Zannah: When Valentina Pavel was a teenager growing up in Bucharest, Romania, her mother told her a story about life under communist rule in that country in the 1970s.
Valentina: So when my mother wanted to join law school during the communist regime in Romania alongside the written exam, she also had to pass an interview where the committee checked for so called good behavior and they did all sort of background checks and she told me that she was afraid you might not get into law school because her grandfather supported political regime, which was against the Communism. So the entire family did everything they could so that this information doesn’t get out. And in the end, it turned out, uh, it turned out good. She joined the law school in Bucharest. But I remember the emotions and the fear that she expressed when… when she told me the story and everybody was simply terrified, that this information should not get out because it’s put in danger her receiving the formal education.
Zannah: This story about family secrets, political alliances, whispered rumors and a little scrap of data with the power to make or break a life. This story stuck with Valentina when she grew up, Valentina studied law just like her mom. Now she researches privacy, data protection and data governance models. In 2018 she was awarded a Mozilla Fellowship. Also Valentina is a time traveler.
Chad: On this very first episode of MozCast, a new podcast from the Mozilla Foundation we’ll travel with Valentina into the future to explore the ways our personal data might shape emerging technologies, everyday lives, vast global economies in 2030. And will also learn about how you can become a time traveler like Valentina. And contribute to her project, Our Data Future. I’m Chad Sansing, co-host of MozCast.
Zannah: And I’m Zannah Marsh. MozCast co-host and producer. MozCast is a new experiment in audio storytelling about projects and the people working to make the Internet we all use every day better and healthier. We’re working for a more decentralized, open Web with more user agency over things like privacy and data security.
Chad: Welcome to MozCast. MozCast is one of several new channels we’ll be piloting to help people stay connected and engaged throughout the year from one MozFest to the next. If you’ve never been to MozFest. It’s Mozilla’s annual gathering of educators, technologists, artists, activists, students and scientists. People like Valentina, who you just met, all working together for a better, healthier Internet and more trustworthy artificial intelligence.
Zannah: Yeah, there’s definitely a creative, energetic, festive party element to MozFest. It’s like a big, nerdy, awesome celebration of tech and activism. It’s pretty amazing.We’ll be talking much more about MozFest and this idea of trustworthy artificial intelligence in future episodes of MozCast.
Chad: Our aim is for this podcast to inspire you to dive in and get involved and engaged with some of these ideas and projects and maybe even get yourself to MozFest 2020.
Zannah: But didn’t you say there was gonna be time travel in this podcast? As part of our data future project, Valentina created four scenarios exploring how we use data in 2030. How about we visit the second in Valentina’s set of scenarios? Can you get us there, Chad?
Chad: Okay, I’ll try. In a world far into the future, where data has become currency and the cost of privacy has become far too high, one unit dives into the murky depths of the data economy.
Antis: I’m in my green pajamas. But I can’t say for sure if it’s morning or evening. My eyes are red from staring at screens. I’m discouraged and very tired. Of course, all these emotions and reactions are registered by my playbor, my pocket size smart console that has basically become my entire life. It’s my connection to family friends and the world, my health and mood monitor, my life organizer and personal assistant. Basically, how I earn my living. It’s my play, and it’s my labor. These days, fewer and fewer people go to work in an actual office. Everything happens through this device, which captures the data I generate on different platforms and pays me for all the data inputs. But in reality, everything goes to one single company, as most of the other platforms are its partner or affiliates. Last month, I enabled the health add-on on my console. So now it’s counting how frequently I go to the bathroom and it connects to the sensors in my toilet to collect data about my pee in my poop, this data sent to pharmaceutical companies so they could make better drugs. Maybe it’ll help cure the world from urinary infections, prostate disorders, digestion, problems and hemorrhoids. Every now and then, I’m tempted makes a bad joke about shit money. But health data pays better than most other types, so I’ll shut up. You know what else pays well? Entertainment data. I get bonuses for more juicy data such as my heart rate, eyeball movement and amount of perspiration when I watch movies, listen to an audio book like games or read articles, data associated with political media pays even better. After I learned that trick, my behavior changed a lot. I’m watching all the movies recommended in my playbor. I’m frenetically consuming Clickbait articles and trying to produce is much health related data as possible. My life and actions are all about how well they pay.
Zannah: You know some of that – using a device obsessively the constant tracking of all online activity. It feels like we’re already there or really, really close.
Chad: Many of these technologies and economic models already exist in one form or another. How soon will it be until they all come together? Until we depend on selling our data to make a living until we can’t live without our devices. Or until we choose another way. Valentina has given a lot of thought to questions like these in creating different scenarios for our data futures.
Valentina: In the first scenario, I talk about data as property, a model in which your own data as you would own a house or a piece of land. In the second scenario we’re being paid for data as labor, earning our monthly wage for the data we generate. The third scenario with store data in a national data fund, which is managed by both citizens and governments and companies need to pay an access fee if they want to use data for building different services. And in the last scenario, which is my, uh, my favorite, I speak about having rights for our data, which will mean it’s a much more comprehensive system of protection compared to the other ones, because it allows us more agency and autonomy over the data we generate. So the basic idea in our data future is to spark a meaningful discussion around the possibilities that lay ahead for our digital future and what are the potential implications.
Chad: I also think about the implications for people who opt out of a data economy. And the implications for people trapped in one data eco-system, managed by one tech giant, who can’t participate or get service is from another, controlled by a different tech giant.
Zannah: Yeah, I hear you Chad. You know, I really like the sound of Valentina’s fourth scenario, the one about data rights where every person has access to complete information about who uses their data and how. Can we go check that scenario out?
Chad: Oh, sure thing. Travel with me to the not so distant future to a brave new world where data transparency is the rule, not the exception, where one person is settling into a new home filled with the latest technology.
