I don't know, maybe it is. Maybe the politics of our world simply are that cynical and won't allow for such a thing to exist. But I guess I'm hoping it isn't. I'm trying to imagine how a non-authoritarian institution would work; it wouldn't have the "authority" to compel anyone to turn over their data, but just about everyone would have enough trust in the community and its decision making process to be okay with it.

What I guess I'm asking is ... what if the organizations we built looked more like the WHO, and less like the CIA?

What if information could be revoked? Imagine the government suspects me in some investigation. I give them a key that gives them all information about me and my recent activities. Then once some period elapses, I revoke that key and they no longer have any of that information. Nor, of course, were they able to copy or independently distribute it in any way when they had it.

This is probably pure fantasy, but if there was any way this scenario would be possible, I think it would go a long way to assuaging people's concerns. As it is, we know data can be copied and distributed without permission. That's kind of been the underlying problem of spies throughout the history of the world.

I think this concept is where Stephenson was going with Snow Crash, but his scenario for this seemed like fantasy as well to me.

> What if information could be revoked?

What if information can't be revoked on systems outside your control? That's the reality, however many secret handshakes you do, blockchain, etc, eventually some person or process knows something and can do something with it (e.g. copy it).

You could pull a gmail and say, there is no human in the loop, it's just a process of personal data ingestion and ads come out the other end. That might be more comforting if it was open source, but even open systems have things can be hidden in obscure technical details.

The truth is, we are all human, including our leaders. Your average human is weak and susceptible to trading a vast privilege like having control of everyone's whereabouts for favors (e.g. money, position, control, sex, etc...).

I'm a sucker for an open source process (e.g. robot) that would look at the data and tell us who needs to be quarantined, but again, you still have human technical people, with all their failings, controlling the system (e.g. source code). How much do you trust the open source process is a matter open for debate.

I maintain that copying is fine in some or a lot of cases because stale data has a diminishing ROi and eventually becomes useless. Doesn’t mean the govt couldn’t amass data from multiple sources to provide a complete picture of you. But you just proposed DRM for your personal data and we all know about the analog loophole...

Every time I think about this issue, the closest I can get is a distributed world of APIs, where everyone hosts their own data [however], and for any service whether it be government, commercial, work, friendly, etc, the entity's agent makes an API request and gets a result. But that result isn't the data - it's a privacy-focused result that can be used in place of the data.

The simple example would be "I'd like to send indigochill a gift", which would send a request to your API (with some notification for you to approve or deny receiving said package) and return an id that could be written or printed on an envelope. That id is unique and the mail service would scan the id and the package would be routed. And the mail carrier would scan the id and get an actual address (or a blip on their map of the block or something). Nobody along the way has learned your address or name or anything - nor do they know my address, which is just another unique id.

There are some very interesting implications in that data can become stale so quickly. If you approved of receiving the package but were out of town for the week, the package could be routed directly to you without any interaction whatsoever. Nobody along the way would know the difference between your home or your hotel room.

The same could easily be done for lots of personal data. Phone numbers, email addresses, etc. All your shopping history could be stored on your own private data store and the local grocery stores would send out a mailer "Address this mailer to all people in the neighborhood who have purchased discounted burgers in the past month". The store doesn't know who is getting the flyer, but the people who would be likely to use a coupon for buying burgers would get a notification and likely go buy some burgers on sale - or reject the notification and not be bothered - to the savings of the store and the recipient.

Social Media could still exist with this sort of thing but the services would be querying engines rather than the creepy data warehouses that they've become.

This of course gets significantly harder with the queries this article is about, but the idea is the same. Instead of "give me everyone's location for the past month", the request would be "give me the anonymized ids of people who have been to x locations for x amount of time within x amount of space between one another". The response would provide data that could be used for the purpose in question, but the underlying data remains private.

I've been pondering this idea on random occasion for about 15 years, but I don't care enough about it to make it my life's work. But I sure would like to live in a world with that level of data ownership and privacy.

Sounds like an interesting possible world that might one day get built.

In the meantime, sounds like most likely outcome is the government hits CTRL C, CTRL V on Facebook/google’s user database and starts a China/Tencent style SQL dB on every American.

Or even more likely, this already exists and now the government can start using it more openly.

