Privacy and data dignity
Privacy and data dignity are the same project. Here’s what that means to us, and what we hold ourselves to.
Data dignity
The virtual world won’t integrate with the real one until the data subject is treated with the same dignity as the citizen.
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
Specialist services to act on your behalf, with only your interests in mind.
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.
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 our member’s stated interests so they can navigate IT systems with confidence.
Impartiality
The same service to every member, regardless of who they are or how they came to need it.
As our society has grown in complexity, most modern professions navigating it on behalf of their clients have arrived at some version of this. We can recognise that a barrister defending an obviously guilty client may not be endorsing their crime, as a legal system only works for anyone if it works for everyone. Similarly, 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 person holding the account. Even prisoners of war are entitled to medical treatment once the fighting stops, as a world where healthcare is dependent on your allegiances is hardly worth fighting for.
Each human being should be entitled to representation in online spaces if we are to have a well-informed digital society — we take our impartiality seriously to ensure that’s true.
Confidentiality
Your account is a lock and key and only you choose what you share and to who.
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. Your data is your property and simply requesting it and storing it in an account you control is a powerful protest in a world accustomed to apathy.
A data union account can be used as a confidential store for your information as you would store money in a bank. Acting as an interface into your GDPR rights, it’ll help you seamlessly request your data so you can control who sees it. That control is what turns data from something other people take from you into an asset you hold, and it’s the precondition for real rights in online spaces, the same way property rights underwrote them offline.
Solidarity
History teaches us that collective bargaining is what underwrites many of the rights we take for granted.
The institutions that made the industrial revolution survivable were membership institutions: trade unions, cooperatives, friendly societies, consumer associations. Those societies with healthy institutions benefited from more trust in business and communities in general. Those that missed the layer sitting between the state and capital fell to whichever pole was strongest.
A healthy society keeps the middle layer intact. It needs organisations that sit between the political class and the owning class and answer to neither. That goes as much for the age of mass surveillance as it did mass production, as much for data as it did labour. However, it only holds if the members, and ultimately the organisations themselves, mutually support one another.
While most traditional business models have been transformed for the information age, those institutions that traditionally guard solidarity have not yet updated their models for information economics. The result is a world where outrage, division, and exploitation are increasingly permitted as design choices in the platforms we all rely on for participation in digital life.
Collective bargaining with our data is the transformation needed to bring those institutions into the information age. That’s why we choose to disrupt by building for trade unions, consumer unions, NGOs, and mission-led companies.