The Way the Web was Supposed to Work

Cory Doctorow:

If you had a mobile device that was yours and that you trusted and that didn’t give your information to other people, it could amass an enormous amount of both explicit and implicit information about you. … Then, as that device moved thorough space, the things around it could advertise what kinds of services, opportunities, availabilities they had to the device without the device ever acknowledging that it received them, without the device telling them a single thing about you. Because your device knows a lot about you, more than you would ever willingly give out to a third party, it could actually make better inferences about what you should be doing at this time in this place than you would get if it were the other way around, if you were the thing being sensed instead of you being the thing that’s doing the sensing. I quite like that model. I think that’s a very exciting way of thinking about human beings as entities with agency and dignity and not just ambulatory wallets.