Re-Public Weekly: Is Apple Helping or Hurting?

Someone posted a Twitter thread this week that claims that Apple's anti-tracking and privacy changes hurt small businesses that rely on targeting to reach customers. Without this tracking, revenue goes down and, in extreme cases, the businesses have to close. (Thanks to quixado for the tip.)

Small businesses are once again are the chew toy of monopolistic practices in both directions. First they are forced to get on Facebook and Instagram to stay competitive and then they have the rug pulled out from under them as Apple squeezes their revenue stream. At no point are they consulted or considered.

Personally I use Apple products because they are the lesser evil, but they are still playing the zero-sum game of market share and they will always choose winning over doing the right thing.

To me this re-enforces the status quo that is enabled by caring about "privacy" rather than "data ownership" or "data dignity". If we focus on privacy, the power remains in the hands of the current extractive players. They can keep their business models as they are and slowly give us slightly more and more privacy while still keeping the value that our data and digital labor generate.

If we give data ownership back to the people, the power to shape society comes with it. Business models are forced to change to suit our interests instead of the interests of corporations. And in many ways data ownership is the only play for agency that we have that has a real chance of working.

Small local businesses should not have to be reliant on national corporate monopolies to reach their customers. If there were a global data utility, they wouldn't have to. They could use their customer acquisition budget to find the people who want to be found, and that budget would flow to those people in exchange for them allowing themselves to be found.

Perhaps Re-Public should seek a partnership with the small business community so that they understand how much more control they will have when everyone owns their own data.

Now on to updates ...

Ocean Protocol and Data Stations

I had a couple of interesting calls this week. The first was with Christian Casazza who is on the core team of OceanDAO, which is the community behind Ocean Protocol.

I've looked into incorporating an Ocean Protocol option into the app since before I started development and Christian walked me through a few grant options that would help me prioritize it. We roughly settled on doing a short-term integration grant as an exploratory phase while investigating a larger partnership with the protocol.

The other call was with a group formed by RadicalxChange to discuss data coalitions and Privacy Preserving Technologies (PETs). The guest speaker was Raul Castro Fernandez who talked about the concept of "Data Stations". Kind of like an escrow for data, where the data owner puts their data into the escrow and the buyer puts in the query that they want to run on it. The owner then has to approve the buyer's terms before the data or the query's answers can leave the escrow.

I'm seeing this model a lot: Using a separate environment that contains the data and the query and then only allowing the minimal amount of information to leave the environment once properly concented to. More on these models later.

Last Week's Town Hall

Town Hall #2 is now up on YouTube. Wherein we discuss the virtues of finding product market fit or continuing to explore the larger vision.

On the Horizon

App updates are still in the works. Hopefully by next week's update we'll have a fresh iOS app ready. Thanks for your patience!

Cover image by Laurenz Heymann on Unsplash