I wonder what the world’s biggest database is?
Is it Facebook? Is it Amazon? Is it Google? Microsoft? Maybe it is Oracle or Salesforce? Maybe it is the credit bureaus or credit card companies? Or is it some government agency?
I could use Google to try to find the answer, but I am not sure that it really matters at this point.
The reality is that we exist as entries in multiple large databases with varying degrees of accuracy.
And while we might have some rights to keep our data accurate with each organization that is or may be tracking us, the reality is that none of us has the time has to do this on our own. We really don’t even know where our data goes…
I am not a huge data privacy zealot. I actually come at this from the perspective of a business trying to serve its customers with no grand scheme for world domination.
I don’t see any laws that would be practical and address this problem. Somehow, there has to be a way that people get agency over their own data. But every idea that I have for that involves entrusting your data with another organization that is probably not all that trustworthy.
So maybe the path forward revolves around the distributed mess that we have now. Accept that your data is distributed, messy, redundant and to varying degrees inaccurate.
In any case, your data is only as good as the entities that are interpreting it.
