Privacy and data dignity

Data dignity

People should have a real say over what happens to their data, and the means to act on it.

A say isn’t worth much on its own. A citizen of the industrial age could reasonably expect access to a doctor, a solicitor and an accountant, professionals whose job was to make a complicated world navigable on their behalf. The information age arrived without an equivalent. Data dignity means building the missing profession: a suite of services that lets ordinary people manage the complexity of modern information systems, rather than be managed by them.

Duty to the member

Nobody can navigate this alone, and it’s unreasonable to expect them to.

Reading the terms and conditions on every platform you use is a full-time job. Knowing which permissions are right for your child, or which sites they should be on, is a specialist question. These are exactly the situations where a person should be able to have a professional act for them, in their interests, and be accountable for it.

A doctor’s first obligation is to their patient. A trustee’s is to the beneficiary. A solicitor’s is to their client’s case. A data union representative owes the same kind of duty to their member: to act only in that member’s stated interests, and never to be quietly working for someone else.

Impartiality

The same service to every member, regardless of who they are or how they came to need it.

Every profession that acts for people has arrived at some version of this. Prisoners of war are entitled to medical treatment once the fighting stops. Losing your bank account over your political views is treated as a warning sign about the health of a society, whatever you think of the account holder. And we can distinguish between a barrister defending an obviously guilty client and a barrister endorsing the crime, because the legal system only works for anyone if it works for everyone.

The professional serves the system as well as the client. That means holding the line when there’s an emotional pull to make an exception.

Confidentiality

Your account is a lock and key. You decide what goes in, and who gets to see it.

The parallel is a bank account, or property rights more generally. It’s very hard to exercise any economic or political right over something you own if you can’t control who has access to it. A gate you can’t close isn’t really a gate.

A data union membership account is a secure store in the older sense of a bank: somewhere to put your information, connect only the services you choose, set a price, and say no. That control is what turns data from something taken from you into something you hold, and it’s the precondition for real rights in online spaces, the same way property rights underwrote them offline.