I had been a staunch advocate of not sharing any personal information wherever possible, but recently I've been thinking whether I've approached the whole privacy issue from a wrong angle.
Maybe there isn't anything wrong with sharing our data and information for the public good. After all, we almost view it self-evident that transparency is good for communities at large. The real issue is that most of the parties who come after our data are only interested in exploiting us to make more money.
Given this thought, I believe I would be inclined to share my data with orgs that I know are trying to do public good in a verifiable and transparent way.
Verifiable and transparent are very much the key words there.
Currently the only way to share personal information is to basically just hand it someone you think should be trustworthy, who does god knows what with it. And that's if you even get that level of control, and whomever you handed your data previously isn't sharing it on your behalf.
The problem is that you can't take the data back when good organizations turn bad. Maybe you trusted the US government in 1940 when you took the census, but in 1942 they showed up at your door to take you away if you had listed yourself as Japanese.
If you lived in the Netherlands in the 1930s, you may have had a great deal of trust in your government. They collected extensive population data and did a lot of good with it. When the Nazis invaded, they got access to the same systems. It made their genocide much more effective than in neighbouring countries.
Maybe there isn't anything wrong with sharing our data and information for the public good. After all, we almost view it self-evident that transparency is good for communities at large. The real issue is that most of the parties who come after our data are only interested in exploiting us to make more money.
Given this thought, I believe I would be inclined to share my data with orgs that I know are trying to do public good in a verifiable and transparent way.