Hey! You! Get Off Of My Cloud!

Facebook is taking my friends -- who they are, what we say to each other, the pictures and videos we share -- and saying they own that data. Google recently got in trouble for accidentally picking up wi-fi -- as they drove around collecting hotspot information.

Google wants all the data in the universe. They're not going to charge me for it, but when I go looking for it, they want to "help" me out.

There are three types of businesses you can have any more. You can make pipes -- bring the internet to the house. You can hold data that goes through the pipes -- search data, map data, library data, whatever. Or you can write an application that transforms data, like QuickBooks, which transforms receipts, bills, and invoices into accounting data.

Transformative apps are becoming a sucker's game: the economics are driving most all software prices to zero, and creating the data is generally not as important as moving it or sharing it with the right people.

The pipe business is going like gangbusters, although most providers are looking at greed instead of Quality of Service, and they're going to pay the piper for that choice. But at the end of the day, the pipe business is mechanical and limited. Once you have 100 Gigs to the house, you're probably going to be okay for a while.

The data business, on the other hand, is the great internet land rush of the 21st century. Everybody wants to take parts of your life, your thoughts, your conversations, your email, your videos, your pictures, and "keep" them for you.

It's causing a lot of problems because the key issue here is this: is the computer a device like a record player that I store things on to play back at some future point? Or is it an extension of my mind?

The mp3 file-sharers have understood this problem for some time. If I hear a song, can I whistle it on the way to work? Can I record it on my mp3 player and listen to it any time I want? Can I share it with others? Their mantra, for quite a few years, is "data has to be free" The idea is that once an artist does a performance the information becomes bits and freely travels everywhere, whether we like it or not. Whether we try to outlaw it or not.

The computer is an information freedom device, moving all human knowledge and art around freely to everybody, enabling the world to know and act on the same data.

But then kids started taking pictures of themselves naked and sending them to each other on the phone. Or taking drunken pictures at college and posting them on FB. People have arguments via chat and words are said that live on forever.

Data never forgets, but people do (or used to)

Let's say I am 17u and living a wild life. I take lots of pictures and videos and write lots of blog posts that are radical, weird, or whatever. Perhaps due to some chemical imbalance I go insane and spend time posting totally incoherent thoughts for a year.

Later on I get that fixed -- it was something both natural and outside my control that caused me to act in an extremely anti-social manner.

Years pass. I go to college. I get a job as a lawyer. One day they ask me to be a judge. People Google me and blam! There's my life.

Now people will tell you that in this wondrous mysterious future, everybody will have skeletons in the closet and being able to find bad things on Google won't be such a big deal. This is akin to saying that since photography was invented, it wasn't a problem for folks to have slanderous pictures floating around, since there were a lot more slanderous pictures once photography had been invented. It's stretching the truth quite a bit. There will be folks with little to poke fingers at, and there will be folks with lots to poke fingers at. Who do you think is going to do better at being a judge?

The internet never forgets.

Worse still, the great data land rush is causing all sorts of little data islands to pop up. Each island has various rules and various standards of what to share with whom.

At the heart of this is a simple question: once the great singularity comes, are we going to evolve into a thinking machines that will live forever? Or are we evolving into some kind of hive mind where everything is shared and processed in parallel?

So here is my proposal.

Each person owns a file that describes everything they have put on the internet. Perhaps it's XML, don't care. Every time I tweet, or email, or post on FB, or record a video, or write a blog -- every tiny piece of data that I produce that is shared with anybody at all goes into this XML file.

Then I get to go in and annotate what I want to share with others. I may change this at any time. This is a passive standard -- people like FB and Google check this file from time to time and honor my wishes as to how my data is being presented or shared. Perhaps I keep this data on a key dongle, or on a PC, or in the cloud. Doesn't matter. But I separate the data from the ownership. Sure, I might choose to share any number of pieces of data with anybody on the web. Perhaps I blog, tweet about it, then post it on FB. But I get to say what my wishes are. If ten years later I am embarrassed by that post, I get to withdraw it.

The internet needs to be able to forget.

I'm not proposing a law, but I am saying that it is vitally important that each of us control our concept of self, of who we are. It used to be that if you made mistakes people would forget who you were and you could move on. It is absolutely critical that we provide this same functionality into whatever we're changing into.

It used to be that there was only one or two places that could index or hold all of the internet. As storage prices drop, the price of data storage is dropping through the floor and the number of organizations able to store all the data we generate in our lives is increasing geometrically. It is already impracticable for me to find all the places some picture might appear and annotate it with "but I was just a kid then". In the future instead of making me chase my data, my data should point back to me. We need a robots.txt file for people.

Bits still gotta be free, but there is a difference between a book, song, or movie and my life. As bits start adding up to cover more and more of my life, you're not just sharing some tune anymore: you're taking away my soul.

I don't want to be the Borg.

For those of you who don't get the pun in the title, obligatory link (and yes, this was before my time)