Exploring Data Intermediaries as Infrastructure for a Human-Centric Data Economy: Speculations & Critical Reflections
Samuel Barnett, Nico Brand, William Odom, Kaitlyn Andres · 2022
Through participating in our contemporary digitally-mediated society individuals are surveilled, generating data about them that is analyzed and aggregated to create computational models of their everyday habits, behaviors, desires, and anxieties. The concept of data intermediaries has recently been proposed and gained purchase as digital services that could enable people to have more control over what data is collected about them and how it is used. Yet, data intermediaries currently exist as a high-level aspirational concept. Little is known about how they could or should be designed. In this pictorial, we propose a diverse range of concepts and scenarios that, taken together, offer a range of possibilities and consequences that personal data, shaped by data intermediaries, might hold for mediating data exchanges in people's everyday lives.