In an era where goods/products and money was king, governments over-reached and implemented taxes without representation. The great social cry of that time was “No Taxation without Representation.”
We now live in an era where data is king, in both its public and private (secret) forms. Today’s government’s overreach in surveillance and collection. Yet we know almost nothing about what is collected and how it is used. We can’t even expect our representatives to debate or push back on any aspect of the surveillance/data collection because it is all secret. We need to be able to know what is collected, why and for what purpose and discuss whether it makes sense. Today’s social cry is “No Collection without Conversation.”
Oh, and by the way, given the power of corporations today, and their data practices, this applies to them as well.
Postscript: Just after writing this, I saw Clay Shirky tweet about an earlier blog post he wrote saying “big data is our generation’s civil rights issue.”
Guess we’re all on the same wavelength these days, and he’s right. So let’s give it a rallying cry.