💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2021 › 202104 › 20210429-data-aggregation-apprehension.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I attended my first Red Hat Summit this week. In many respects the sessions felt like glorified PR campaigns for IBM, talking in broad terms about challenges their customers faced and how Red Hat, merely an acquisition by IBM, helped them tackle those problems. Frankly, I didn't feel very enlightened after each session.
More frustrating to me on a personal level was the content of much of the discussion. As the amount of data online created by users and generated by machines grows, there is a demand in business to figure out how to gather, process, and monetize that data. Many of the products championed by Red Hat deal with mass data analysis, virtualization, cloud services, and automation. The fact that such products even need to be utilized to this extent is a big part of the problem I have with the modern Internet.
A major advantage of Gopher and Gemini in my view is that both protocols are user-oriented. Servers can only provide either static content or CGI scripts, and those scripts run server-side. Clients are ultimately in control of how they interact with the server, and the server by design can't take that control away from them. The server can't track users across Gopher- or Geminispace at all, much less without permission. Any content aggregation is done voluntarily, and no automatic discovery of content takes place.
One of the major goals of these two protocols, at least with how Gopher has evolved today, is to try to stop the aggressive monetization of users and their data which is so rampant in the modern Internet. If users are in control of how their data is used, and servers don't even have a mechanism to bypass that control, commercialization becomes much more difficult.
This control is not in opposition to the idea on engaging in commerce via Gopher or Gemini, by the way. If a server owner wants to sell a product or service, a user can arrange to purchase it over Gopher or Gemini and conduct the transaction via other means. But advertising can't be forced onto users, their hypothetical purchases over the protocol can't be tracked, and their own data can't be aggregated through the use of cookies, tracking pixels, or other sneaky (and ethically-ambiguous) methods.
I work in IT, which by definition means that someone is paying me to provide an IT service. My company's customers are other businesses--we do not direclty handle end-user data. To be honest, I would feel morally conflicted about performing such a job.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]