We’re definitely playing in the same ballpark. I sent you an email to follow up.

Btw, you can expand the comment field by dragging the lower right corner.

Unfortunately the textarea to leave my comments here is uhm… 8 characters wide so I’m going to keep it short for now. Hoping to hear back from you though.

I think the only meaningful controls must be both social and legal, and enforceable through criminal and civil courts as well as the “court” of public opinion.

I like the way Bill Washburn puts it. His grandmother used to say “I can’t make you do anything, but I can make you wish you had.”

The shadow of the future is how our society prevents and manages anti-social behavior: the risk that you will be caught and face social, legal, and even physical punishment. For many, the mere threat of social ostracization is enough. For other cases, even facing the death penalty is not enough to change behavior. We don’t prevent people from driving cars because they might run a red light and kill someone. We don’t prevent strangers from entering a bank because they might rob it. And we don’t require controlled containers for gasoline to prevent people from making Molotov cocktails. No, we “control” these things through the shadow of the future.

So, you’re right, once the data is out there, there’s nothing we can do to literally prevent abuse–not any more than we can “control” other kinds of crime in our society. But we can make them wish they hadn’t.

I think the trick is enabling enforcement at scale, so that it can be done cost-effectively. Proactive data labeling, explicit contract exchange prior to data release, and even automated audits (although I worry about the burden of the audit overhead for many use cases). It’s gotta be simple, fast, and effective. In fact, the economics of enforcement have got to be better than the economics of exploitation. That’s been the real problem with most data-related crimes. It’s so cheap to hack & copy and so hard to track down and punish. I’m not sure we have a good answer to thwarting determined criminals, but I do think we have an answer for the vast majority of companies that want to work with clean data, whose reputation depends on above-board behavior. The social approbation of screwing over your customers–in both revenue and stock price–just isn’t worth it to squeeze a few more pennies out.