James;
I’m unaware of such a group collaboration with respect to the GDPR, but would also love to find out about it if it exists. I’ve had to read the GDPR end to end a number of times recently for an engagement I had. It will be interesting to see how what you call, I think correctly, “a powerful point of view”, interacts with the also powerful forces of commercial inertia that have build the personal data ecosystem based on a de facto treatment of personal data as property. My experiences with large enterprises suggests that we are at the confluence of a number of development curves:
- Personal Data Economy: This is how the Internet was monetized and is fully mature. It is predicated on contracts of adhesion or terms of use that enable one way doors for the collection of personal information by entities that then get to use that data as they see fit, with marginal constraints that appear occasionally if a particularly heinous security or privacy incident reaches a regulator or the press. This is in many ways a mature market.
- Big Data: Moore’s law has put affordable big data on the table. Despite the hype in the media and with VC’s my suspicion is that actual useful big data installations are still at the Early Adopters stage. Much of the predicted profit from Big Data comes from the personal data economy and assumes unfettered access to data lakes of personal information. This is where ‘innovation’ is happening. And it’s not good for the GDPR or our personal data autonomy generally.
Notwithstanding nattering about these innovations, large organizations with a dependency on the status quo will push back hard against anything that might require a change in business model or business processes. Similarly, startups seeking VC money tend to articulate their MVP in terms of existing schema for profit and monetization. A couple of cliché’s come to mind involving rocks and hard places or immovable objects and irresistible forces.
This is why the Kantara Incubator is so necessary and exciting. It presents researchers and startups with an opportunity to innovate against the mature personal data economy itself, rather than try and come up with news ways of monetization (which is essentially all that the current big data initiatives appear to be). I don’t know what the successor to the Personal Data Economy will be. It may be as simple as the Personalized Data Economy, where the locus of control shifts from the data controller to the subject. But it seems clear that the GDPR and the Personal Data Economy as it is currently constituted are mutually incompatible.
