arnoud glaudemans, rienk jonker and frans smit documents, archives and hyperhistorical
societies: an interview with luciano floridi
EDITORS: A book by Jaron Lanier: Who owns the future (2013) is about regulating
the personal possession of data.
FLORIDI: I had several interactions with him, as we are members of the same
committee on the European General Data Protection Regulation. I'm afraid I
disagree with what I take it to be his vision. It is natural to think that data are a
property and therefore that data usage can have a price that will be regulated by the
market. But the truth is that personal information is not about what the 'market'
should regulate. It is about social preferability of what we want to do. Data become
useful and valuable only when hugely aggregated. That is why I keep stressing that
what makes the difference here is the amount of data. Lately I checked the value of
my profile, I think it was a service provided by the Financial Times. It was less than
the value of a song on iTunes. I am sure that is the case for most people. Nobody
cares about a grain of sand. Everybody cares about the beach. So I would argue
exactly the opposite: precisely because money is left out we can care about personal
information, because it is not a possession, but the priceless information that
constitutes one's personal identity. If we start attaching one dollar of worth to a
personal profile, we're done. If there is no price attached to those personal data,
then the use of those data is not regulated by the forces of the market.
EDITORS: There is also another issue concerning ownership of information, at least
in Dutch law. You cannot really own the information 'itself'. You only own the
carrier: the floppy, the (piece of) paper, the disk drive or whatever. When you would
regulate ownership of information 'itself', you could also regulate responsibilities
concerning the information. What is your point of view on this?
FLORIDI: There is very little information that we own strictly speaking, unless you
have the copyright on something. In that case you basically own the information,
the content. Anything else is not covered by law, there is no contract.
I think it is important to understand that the private owes badly to the public. The
private has taken huge advantage, rightly so and legally so, of public resources. It
would be great to see the private put back into the 'common good' some of the value
extracted from such resources. I am talking about data here, just data. Because when
it comes to software services, it is the other way round, the public is taking an
enormous advantage of the private. Take all the services we have that are free, just
because someone somewhere is providing them in exchange of personal data and
attention. The governments should have done that, but they did not. This brought us
the current situation of data exploitation. I can image a world in which a company
says to a government: you are using my software for free, so I am using your data for
free.
Data donation, to me, is part of the solution for a better future. However, there has
to be a shift in culture. It is a small shift from the philanthropic donation of money
for the public good - which is not uncommon - to the donation of data. Today, data
is the valuable resource. There must be a switch in perspective.
EDITORS: By way of finishing this interview, could you elaborate on what archivists
and/or the archival community should or shouldn't do, maybe on the ethical side,
given all the developments in archives and data we discussed?
FLORIDI: That is quite an open question, and it is a big one. I would like to address a
more general ethical issue relating to current digital developments, that of self-
determination. In this regard, the questions to ask are: how much do we want to
have digital media empowering people to determine their lives and be well
informed? Can people still decide to have a life apart from the constraining power of
the profiling techniques? What can we do if the interest of the profiling or
monitoring entity becomes mainly to influence and predict, so to manipulate the
behaviour of the individual? We should not be too paranoid, they might just want to
sell me another fridge, which is not the end of the world. But what if they stop
selling me fridges and instead want to sell me ideas about what world I should live
in? This is the scary bit, because what we have at the moment is basically a 'fingers
crossed strategy'. At the moment, the immense power they have is exercised in a
mostly benevolent way. But we are relying on hope, that nothing goes wrong, and
that is not reassuring.
It is the self-determination and the autonomous individual that is at stake. Of
course, basic trust is important in the present world. But should we just rely on
trust? Should we not also have some constraints, accountability, liability,
expectations? In English we use trust also as a verb. 'I trust you' means that I believe
strongly that you are a good person, that you mean well, and will do your best to
deliver on expectations. That is also the way we are trusting digital companies. I trust
they will not do anything harmful. I trust that if they do not behave well is because it
is a mistake, not a plan. Yet this looks to me like a weak strategy. What I do doubt is
whether trust is a successfully strategy here; it is like leaving the door unlocked, and
trust that no one comes in to steal anything. It is an unsafe kind of trust.
One of the final, defining questions concerning the next step of information society
is: where should we support trust with further, social, legal, political frameworks? As
we speak, the major actors are realising that they have to be good citizens. They are
no longer playing the sort of 'we-are-neutral', 'we are not involved', 'we just give
people what they want' kind of game. They are also given big fines by the European
Union, and they might start listening. The question here is, how do we start
changing and getting on with implementing the good side of citizenship. That
means not only trust, but also playing according to the right rules and taking
responsibility. In short, the biggest challenge in front of us is the governance of the
digital.
I am an optimist, so be careful when I say that this is the way things will go. More
pessimistically, perhaps I should say that if we have a good future for our
information society, then that is the way forward - which does not mean that we
will take it. It is more like: if we want a good information society, which is socially
preferable and something that we would sign out for, it is a society in which big
corporate actors in the information world play their role as good corporate citizens.
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