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Mike Hind's avatar

Love this as a pragmatic overview - thanks!

Am I naïve in thinking that this could be helped with transparency legislation. Proper transparency legislation?

Here in Europe we are prompted to say 'I'm fine with this' when informed that a site is going to involve me in this ecosystem. Or not visit *the content I want to see, already 10 seconds ago* 🙄

But I would like to see a report from an app/site that told me a month later (if I wanted to know) exactly what data was captured & everyone it was pushed out to.

I feel stupid even thinking this could be a thing. Yet, apart from scale, what's the blocker?

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Steven Hessing's avatar

5 steps to fix social media and online advertising through legislation

1. Companies must a publish a technical specification of all information they collect and store about people that use their service, from the perspective of an individual person using their service. This specification must include which of that data is shared with 3rd parties and on what terms that sharing happens. Think about this specification as a 'data contract' and an addendum to the privacy policy of the service

2: Companies must make APIs available to allow people to download their information at any point of time and this information will comply with the technical specification of #1

3: Companies must support storing and retrieving this information for a person at any and all times in a data storage platform specified by that person. This data must always match the information stored in the internal systems of the company

4: Companies must allow persons to demand that all data about them is only stored in their data storage platform and that none of this data must be stored in the internal systems of the company

5: Companies must not store any data about any of the people that use their platform but must store and retrieve that data from the data storage platform specified by those people

The thinking is, once you have full control over your data and, through the specification, know what that data means, you have full control of managing your data and its usage.

For more info, https://stevenhessing.medium.com/ and https://github.com/StevenHessing/byoda

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