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Become your own data merchant! |
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Consumers who are not preoccupied about their data bodies being appropriated by corporations can play an active part in the data body business: they can offer their own personal data on the market and become, in paraphrasing Gate's metaphor of information being the lifeblood of the economy, the blood donors of the information age.
Internet services such as the one offered by  I-fay in Germany offer their customers a 40 % share of the profit generated from data vending. As an additional benefit, consumers are promised to always be in control of who acquires their data. I-fay's slogan: be king of your data!
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Punch card, 1801
Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard, an engineer and architect in Lyon, France, the punch cards laid the ground for automatic information processing. For the first time information was stored in binary format on perforated cardboard cards. In 1890 Hermann Hollerith used Joseph-Marie Jacquard's punch card technology for processing statistical data retrieved from the US census in 1890, thus speeding up data analysis from eight to three years. His application of Jacquard's invention was also used for programming computers and data processing until electronic data processing was introduced in the 1960's. - As with  writing and calculating, administrative purposes account for the beginning of modern automatic data processing.
Paper tapes are a medium similar to Jacquard's punch cards. In 1857 Sir Charles Wheatstone applied them as a medium for the preparation, storage, and transmission of data for the first time. By their means, telegraph messages could be prepared off-line, sent ten times quicker (up to 400 words per minute), and stored. Later similar paper tapes were used for programming computers.
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