss numbers. We need to be able to talk about what we want, and test what we might have and how.
This is how the AT Protocol, on which the social microblogging platform Bluesky runs, is designed. Its schemas are public, its public information is public. Bluesky, the application, makes use of this protocol and your data to construct a social experience for you and with you, producing feeds and following and public conversations and personal data ownership. The Bluesky software is open source, and most of the data relationships that constitute the social network are derivable from accessible data in tractable ways. But the Bluesky application still conceals the data layer more than it exposes it, so I made a ruthlessly basic Bluesky query interface called SkyQ to try to invert this. You can see the data directly, and wander through it both curiously and computationally. You can build data tools for yourself, or for everyone, that everyone can share.
Current music streaming services, like Spotify, are not built this way at all. Your Spotify listening data is yours, morally, but so inaccessible to you that Spotify can make a yearly spectacle out of briefly sharing the most superficial and unverifiable analyses of it with you. And the collective knowledge that we, 600 million of us, amass through our listening, is so inaccessible to us that Spotify can passively deprive us of its insights just by not caring.
Curio, thus, my web thing for collating music curiosity, is both an experiment in making a music interface that does music things the way I personally want them done, but also a meta-experiment in making a data experience that uses your data with respect for your data rights. Every Curio page has data link at the bottom. Every bit of data Curio stores is also visible directly, on a query page where you can explore it however you like. I made a bunch of Spotify-Wrapped-like tools with which you can analyze your listening, but they do so with queries you can see, check, change or build upon, so if your goals diverge from mine, you are free to pursue them. The more paths we can follow, the more we will learn about how to reach anywhere.
There is a lot more to the human future of Data Rights than just microblogging and listening-history heatmaps, obviously. We are not yet near it, and we probably won't reach it with just our web browsers and a query language and a manifesto. Maybe no tendrils of these specific current dreams of mine will end up swirling in whatever collective dreams we eventually create by agreeing to share. I claim no certainty about the details. Certainty is not my goal. Possibility? Less resignation, more hope. I'm totally sure of almost nothing.
But I'm pretty sure we only get dreamier futures by dreaming.