Rory O'byrne on Google
From What If We Generate Our Own Data? | Rory Byrne · · Data Natives
“Google was the originator. It started off as an algorithm to PageRank algorithm by Larry Page and Sergey Brin's research at Stanford University. When they commercialized it, the business model naturally, given it was the 1990s, was advertising. Think about it: this was the Golden Age of advertising.”
On , Rory O'byrne, Senior Vice President & Chief People Officer at ADVANCED ENERGY INDS INC, spoke about Google during What If We Generate Our Own Data? | Rory Byrne on Data Natives.
About Rory O'byrne
Rory Byrne, founder of Metro, gave a presentation in September 2019 in which he criticized the current model of data collection by internet companies. He argued that the traditional "corporate model," where platform owners generate data about users in real time, was "built for the advertising era" and "not built for the AI era." Byrne described the term "data collection" as "extremely misleading," asserting that data is generated by corporations behind a "silicon curtain" and that users do not truly own or control it. He cited issues such as the rise of organizations like Cambridge Analytica and surveillance programs like Prism as consequences of this lack of transparency. Byrne proposed an alternative system called "self-generation," which he said Metro is implementing. This model allows users to generate their own data across platforms and exchange it with businesses on their own terms. He described the system as "user-centric," "mutually beneficial," and "transparent," adding that Metro is an "open platform" where anyone can build data generation code. Byrne stated that users could be paid multiple times for each data point they produceched, and he envisioned a future decentralized data transfer system built with a distributed ledger. He contrasted this with the current model, which he said "sucks for everybody who is not a tech giant."