This could be possible if the data is stored encrypted in a public ledger (blockchain), which has time-locked script functions that permit another key to decrypt certain pieces of data for a limited duration. I think something like this is a primary goal of most decentralized identity projects, some of which have been underway for around a decade.

Of course none of this stops the person with temporary access from making a copy to save forever. I doubt that problem has a technical solution but would love to be proved wrong.

I think the solution would be sending as little data as possible to answer the query, and choosing which/how many queries to respond to. Any large scale requests for data would have to be designed in a way that minimizes intrusiveness or risks being largely ignored. I don't think there's a great way to counter spoofing or sending garbage results without sacrificing user control, but the onus to de-noise should be on whatever institution is attempting to collate data. Additionally, if it's an opt-in system focused on public good there would generally not be much incentive to mess with it as long as users are somehow verified as being in the community (cert generated/granted once after initial identity check, etc). Sadly this is all very pie in the sky at the moment, the amount of cultural change + added infrastructure required for any system like this at the scale of a country would be insane

That's a good point. A common example is how a bar doesn't need to know your birthday, let alone your home address or driver license number, but right now it's common to hand over your entire id. All they need is a yes/no answer to "is this person 21+ today?"

Personally, I think the only way we will retake our privacy is when hobby level, readily available hardware, software, and 3d printable parts enable hobbyists to create “good enough” phones with encryption and privacy options that won’t exist in mass market phones.

Then an enterprising startup can deliver marked-up, preassembled devices, then people might have privacy again.

The goalposts on "good enough" keep moving. When everyone else has a holographic direct-to-eye refraction display, people are going to be as disappointed in a 2020-level smartphone as people were with OpenMoko devices, which still had a pressure-sensitive touch screen with a plastic stylus when the iPhone has just come out with its relatively massive capacitive multitouch display.

I was disappointed with the OpenMoko for many reasons, but the screen wasn't one.

Things like it wouldn't read my sim (bug 666), the stylus was almost required, but there was no place to put it, audio issues, sleep/wake issues, poor battery indication and tricky to charge from a flat battery.

Sure, the screen was kind of small, but the resolution was high, so you could claim hidpi before Apple invented it?

Depends...'good enough' goalposts are for a particular audience. Technophobes seeking privacy are certainly less motivated to upgrade to a holographic direct-to-eye display, than a technophile.

Personally, I like the idea of a Fairphone with Lineage/MicroG.

I say like the idea of as opposed to use as currently Fairphone is out of my budget and I can't find a phone in my budget range that's supported by Lineage/MicroG so I just have somewhat reliable <£100 phone with as much de-googling as I can while still having normal android.. (Not much)

Edit: the bonus of phones in this price range is like Fairphones they almost always make it easy to quickly remove the battery so you're certain nothing's running.

You would still have position data based on triangulation from signal level / latency for different BTSes.

You can already buy a Blackphone. Almost no-one does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackphone

It exists. Its not that people "don't allow" non-authoritarian institutions/solutions. Its that they have their own limitations in dealing with complexity. Rationality is Bounded. Know what the bounds are. Read some Herbert Simon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

Look at the EU. There is no dearth of cockups there, even though their instinct at everything is non-authoritarian.

From a sovereignty perspective, that's a nonstarter.

I think you just described Facebook.

I would trust the CCC or the EFF with this I think, and the other paranoid fighters for privacy. But only as long as it takes for the to rotate their members enough for takeover by others.

We've seen that wit smaller political parties as well. When membership suddenly become a viable path to power things change in the structure and people.

>But only as long as it takes for the to rotate their members enough for takeover by others.

This is the key. The power makes joining their ranks appealing to those that would abuse the power.

I agree. Once you cross the point in organizational size where people stop feeling personally responsible for the organization and start feeling responsible to the organization it starts behaving like a sociopath in pursuit of whatever it's official goals are (shareholder value, catching criminals, etc).

You can mitigate this to some extent by having one or a couple people who are personally responsible for the whole organization (royal families in monarchies, the owners of privately owned companies, etc) but then your organixation is not resilient to bad leadership.

I agree but it's also the most compelling fantasy in human history.

I disagree that "large" authorities could be fantastic. Authority, like most things, is better when smaller. For one thing, a small authority is more likely to notice those people subject to it.

Just to be clear, I don't subscribe to it. But I have noticed that pretty much any time anyone has a good idea, their next idea is to force everyone to do it.