Hi fine people from Mattermost!
I'm Christoph from CloudFleet. We are creating a private data center for everybody, because we think that people should have control over their own data.
We now have a finished product and will start a crowdfunding campaign at 32C3 at the end of December.
To explain our motivation behind that I drafted a Data Autonomy Manifesto and I am looking for other projects, that enable people to take back control, who also want put their weight behind these demands. The domain dataautonomy org is already reserved for this purpose.
As Mattermosts vision is closely aligned with ours, you are an obvious choice for this list (you'll also be mentioned in our next blog post about 9 essential tools to take back control over your data).
The first draft of the manifesto is below.
Please tell me what you think about it and if you think Mattermost as a project would be interested in joining the movement!
cheers
Christoph
Data is the oil of the 21st century.
Preamble
The amount of data collected by and about individuals has risen to a staggering
amount within the last 20 years. The main driver of this development are the
increasing capacities to store, to transfer and to search through all this data.
Part of this data is consciously collected by us. Part is collected about us and
a part is the result of our interactions. Regardless of how the data comes into
being, for the most part we do not have sovereignty over it. Other people
have access to it, with or without our knowledge and consent, and in many cases
they derive a lot of value through it.
At least two of the biggest companies of our days – Google and Facebook – make
money almost exclusively by trading on the data their users generate while
another – Amazon – is using the data of its users to build a retail monopoly across
all categories and geographic regions.
But not only private actors lust after our data. Government agencies like the
NSA built incredible infrastructures designed to collect every piece of data
they can get their hands on. Shielded by laws that profess to protect
"national security", they assemble a treasure trove that is beyond everything
the surveillance-obsessed J Edgar Hoover had dreamed of.
This information economy made some people a lot of money while it failed
miserably at making the world safer. Furthermore, it poses a danger to our future.
The first rule of a con artist is to know the victim. If you know the hopes and
dreams of people, you can easily manipulate them. The collection of data about
us makes us susceptible to manipulation by those who possess it.
That is why we have to take a stand. We have to declare that our data is ours,
and ours alone until we explicitly give consent to use it. That's why we put
forward the Data Autonomy Manifesto.
The Data Autonomy Manifesto
We claim back what is ours! We claim sovereignty over our data. We demand every
entity that collects data about us to grant us the three powers that are
necessary to achieve Data Autonomy:
The Power of Knowledge
We have the right to know what data exists about us.
Every entity that collects data about us has to inform us of that fact. They
also have to inform us what data is collected and about the purpose
of this endeavor.
The Power of Access
We have the right to access our data.
If data is stored about us or by us we have the irrevocable right to access it.
Every service that accepts our data or collects data about us has to make this
data accessible to us at all times until we decide to delete it.
The Power of Control
We have the right to decide who gets access to our data.
Our data may be shared if and only if we give explicit consent to share
a well-defined subset of our data with a specific other entity.
This concerns data that we collect, like photo albums or emails, but
also data that is collected about us, like energy use or credit card
transactions.