Tag: policy

Data Manifesto

a recasting of “information wants to be free”

  1. Data cannot be owned. By anybody.
  2. The natural habitat of data is in the commons. It is born in the commons, and will return to the commons, even if it is granted temporary monopolies. The longer it spends in the commons, the better.
  3. Data is a shared resource, that only exists in relationship to its sources and substrates.
  4. Any party that touches or generates a bit of data has rights and responsibilities about that data.
  5. Rights always have corresponding responsibilities.
  6. Control of data is both a right and responsibility that is always shared.
  7. Privacy is a misunderstanding that does not apply to data.
  8. Data is made more valuable by being connected to other data. Solitary data is worthless.
  9. Data is made more valuable by moving. Storage is weak because it halts, “Movage” is better.
  10. Both directions of movage are important — where it came from, where it goes.
  11. The meta data about where data goes is as important as where it came from.
  12. Ensuring bi-directionality, the symmetry of movage, is important to the robustness of the data net.
  13. Data can generate infinite derivative data (meta data) but they all follow the same rules.
  14. When new data is generated from data (meta data) the rights and responsibilities of the first generation proceed to the second.
  15. At the same time, meta data has claims of rights and responsibilities upon the root data.
  16. Data can be expensive or free, determined by the market. It has no inherent value.
  17. Data is easy to replicate in time (free copies) and difficult to replicate over time (digital decay). The only way to carry data into the future is if it is exercised (moved) by those who care about it.
  18. Like all other shared resources, data can suffer from the tragedy of the commons, and this commons must be protected by governments.
  19. As the number of entities, including meta data, touching a bit of data expands over time, with claims of rights and responsibilities, some values will dilute and some will amplify.
  20. To manage the web of relationships, rights and responsibilities of data will require technological and social tools that don’t exist yet.

Yang Bid Very 21st Century

In the history of politicking, few politicians have publicly declared what to do about America’s crumbling malls, or how to provide free marriage counseling for all, or how to make filing taxes fun. But Andrew Yang, who’s gunning to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, certainly has—and those are the more minor concerns among a dizzying list of 80 policy positions on his campaign website.

also has geoengineering, UBI and many other things.

Utah Digital Privacy

Utah Just Became a Leader in Digital Privacy

Utah legislators voted unanimously to pass landmark legislation in support of a new privacy law that will protect private electronic data stored with third parties like Google or Facebook from free-range government access. The bill stipulates that law enforcement will be required to obtain a warrant before accessing “certain electronic information or data.”

Restarting Nuclear

Despite its advanced age, the average American plant has a generating capacity—a measure of the percentage of time a reactor is producing energy—of more than 90%. Plants abroad have an average generating capacity of 75%. “In terms of the ability to reliably generate electricity and safely generate electricity, the US fleet still sets the standard for performance. The place that the US is falling behind in is in the ability to build a new plant at schedule and at a low cost. A combination of solar, wind, and nuclear led to decarbonization at the lowest cost. New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have introduced subsidies to keep their nuclear power plants profitable and running, rather than trying to meet energy demands with renewables alone. But keeping America’s current fleet running is not enough to decarbonize the electricity sector.”

it wouldn’t need saving if people weren’t so dumb and mood-affiliated.

Reality & Straight lines

Does reality drive straight lines on graphs, or do straight lines on graphs drive reality?

Here’s a graph of US air pollution over time:

Some people pointed out that this showed the Clean Air Act didn’t matter. The trend is the same before the Act as after it. This kind of argument is common. If we wanted to be really harsh, we could make a graph like this:

But the same argument that disproves the importance of photolithography disproves the importance of anything else. We’d have to retreat to a 1000-coin-flips model where each factor is so small that it happening or not happening at any given time doesn’t change the graph in a visible way.

Warren Wrong

This entire plan gets headlines (duh) because so many people are (perhaps reasonably!) angry at the power of big tech companies. But, very little in the actual plan makes much sense. The “platform utility” idea will lead to massive, wasteful, stupid lawsuits. The unwinding of old mergers will involve interfering with an independent agency, and seem unlikely to do much to change the main “concerns” that Senator Warren raises in the first place.

Data Incumbency

Open-data requirements could make it clearer who is providing a valuable service and who is primarily exploiting information asymmetries between creators and services. They could help identify the genuine rip-offs that thrive on opacity, such as the chronic underpayment of artists or the role of concert organizers in ticket black markets. They could help answer the perennial question of whether streaming payments and other licensing schemes are fair to artists, based not on a notional “value gap” but on who else is getting a cut.

Prospiracy Theories

Last week I wrote about how conspiracy theories spread so much faster on Facebook than debunkings of those same theories. A few commenters chimed in to say that of course this was true, the conspiracy theories had evolved into an almost-perfect form for exploiting cognitive biases and the pressures of social media. Debunkings and true beliefs couldn’t copy that process, so they were losing out. This sounded like a challenge, so here you go:

Data Is Not the New Oil

data isn’t the new oil, in almost any metaphorical sense, and it’s supremely unhelpful to perpetuate the analogy. Oil is literally a liquid, fungible, and transportable commodity. The global market is designed to take a barrel of oil from the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia and, as frictionlessly as possible, turn it into a heated apartment in Boston or a moving commuter bus in New York. With data, by contrast, the abstract bits are functionally static. The distinction between the service that provides user value and the previously cited bounty hunters who buy trafficked location data becomes clear when considering the 2 biggest triumphs of privacy legislation: the European Union’s GDPR and California’s Consumer Privacy Act. Both require data handlers to gain user consent and place various administrative hurdles around the third-party use of data. A well-known app, publisher, or online store like Facebook, The New York Times, or Amazon can easily collect consent. Who doesn’t just click Accept on all the popups to get to the story or product you want? But what if some random company like LocationSmart (implicated in the bounty hunter data leak) needs to find you and collect consent? Best of luck with that.