Do You Have a Right to Be Forgotten

We’ve been talking a lot about data sovereignty, so maybe it’s time to say a bit more about why we think it matters. For us, this goes far beyond the concept that countries and jurisdictions have the right to govern and control data created within their boundaries. We believe that a person’s control and ownership of the personal data their life generates is akin to a fundamental human right.

If you’re using a computer, a phone, an AR headset, whatever it may be, to interact with the online world, data -about- you is shaping that experience (and being collected). It’s how you’re monetized, targeted, tracked and sold to.

We are going to help you establish your right to use data about you for you.

Even When You’re Choosing to Create Data for Your Own Benefit, You’re Probably Being Targeted

Tech giants wield significant power over our lives. Their business models often rely on harvesting vast amounts of user data, using it to craft algorithms that can predict our behavior, preferences, and even our thoughts. So they can sell things to us.

We’re not judging that exchange of value - it’s the economic model of the free internet, and makes a lot of things work. But it may not work for you, or be entirely clear to you.

This data-driven decision-making molds our user experiences and often occurs without our explicit consent or even our awareness. We need to be more aware that we have become products, our data commodities traded in vast virtual marketplaces.

We may choose to create more data about ourselves with the goal of making our own lives better by wearing smart watches and fitness trackers, using smart scales, logging our food or our moods, but even when doing that, the lines between data for our own benefit and data for the benefit of those trying to sell to us is at best murky, hidden deep in esoteric interpretations of carefully crafted language in hard to parse terms of service. You may be helping yourself, but you are likely also helping yourself be ad targeted. We ask, what if we can create a world where we can take your data and make it actually work for you and benefit you?

What if You Could Be Forgotten?

Enter the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a landmark statute that recognized our right to be forgotten. Under the GDPR, individuals can request the deletion of their data from platforms, reinstating some semblance of digital agency. Other data regulations, like California’s CCPA grant similar rights.

Which sounds great, until you realize that all of this data that is out there about you might be useful to you. Understanding your habits, creating improvements in your life, figuring out trends, saving memories - these are just some of the ways your data can be useful to you.

This is one of the primary reasons we’ve built Fulcra. By bringing a copy of as much as possible of the data that web platforms have about you under your own control, you can exercise your privacy regulation given right to be forgotten without risking losing the future benefit of the vast amounts of data collected about you online.

You can not only achieve greater privacy and security, you can also safekeep the information that may provide you with deep insights about your own life down the road.

This is what we really mean when we discuss data sovereignty - exercising sovereignty over your own data, taking back the data that has been collected about you and placing it under your own control, for your own future benefit. And then (maybe) pulling up the drawbridge behind you and asking big data platforms to forget you, while you continue to collect data about your life in your own secure personal data store, only granting access to those platforms and services that you choose, for your own benefit.

It’s a big swing, but we think it’s worth it.