I’ve been wanting to share the core values that both inspired the founding of the Locker Project last year and that are driving me so passionately to advance it, but it’s been challenging to summarize such things.
The first and most central value is that of personal data ownership. That may not mean much to most people, but let me try an analogy: it's been tried often in the past to create micro economies where you get paid by an employer in company "credits" that are useful only at the company store, you never really owned your paycheck/money. I feel like that's the world that we've fallen into when it comes to our personal data, and anything we can do to have more ownership over our data will free us to create a more vibrant digital economy.
Now, it’s not enough to simply own (or at least have a copy of) your data, it has to be useful to you. That's the second core value, the ability to get immediate and direct personal value out of your data. It's yours, you should be the first and primary beneficiary of it, and you'll need an open platform and great tools in order to do that.
My third core value builds on the first two and is the very fabric and definition of (digital) freedom. Everyone must have the capability to both share (or not share!) their data and the right to make those sharing decisions without bias. This one is difficult to summarize but it's central to any society, that individuals can connect independently and are free to decide to share things between them without any oversight or gatekeepers.
My first attempt to simplify these into three statements a while back was this:
- We believe you should have the ability to make a copy of your data
- We believe your personal data should be always available and most useful to you
- We believe that you should have have the freedom to share your data however you want
They weren’t quite right, and the “We” felt like it created a separation, so I refined them further, here’s my current core values draft:
- I own my personal data
- I want my data to be useful to me
- I make the decisions to protect or share my data
Possibly a bit too far simplified, but they’re a work in progress. I wanted to openly share them with everyone for feedback as well as give some background on my personal drive in building this platform.