A picture story about regulating user data storage.
Long before technology there were tools: humans solve problems and perform tasks using tools. We make our world with tools.
How are people feeling about tools in the digital world – what’s wrong? Read on.
Tools enable users to do tasks. We create value by using tools.
Tools are fundamental in human economy and culture.
We use tools to make goods that we share or trade with others.
We make intermediate goods and create value chains using tools. This fosters collaboration and division of labor.
Tools are by themselves valuable goods creating additional markets.
In our digital world, tools are programs and goods are data.
During the PC era users had to manage programs and data on personal storage devices.
Technological obsolescence and Digital Rights Management (DRM) made this a complex and costly task. Users had to deal with:
- Market-driven technology upgrades on all levels from hardware, operating system to applications and file formats.
- Copy protection mechanisms on programs and files restricting user actions on both owned and shared digital content.
As a consequence, most users have failed to retain most of their data from those days.
Enter the era of Internet and cloud computing.
On the Internet, programs and data reside on servers managed by companies and offered to the user as Software as a Service (SaaS).
In the SaaS model:
- Technological obsolescence is now largely handled by the SaaS providers, freeing the user from most of the complexity, but also taking away the possibility of resisting change. Users are continually forced to upgrade their end-user devices in order to access the services.
- Programs and data are often confounded and handled by the same provider. Processing data using different service providers require significant effort and technical expertise from the user.
- In order to deal with DRM, multimedia service providers do not expose their content as files but stream it to the user. After consumption, users are left with little more than a link to the media, often with no guarantee of being able to access it in the future.
- Most providers collect metadata about how the user interacts with their service. This data is not made available to the user, but used to optimize their service without transparency to the user.
- Social media and other free service providers have built a business model around collecting user metadata and selling those to advertisers instead of charging the user directly for their services.
In summary, SaaS has shifted program and data management to the service providers. Today, users own and control less data including their metadata lacking robust interoperability and archiving guarantees for it.
How could we make the digital world a place where users feel empowered by tools to create, own and exchange digital goods?
Sigue: Aplicaciones y Sistemas