The Trust Manifesto

Book excerpt: From the moment we wake up and unlock our phones, we're producing data. We offer up our unique fingerprint to the online world, scan our route to work, listen to a guided meditation or favourite playlist, slide money around, share documents and update our social media accounts. We reach for our phones up to 200 times a day, not knowing which companies are storing, using, selling and manipulating our data. But do we care? We're busy. We've got lives. We're pressed for time! There aren't enough hours in the day to read the terms and conditions. Or, maybe we're happy to trade our personal data for convenient services and to make our lives easier? Big data is the phenomenon of our age, but should we trust it without question? This is the trust dilemma. In 2009, Damian Bradfield founded WeTransfer, the largest file-sharing platform in the world with 50 million global users shipping more than one billion files of data a month. His unique experience of the big data economy has led him to question if there is another way to build the internet, one that is fairer and safer for everyone and, in The Trust Manifesto, he lays out this vision.