A "for dummies" glossary of electronic identities

[alberto]

Interesting about #GoodID, @teirdes, I was not aware of it.

What do you think about identity as a tradeable commodity? A month ago Rob and @hugi and I went to MyData 2019, and we found this:

@alberto

To my surprise, the MyData community seems to have a rough consensus that monetizing personal data is not a long-term sustainable way to run a data economy. The person that came up with the clearest formulation was perhaps Finnish lawyer Jussi Mäkinnen (not verbatim, I am quoting from my notes):

When copyright was invented in the 17th century, lawmakers conjured up a new property right, the right to own something immaterial. They knew it was a bit of a ghost, with little grounds in terms of the legal system of the time, but they wanted a way to reward the creators and their publishers. That, however, created more long-term problems than it solved. So, we have learned from the copyright story that legislating private ownership of personal data is probably a bad idea.

Ingrid Schneider’s super-good talk at the same conference went on to list four main proposals around the economic models for a data society. One of them was

@alberto

• Individual data ownership + micropayments (Jaron Lanier, 2015).

But, as I said, at MyData these ideas seemed to be shrugged off as old and overtly neoliberal, not ideas that a respectable adult can really entertain, and certainly not in Europe. A fortiori this should apply to identity, no?