Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste, or see, or touch. A prison for your mind.

2018 is behind us and what a year it has been. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out, almost a week didn’t go by without some report on the negligent or abusive way organisations treat personal data.

The ways web giants abuse their privileged access to our data and sell it to the highest bidders are still being exposed; we’re just beginning to grasp the amount of data shady third-party brokers have on us and how easy it is to buy it from them; data breaches are a fact because they cost less than it would to prevent them. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The current situation is akin to something some have labeled as data slavery — the creation of enormous value in return for meagre compensation under completely unequal terms. And just as slavery could only exist with a constant influx of slaves, this broken system can only survive by increasing the intake of personal data and data-producing labour.

A Fair Data Society Decentralised Altruistic Community on Giveth

To propose an alternative way Datafund has recently launched the Fair Data Society Decentralised Altruistic Community (FDS DAC) on Giveth. Briefly, FDS is Datafund’s organisational upgrade. It’s also part of a much grander effort to change the dysfunctional way personal data is treated and to bring individuals more control over what happens to that data.

And we started it on Giveth because it is the perfect platform to begin our journey from.It offers an entirely new way for social initiatives to present, fund and organise themselves at unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability. Here’s how it works.

We’re building the FDS DAC around three main missions:

Build the technology for handling sensitive data in a fair and transparent way.
Define Fair Data Society principles that will serve as guidelines for all stakeholders in the data economy.
Educate about privacy and the value of data.

The FDS DAC will manage several campaigns, with new ones being added regularly and all will work towards accomplishing the above missions. Three are already public:

Let’s replace surveillance capitalism with something better

This is the part where we warmly invite you to become a part of our FDS DAC.

What we want is for our DAC to start off as a collaborative effort that later evolves into a completely new form of an independent decentralised organisation — a DAO. That’s why all the documents related to the projects covered by the FDS DAC will be open to you, the public, to leave your ideas, comments, suggestions, critiques… Together we can evolve an idea into a living, breathing creation.

If we want to end the invasive practices of data hoarding, exploitation of our personal data for other people’s gain and stop the selling and processing of people’s data without their consent, we need a better system in place. It is past time we found new and better ways to bring the benefits of the new data economy to everyone without dissecting our private lives and selling them off to the highest bidder. It’s time our personal data was not used against us, manipulating us into decisions we later regret.