Data for the People

Data for the People, by Andreas Weigend, is coming out this week, or maybe it came out last week. Andreas is a leading technologist (at least that's the most accurate one-word description I can think of), and I have valued his insights ever since we were colleagues at NYU almost twenty years ago. Since then he's moved on to many other things; see http://www.weigend.com. 

Andreas challenges prevailing views about data creation and "data privacy". Rather than perpetuating a romanticized view of data privacy, he argues that we need increased data transparency, combined with increased data literacy, so that people can take command of their own data. Drawing on his work with numerous firms, he proposes six "data rights":

-- The right to access data
-- The right to amend data
-- The right to blur data
-- The right to port data
-- The right to inspect data refineries
-- The right to experiment with data refineries

Check out Data for the People at http://ourdata.com.


[Acknowledgment: Parts of this post were adapted from the book's web site.]