Sir Tim on the Beeb

Sir Tim Berners-Lee was interviewed on Radio 4 today.

He was promoting the use of data in a truly public manner. He reckoned that "nerds" could solve the economic situation. This is not new for him, see link below from 2010.

He does think that that UK's recent calls for the Security services to have greater powers to perform surveillance on UK citizens as being dangerous. I agree with him on this point but disagree about the sharing of public data. The very recent situation with the IPO of Facebook is a prime example of that. It has been cited that the reason for the lack of acceptance is the deficiency of the Facebook platform in its ability to serve up ads to the mobile user. The use of data in an anonymous form is, in my opinion, an anathema to the the advertising industry i.e. businesses in general. If businesses cannot target consumers then they will not pay up for the service.

• Tim Berners-Lee launches UK public data website - Kevin Anderson guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 January 2010
• Is this an April Fool's joke? - A BBC article that was posted on 1st April 2012 about proposed increases in government powers.
• Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws  BBC News 1 April 2012

The reason that publicly available data is not going to be a viable for those that are capable of extracting and manipulating it, is because the sad fact of life is that big business makes the world go round. Sure, anonymous data, medical and the like, could be useful - but to make it valuable it needs to have a commercial value. To get this value will be difficult. It is another case of the lowest common denominator and you only have to look at the efforts of companies such as Groupon and FourSquare. Here we have the promise of discounts in a trade for your information. Information that is valuable to adverizers, public information is much less valuable by its very nature. To turn this into value that is greater than that generated by greed will be extremely difficult.

This coupled with the potential of abuse from those that are unscrupulous to link the anonymous information with identities makes it a non-starter in my opinion. Although I generally agree with Tim I think that he is being rather naive to thing that all you need to do is to get the architects of this new data source/pool to agree to keep it anonymous.