Public data are foundational to our democratic system. People need consistently high-quality information from trustworthy sources. In the new economy, wealth is generated by access to data; government's job is to democratize the data playing field. Yet data produced by the American government are getting worse and costing more. In Democratizing Our Data, Julia Lane argues that good data are essential for democracy. Her book is a wake-up call to America to fix its broken public data system.
Consider to also join the Center for Data Innovation on Friday, October 2, 2020 at 12:00 PM EDT for a conversation with Julia Lane on her new book.

Cory Doctorow published How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism - available to read for free on Medium (109min read)

We want to determine by ourselves which personal details we share with others, and how they are used. We don’t want everyone to know what we do or think. We don’t want our boss to know what we discuss with our friends. We don’t want our personal information to be misinterprete doutside the original context. In other words, we want some privacy please.

This book is the result of a larger project titled ‘Future Regulation of Industrial Internet (FRII)’, a collaborative academic-industry study funded by Business Finland (former Tekes). Experts in various relevant fields of science and industry measure the legal tensions created by Industrial Internet in our global economy and propose solutions that are both theoretically valuable and concretely practical, identifying workable business models and practices based on both technical and legal knowledge.

This week the first reading club was held on Thursday and a number of interesting things were posted subsequently: @Fredrik Löfman posted an Economis article (Is Google an evil genius?) and an interesting article series on data-rights related issues. @Antti 'Jogi' Poikola proposed to read and discuss Laron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now next.

The first reading club chat is in the coming week on July 11th.

Queensland University of Technology will soon be launching Dr Monique Mann's new book Good Data - it's open source: http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/tod-29-good-data/