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. archives in liquid times 318 319

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2017 | | pagina 161