Personal datastores
There has been talk about having people owning their data. The same data used by tech companies. This sounds like an interesting idea. After reading in The Economist that they maybe EU internal markets for data. In which EU citizens can choose where their data should be stored. So if a German person wants their data stored in France they can. So with the increasing popularity of governments wanting to regulate tech companies. Ownership of one’s data may be on the table. I’m going to be honest, I haven't read too much on the issue. So I'm just spitballing.
Personal datastores can be very useful. Especially for interoperability. Which means users can move their data to different competitors. EU has been thinking of mandating something like this. But it’s difficult because what data should be used for what. I think have written about this before somewhere. But ticktock is different from Facebook. Youtube is different from Twitter. So the data being moved is not one to one nor the same. So how would one fix that? I don’t know.
I think allowing data to be exported. Is something future tech companies will find useful. As they can design their products to take advantage of the feature.
Also, a lot of data of you is contained in third party companies. People like data brokers. And other advertising companies. How would you get data from them? As they don’t have a website that you can access information about you. As they come in pieces. As they used by the tech companies to add them all together to get a whole picture of you. This makes it very difficult. To collect all the data of you out there.
Also, while I think having a datastore is a great idea. Most people frankly won't care about it. As they just want to watch good YouTube videos. And see good memes on Facebook. But I do think people should have their choice on how their data is used. And if they can transfer it to other services. As we the ones being monetised. So it should make sense. That we should have more control over our information. And maybe be compensated for are data. Maybe this can change some of the incentives for tech companies. The company may feel less of a need to hover up data. Or move to a business model were using data from adverts are not useful.
If the EU does go ahead with this. Hope they can write the laws correctly. To avoid bad unintended consequences. And not hurt the smaller tech companies. As the EU. Focuses on mainly curbing American tech companies. Sometimes forget that they are other tech companies that need to follow the same laws. GDPR is a great start. For allowing people more options with their data. But it is flawed. With tech companies paying major fines. And appeals costing a fortune. A small tech company can't afford the lawyers that Facebook or Google has. Or even the money to pay the fine. This is the way some websites was blocked from EU users for a long time. As they knew that they can’t follow the GDPR guidelines to the tea.