Decades ago, Orwell was publishing a Science Fiction book called "1984", describing a world where "the Party" was permanently tracking what everyone was doing and saying, which seems like a nightmare for us today. "Big Brother is watching you!" is most probably something we would not want to experiment nowadays.
However, with all the emerged technologies and the rise of the app-economy we choose to share our data, our life in every detail. We share our thoughts, we check-in in different places we go to, we share our network of contacts, we upload pictures and videos, we use apps that track our everything... And all the data about us is there, in the clouds, managed by different businesses that gave us the tools to track and share and upload.
We have created a Big Brother with the innocent belief that it is worth it, that what we get out of our data is relevance in a highly crowded informational world (examples: offers available at your location, search results adapted to your search history), is self-management help (examples: calendars, task lists, cycling tracking), and last but not least, is the way to satisfy our belonging and self-esteem needs (examples: sharing pictures with your friends on a social network). Sometimes you hear us concerned about our privacy, but facts show that we do not really care.
So better than talking about privacy, we should talk about Return-Of-Shared-Data - this is the one we actually care about.
After Next Conference edition of last year on the topic of Data Love, this year (Berlin, 8th-9th May 2012) the focus will be on Post-Digital - how all technologies, apps etc (a.k.a. the tools we use to share our data) are impacting our life. Or how we live now in front of the Big Brother we have created.
I will be there as Official Blogger, sharing with you interesting perspectives of speakers and participants. Yes, sharing I said.
(This article is published also on Next Conference website: http://nextberlin.eu/2012/05/return-on-shared-data-the-counter-to-the-cloud-big-brother/)
