📑 We Don’t Know What ‘Personal Data’ Means

David Golumbia provides a list of six types of personal data: provided, observed, derived, inferred, anonymised and aggregate. In unpacking the work of Virginia Eubank and Cathy O’Neil, he warns about what we share only when we do not really know who is collecting such information.

Yes, we should be very concerned about putting direct personal data out onto social media. Obviously, putting “Democrat” or even “#Resist” in your public Twitter profile tells anyone who asks what party we are in. We should be asking hard questions about whether it is wise to allow even that minimal kind of declaration in public and whether it is wise to allow it to be stored in any form, and by whom. But perhaps even more seriously, and much less obviously, we need to be asking who is allowed to process and store information like that, regardless of where they got it from, even if they did not get it directly from us. source

Golumbia says that governments need to get on top of issues associated with data, because the public is struggling.