Antis: I just moved into a new apartment and everything was a mess. My stuff was all over the place and I couldn’t find anything. I received a notification on my dashboard that a delivery drone had arrived with my package. The dashboard showed me a summary report with information about how my data was handled. Which company processed my order, the type of data that was collected about me, why it needed that information and who this information was shared with. I’m getting more and more clean reports nowadays, but 10 years ago it was overwhelming to see these notifications. Few companies were good at implementing privacy minded data of operations and I just didn’t feel like I really had a choice about what to do with my data. Something that pushed companies to be more serious about data protection was the fact that the dashboard could communicate with the regulators’ enforcement systems. Any time there was mistreatment of data, I would receive a notification which I could decide to forward to my regulator. I did that A lot of times. Regulators are more resourceful than they used to be, so when they receive notifications, they would start an investigation. I like the data rights dashboard, because it saves me a lot of time. Before I made the order, it scanned the machine readable privacy policy and terms and conditions and showed me a summary report of all relevant provisions related to how my data was being handled. It analyzed both the companies that were selling the kitchen appliances I need for my new flat, but also the terms of the platforms that companies use to sell the products. The best part was that the summary didn’t just rely on what the privacy policy said. It also queried an official public database to see if there are any investigations related to the product I ordered. Additionally, it performed a deep search for any public information related to the product I wanted, to see if there were known breaches or news scandals connected to the product or to the company. I was shocked when I discovered that a team of investigative tech journalists had revealed that the smart vacuum, which I was initially attempted to buy, automatically sent the blueprints of my house together with metadata to a foreign intelligence agency.
Zannah: It’s really kind of amazing that you can do that Chad.
Chad: Time travel is my speciality.
Zannah: So I’ve always been a huge sci-fi fan, and I think you might lean in that direction too.
Chad: Oh, definitely thinking about the future helps me think about the present and what I should be doing with the time that I have to help work towards a world that I want.
Zannah: I really love that these ideas took the shape of stories with a particular setting and a character with their own motivations. If you go to our data futures website, you can see beautiful illustrations of Valentina’s main character, this sort of sparkly blue androgynous future human called Antis. Interacting with each technological scenario.
Chad: And taking this illustrated fictional approach was a strategic decision for Valentina.
Valentina: I simply wanted to engage as many people that’s possible in this discussion. And I don’t think the way to do it is by writing a policy brief or a legal analysis or an academic paper, because this, uh, this has limited reach and limited impact. I wanted something that really sticks to people, that is thought provoking, and that can spark interest in this very messy discussion on the ownership, because I’m alarmed about the growing claims around property rights for data or receiving payment for data, and I believe there’s a lot of misconceptions. So I wanted to first imagine how would this proposals evolve in time if we were to adopt them? And then I added, ah, a little bit of my own reflection and presented some legal arguments on top off the speculative scenarios that I wrote, and I hope I made this work a little more approachable and easy to understand and it really is a genuine invitation for people to start thinking about the future and how how we get there.
Chad: I think it’s much easier at the moment to understand what we get without fully understanding what we give up for some of the convenience from technologies we enjoy. Stories like these help us weigh the costs and compromises we have to make in the future if we don’t start thinking about data ownership right now.
Zannah: Yeah, and what’s super cool about the data rights story we heard earlier is that it was a late addition, part of a community discussion about the project. Valentina created in response to feedback from colleagues and contributors that a more positive future was missing from the mix.
Valentina: Initially, I drafted one or two scenarios and I posted this article on a mailing list called The Responsible Data. this is a community off privacy professionals and people interested in using data for social change, and I thought, it’s a great opportunity to receive meaningful feedback and open up the discussion to whoever was interested.
Chad: Actually, community contribution really shaped this entire project.
Zannah: So remember how we said you could become a time traveler and visit these futures along with Valentina.
Chad: Yep. Get your time travel pants on. First, check out the Art Data Future project and read each scenario in full. There’s some great stuff there, like robo dogs and data driven transport networks.
Zannah: Valentina writes about industrial data brokerages, incorporated people, the future of open hardware and a lot more. Also, Valentin is extending an open invitation to anyone who wants to imagine and expand on these and other data futures in creative ways.
Valentina: I’m looking for designers and creative thinkers to develop a visual journey for the data ownership discussion. I’m looking for filmmakers and video editors to turn the scenarios into a visual work. I’m looking for song writers and producers to record a data rights song. I’m looking for campaigners to start designing the Data Rights campaign and share a positive message on how to have autonomy and agency over our data. I would like this project to be surrounded by many creative minds and thinkers as possible.
Zannah: Your voice, your perspective and your contribution could become part of our data future. You can help shape the future of data rights and the broader movement for Internet Health. Actually, this is one of the core principles of Mozilla, and MozFest the idea of working openly. It’s about creating and supporting community driven projects where there’s an open invitation for anyone to be involved.
Chad: And where the products and processes of that collaborative work are accessible and remixable.If you want to know more about working open and Mozilla, check out the link to our Open Leadership and events site and newsletter in the episode notes below.
Zannah: You can find links to Valentina’s Our Data Future Project there and more information about Mozilla’s fellowship program and work on Internet Health, including the latest Internet Health report
Chad: That wraps our time traveling journey with Valentina. Thank you so much for joining us on this inaugural MozCast!
Zannah: Big thanks to Valentina Pavel for talking to us about our data future. And thanks to Anne Marie Carrothers, who was the voice of Antis. Our theme, music and sound effects were contributed by the amazing artists Tristan Whitehill and Kane Pour. You can find links to their work in the episode notes. This podcast is by Mozilla, released under a Creative Commons CC BY license. Thanks again and hope to see you for our next episode of MozCast.
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