Tweet of the day:
Ford's CEO just said on NPR that the future of profitability for the company is all the data from its 100 million vehicles (and the people in them) they'll be able to monetize. Capitalism & surveillance capitalism are becoming increasingly indistinguishable (and frightening).
— Kevin Bankston (@KevinBankston) November 18, 2018
If you stop to think for a second about what the most likely future outcome here is on the current trajectory, things get pretty scary, pretty fast. When it comes to data there are very different concerns and goals flying around, caused by the misalignment of incentives between individuals and businesses.
The next decade is going to see a huge acceleration in digital data exhaust trails from each of us and the problem around ownership of data generated from the use of cars alone has the potential to be huge.
Last year, Intel suggested that it would only take one million autonomous cars to generate the same data as three billion people. In other words, one car generating 4,000GB of data based on just one hour of driving.
The answer certainly doesn’t lie in the hands of the car manufacturers. And it’s hard to believe that the regulators will be able to truly fix the issue directly either. We need to fundamentally reimagine how data is secured and controlled by each individual. And I think I might just know how we can do it…
(And here’s something I wrote four years ago about the same thing…progress seems slow – until before you know it, it’s in the rear view mirror and everyone’s made the decisions)