Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Data - The Essence of a Digital Lifestyle (03 Nov 2005) The fatal flaw is that Amazon now owns my data. And Netflix owns a different set of my data. So does Google. So do my financial institution and countless other companies. Our data is dispersed, existing only in shards that we do not own. The companies that own our data use it for their own business gain and make it available to us only as it serves their corporate needs. If I asked them to provide the data to me in a format that would work in a database that I owned, they probably would not even respond to my email message or would do so only with some outrageously generic stock response that didn’t even deal with the issue. So, my data, which remains splintered and owned by corporate interests, does not serve my own personal needs for its use, preventing me from leveraging what could, in an aggregated form, represent an incredibly powerful data record that would provide an interesting tapestry of my life. Article URL: http://uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000016.php Read 9 more articles from User Experience Matters sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: It's not the winning, it's the taking part          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy