"Long live the file system.“

Welcome to 2030. We’ve unclouded the cloud. Everything went just right and we finally achieved full data ownership.

Just ten years ago, back in 2020, we were still struggling with data ownership, throughout our systems, our culture and our economy.

Let’s revisit the situation back then. Let’s travel back to 2020.

....SSWWWOOOOSHHHHHH....

2020

Here we are. Let’s take a look at how the world works in terms of data ownership:

• Problem 1: People don’t own much of their personal data
  • Okay, people do own the data on their laptop computers, they own data on their old hard drives, but that data often isn’t very important anymore.
  • Much of the interesting, valuable data is created through the use of modern apps (both native apps & web / browser apps).
    • Personal data (e.g. emails)
    • Behavioral / usage data (e.g. how often you opened a particular email)
  • It’s technically too hard for app creators to even allow people to own their data.
  • The root of the problem: people own multiple devices and want a seamless experience across all devices.
  • So if I’m a company offering help with your taxes, I’ll create one tax app for every type of device you might be using. To sync the tax bookings across all of your devices, I’ll say ok: I’ll take care of storing and syncing all of your personal data. Either I run my own central database, or I use an external cloud storage provider (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, ...), to store all personal data of all users, centralized, in there. Now even if I wanted to, I’d have a hard time giving you – a single person – live access and ownership to exactly your personal slice of data. You may access your data visually, through my interfaces on your devices, but you’re far from owning your actual data. Well, at least, I solved the multi-device problem for you.
  • Not just tax companies, but EVERY app provider (email, finance, health, search, ...) is solving the multi-device problem that way.
  • In sum: much of your personal data lives in clouds behind app providers.
  • In any case, if you wanted to actually own your current data for a moment, you’d need to “ask for an export” of your data, via email, via an export button, via an API.
• Problem 2: Most people don’t even care about owning their data.
  • Because managing one’s own data is hard.
  • Backing up data is even harder and too technical.
  • So data ownership means obligations to manage that data.
  • Obligations aren’t convenient.
• Problem 3: Phone manufacturers still have too much control over the infrastructure.
  • by not allowing external apps to completely manage and back up your phone’s data
  • by pre-configuring their own cloud services (Apple Cloud, Google Cloud, ...) and slowly nudging people into using those.
  • the consequence: slowed down innovation in phone software, especially around phone operating systems
• Problem 4: The “decentralized movement” is distracted by the blockchain.
  • The decentralized movement / web3 started out, inspired with the blockchain.
  • “Decentralized apps” became a buzzword, apps might be “living” on the blockchain, enabling “trustless access”, and finally – hurray – data ownership.
  • The idea was good, but the problem remains: blockchains don’t naturally solve data ownership. Instead they create new, very hard problems.
  • Highly trained engineers are becoming distracted, working to solve these problems, with good intentions, but ultimately not solving data ownership.
• Problem 5: The advertising economy is taking advantage of all of these problems
  • Since there’s no easy, other way – users give away their data for free.
  • So on a large enough scale, user data is used as a way to monetize apps
  • The apps are offered to users for no money.
  • Apps that remain “free” this way defeat market economics, which would otherwise allow competition through price.

In a great turn of events though, all of these problems are solved in 2030.

So let’s travel BACK TO THE FUTURE.

Back, to 2030.