Jul 7, 2020 - 3 ' read

The conundrum of personalized data

Posted on July 7, 2020

There's been a lot of debate regarding data ownership and the use of harvested private data. I think we all enjoy personalized products, especially when we discover something new and exciting. The problem arises when the data starts to be tied to our real identity and sold to 3rd parties. To exemplify what I'm referring to, I've organized a small tier list based on products I use:

Tier 1

Products and services that are not tied to a real identity nor respond to real world events and use data to enhance the product/service. Those products/services generally do not seek you have you spend large amounts of money.
Prime example, Spotify. You're free to sign up to Spotify with a 10 minute mail address. Spotify gives you music, and it recommends more music as you keep listening.
The data is reinvested in the customer.
Note: I am aware that they've been involved in some more questionable debacles in the past two years or so. I'm talking more about how hypothetically a tier 1 service would look like.

Tier 2

Products and services that are not tied to a real identity nor respond to real world events in any significant way and use data to enhance the product/service. Those products/services generally try to keep you on that platform so you can spend more money on that platform.
Steam is a great case. Steam sells games and wants to sell more games (also one VR headset). Steam wants you to keep spending money so they use that data to recommend you games and keep you on hook for sales. These types of platforms may occasionally take proactive action to real world events, such as themed sales and donations.
The data is reinvested in the platform.

Tier 3

Products and services that are tied to a real identity or to real world events and use data to enhance the product/service. Those products/services generally try to keep you on that platform so you can spend more money and more time on that platform. Primarily ad based.
I was going to use facebook as an example but I haven't used it in years so I'll use youtube instead. Youtube tries to maximize the time you spend watching videos so they can serve you more ads. They may also have options to spend money on the platform itself (youtube premium). These types of platforms drastically respond to real world events, changing codes of conduct and often banning people. These platforms often track users even outside the platform and try to hoard as much data as possible (such as physical related data like location and location history).
Data is invested into 3rd party advertisers, the user is the product.
I think most people are fine with Tier 1 and more Tier 2 types of services, especially if the data is handled with proper care and anonymized. The problem appears with Tier 3 products that end up being invasive and often enough influencing people. This problem is increased by an order of magnitude once you start involving politics and politicizing issues.

Possible Solutions

There can be multiple ways this problem is approached, such as governmental intervention and regulations. Since governments don't exactly have a great track record when it comes to dealing with tech, I'd personally go for decentralization and containerization. Have google not use your gmail data for your Maps recommendations. Stop the borderline surveillance and tracking of people once they leave the platform. Allow the creation of localized forks of the product. Give incentive to people to be products, like Brave does. You can see ads in exchange for a percentage of the money generated by that ad.
In terms of actual technologies that can be used for this, I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader. I'm not a network/infrastructure engineer, but personally I'm a fan of blockchain and containers. The idea of forking an existing product after it stops being what you want it to be or when you want to make some personal adjustments to it, like to a github project, is very appealing, despite the fact it can often seem infeasible.
As for us users, we can also take steps towards a more decentralized internet. Stop using one account for everything. Don't sign in with a facebook/google account, set up a new account, and use a password manager to generate a strong and unique password. Even if the product gets compromised, you can minimize your risk this way.