Liberty, trust and a new deal for personal insights — Data For All book review
John K Thompson is an experienced tech executive and author with a track record building, motivating and managing data analytics teams across a range of industries. With his new book, Data For All, he has targeted the challenge of economics, equity and privacy in data itself, probably the most important and pressing issue of the mature digital world in which we live.
A lot of ‘standard’ texts presented in the professional development space around this topic focus on compliance; the content of relevant laws, how to stick within the rules and cases of organisations getting things wrong. Thompson’s book quickly moves beyond this, to the much chewier and more interesting question — just because something is technically possible to do with data, and currently legal — is it still the right thing to do, and what might be the unintended consequences?
5 years on from GDPR, we are still largely stuck at the threshold level of “transparency” around data — cookie banners, privacy policies and the like. Over seven chapters broken down into bite-size chunks, he provides a broad and balanced review of data’s history, the current landscape, and a peek into some visions held by activists, entrepreneurs and technologists for a future, fairer ecosystem.
It’s said that ‘history is written by the victors’ which is doubly so in the case of data. Among big tech players, privacy is often described as dead, we are told to ‘get over it’ and suspicions cast on our motives for wanting safe spaces online. This is currently coming to a head on both sides of the Atlantic in the context of messaging apps and government security agencies.
Worryingly, these powerful companies and platforms essentially ‘mark their own homework’ in terms of securing, recording and declaring their use of huge amounts of our data, much of it intimate. Thompson covers the rise of new intermediaries like data unions, and how they relate to the original goal of free and open sharing of data, as baked into the web by Tim Berners Lee and others but lost somewhere along the way.
Part of what makes this book an easy and enjoyable read (I finished it in a weekend, while overseeing my daughter’s birthday activities and sleepover) is the author’s use of personal anecdotes, some of which were quite moving. Like John, I was born into a world and childhood where very little trail was left digitally, records and memories could fade and disappear but now occupy an adult existence where literally everything is on the record.
Rather than decry progress and claim everything was ‘better in the old days’, Thompson spends time detailing the practical steps and mindset we can use to change our data behaviours, control the ‘exhaust’ we leave in our wake and find new agency, all without living in a cave.
Blocking calls and messages from unknown parties, opting out and using the rights and controls available incrementally make us more self-aware when it comes to our data, its associated risk and how we teach others in our orbit.This echoes the effect of GDPR in workplaces, where requirements to keep personal data out of public sight gave new impetus to clean desk policies which cybersecurity professionals had advocated for years previously.
The attention of data professionals in marketing and other key areas of businesses traditionally focused on the volume, quality and legality of data collected, in that order. With Data For All, it’s clear John Thompson believes a fresh approach is needed for the teams and clients he runs and advises respectively. This book is an excellent primer for those looking to follow his success, drive positive change in their organisations and most importantly, enjoy an interesting and fulfilling data career into future decades. Forward!
