a data donation platform that allows users of browsers to donate data on their usage of specific services (eg Youtube, or Facebook) to a platform.

The idea is that many smaller tech companies would allow for more choice between services. This solution is flawed. For one, services like search or social media benefit from network effects. Having large datasets to train on, means search recommendations get better. Having all your friends in one place, means you don’t need five apps to contact them all. I would argue those are all things we like and might lose when Big Tech is broken up. What we want is to be able to leave Facebook and still talk to our friends, instead of having many Facebooks.

On the other side, a platform that does share its users’ data through such an interface must make sure federated partners have all the information they need to process personal information according to each user’s preferences.

Less dramatically, bad actors may learn that a part of the federated ecosystem —perhaps a single server with little funding or poor security practices —is more amenable to users who would present false fronts to the rest of the world, and use that service as a base for their bad-faith operations.

Without new legal safeguards to protect the privacy of user data, this kind of interoperable ecosystem could make Cambridge Analytica-style attacks more common.

The obvious privacy risk with this kind of tool is that the delegated agent could turn out to be a bad steward of user privacy.

The Privacy Paradox

Though they compete in different markets, most of the tech giants share at least one business model: surveillance. Technology conglomerates collect information about users from each of their dozens of smaller services, synthesize those data into profiles, and use those profiles to target ads.

The market concentration crisis in tech has brought the need for interoperability into sharp focus. A number of factors have contributed to rapid, decisive centralization over the past two decades, with a handful of companies amassing unprecedented power across borders and industries.

To the extent that companies have to worry about users taking their business elsewhere (especially if users have low switching costs), companies will be pressured to be better stewards.

We still need healthy governance systems, and as a start we need to reaffirm and strengthen multi-stakeholder processes.

An early optimism that the system might evade many of the unwanted constraints of society has been replaced today with a realization that the internet is all too susceptible to societal and human frailties, with limited avenues for accountability or redress.

“words will not be sufficient”

a summit meeting of European leaders that was eclipsed by concern about the extent of American electronic eavesdropping on its allies

sovereignty of the United States of America