FIDU

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us at @nesta_uk on Friday for our first #OpenClawMeetUp 🦞 Our CTO, Oli Robinson led an agentic deep dive, and the conversation that followed was just as valuable. Policy researchers, journalists, developers and early OpenClaw experimenters all contributed and brought questions and ideas. More meet-ups are in the works, so watch this space 👀

🦞 Join us at @nesta_uk's @openclaw meetup: Thursday 11 Sept 40 spots. FIDU's Oli Robinson and Tony Price will be speaking alongside lightning talks from the community No prior knowledge of OpenClaw required. Just bring curiosity 🎟️ Register here: luma.com/3807t5no #OpenClawMeetUp #OpenClaw #FIDU #AIAgents #OpenSource #DataRights #LondonEvents #AgenticWeb

Google just launched Spark: an AI agent that organizes your life 📋 books events 📅 shops 🛒 accesses Gmail and Maps. It's genuinely useful. That's the problem. Useful products become essential. Essential products become hard to leave. And that's how platforms build moats. But there's a choice: vendor lock-in or data unions. 🏗️ #FIDU #AgenticAI #DataRights #AI

OpenAI just updated its privacy policy 📧 'Your conversations are private' 🔒 But here's what they CAN do: 🍪 Track you with cookies 📧 Share your email + device IDs with ad platforms 🎯 Target you across the web 📊 Track ad conversions ON by default for free users ✅ Private chats ≠ private YOU. The enshittification cycle continues ⚡ This is why we need data unions 🏗️

❓ Did you know Instagram is ending end-to-end encrypted messaging on May 8, 2026? The announcement appeared quietly in their help documentation. Users with encrypted chats are being told to download their messages before the change. 🔒 Right now, Instagram's encrypted chats mean "not even Meta can read your messages." 📅 After that date, that protection goes away. 🔓 This is why data portability matters. When platforms change the rules, you should be able to take your data and leave without starting over.

💰 You thought the deal with your bank was simple: you deposit money, they provide wallet and payment services, they earn on the float. Fair and transparent. Turns out, that's not the real business model anymore. Lloyds Banking Group just revealed plans to become "the UK's biggest fintech" by expanding how much customer data it anonymises and sells to third parties. They already do this. Now they're scaling it up. 📊 The modern bank has figured out what's really valuable in your current account: the data. Here's the question: if Lloyds is selling your data for purposes you don't approve of, can you stop them? If the bank isn't providing enough value back to you for that data, can you get a better deal? Will you ever actually read the data terms and conditions on your current account? At FIDU, we believe YOU should be the one offering access to the best picture of yourself. If we want to create aggregate datasets, we should do so through a data union that shares our values, not a high street bank trying to make a quick buck.

Mike Kuiken from the FT: "America must follow China in treating data as an asset." The piece makes a compelling case. Data has enormous economic value, $200bn+ annually in the US data broker industry alone. But US accounting standards pretend it doesn't exist. 💰 In 2024, China became the first country to allow companies to include data on their balance sheets. The author argues America should develop similar frameworks for corporate and government data holdings. Here's what's missing from that argument: who should control that data? When Nielsen (the TV ratings company) pays you $2 for your viewing habits, but that data is worth hundreds to advertisers, there's a gap. When companies or governments put data on their balance sheets, they're claiming ownership of information about you. The author is right that data belongs on a balance sheet. But it's information about you. You're the most trustworthy source for it, and it can create value repeatedly without being consumed. 🔄 Data does belong on a balance sheet. The question is: whose? Read the piece: ft.com/content/897fca33-0505…

Instagram has started asking millions of UK users: pay £2.99/month for ad-free, or keep using it free with personalised ads. 📱 Quick question: Did you pay or stick with the ads? The notification also mentioned downloading your data—possible since 2018, but rarely this visible. When people first downloaded their Facebook data in 2018, they were shocked by what they found. Years of location history. Messages they thought were deleted. Detailed tracking of their behaviour. 🔍 Only visible because EU law required it. The EU regulation requiring platforms to offer paid subscriptions as an alternative to ads seems misguided. The problem with the ad model is our lack of control, not ads themselves. A paid opt-out doesn't solve that. Feels like another cookie-consent situation. 🍪 Regulations that point to real problems but fail to solve them end up giving regulation a bad name. 🤔 Worth thinking about what actual control would look like instead.

Data unions won the Public's Prize at @nesta_uk's Signals event 🏆 Votes for hope and collective action over dystopian alternatives. The energy was remarkable. Real hunger for the fight-back, for power back in people's hands. 💪 We're building a movement as much as products.