#data-silos — Public Fediverse posts

If you’re constantly experiencing project delays and putting out data fires, your business could be dealing with an ongoing silo. https://hackernoon.com/are-silos-preventing-your-back-office-and-field-teams-from-collaborating #datasilos

Comment on DHS Records Modification

We received notice from Restore the Fourth about a comment period on a DHS change to the agency’s record system. Disturbingly, they have already made the change, but now are asking for retroactive approval. Sorry, no approval from us!

There are just 3 days left to comment, so have your say at this link.

Here is the text of Restore the Fourth’s e-mail announcing the comment period, which I sadly did not notice days ago when it was sent:

US Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), for the first time, has begun pooling data from DHS, the Social Security Administration, the IRS and state voter rolls, to generate a list of US citizens in its “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)” database.

They have begun doing this without notifying the American public of this change in practice, and without offering an opportunity before they began for people to comment, violating the National Privacy Act of 1974. That Act, responding to Watergate, intentionally siloed federal datasets, preventing different federal agencies from sharing data except in very specific cases where justification and notification of the subject of the “investigation” is required.

Without that siloing, the government can go fishing across all of government to find anything that a pre-selected person has done wrong; and doing that violates the Fourth Amendment.

What USCIS is doing now is asking for public comment on these changes that have already happened, in order to get some sort of retrospective blessing and insulate themselves from legal challenges. We don’t bless it. We urge you to write comments objecting to it.

Below is the Restore the Fourth suggested e-mail with a list of talking points; use one or more, paraphrase, or write your own comment:

• I oppose the change that DHS/USCIS has implemented to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service’s (USCIS’) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. Pooling data from DHS, the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and state voter data and other sources violates the National Data Privacy Act of 1974. The fact that DHS/USCIS is belatedly asking for comment about the changes that it has already implemented by accessing data from other federal agency databases in order to gather additional information on immigrants in violation of the National Data Privacy Act is deeply troubling because many Americans would have opposed this change had they been consulted ahead of the change, as the Act requires.
• The National Privacy Act of 1974 created silos in order to prevent different federal agencies from sharing data except in very specific cases, and in those cases justification and notification of the subject of the “investigation” is required. Enacted in the aftermath of Watergate, the National Privacy Act was designed to protect Americans from investigations where the government is fishing for evidence that someone has committed a crime with no predicate based on probable cause that they have done anything criminal. Access by any agency to another agency’s data without probable cause to see specific data on a suspect is illegal in order to protect all of us, regardless of our political party or our immigration status. Every resident of the U.S. is entitled to the protections enshrined by the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution.
• The legal justification provided by DHS in its SORN for its merger of federal databases is a 1999 opinion in which the Department of Justice limited the kinds of restrictions agencies could put on sharing data with law enforcement. It provides for the lawful disclosure of citizenship- or immigration-related information, but it does not grant the Social Security Administration the authority to disclose information without adhering to the requirements of the Privacy Act. 
• The repurposing of data from different agencies is also dangerous because different people’s records may be incorrectly linked together because of a name misspelling or even a failure to update a name change.
• DHS/ICIS has implemented additional changes to normal practices as part of its consolidation. Until recently there was no way to deactivate a person’s Social Security number and prevent them from receiving benefits unless there was documentation of their death. Under SAVE, DHS now uses a special indicator code to flag what it considers questionable data or special circumstances concerning an application for an SSN. This allows DHS, without any form of review, to terminate someone’s Social Security benefit. In one case earlier this year when the Social Security Administration under DOGE accidentally declared an 82-year-old man dead (see https://www.livenowfox.com/news/seattle-man-social-security-error), he lost his Social Security benefits, Medicare coverage, and even access to his bank fund. Since in the system being implemented by DHS there will be challenges in matching up names across various databases, the risk of accidental terminations of benefits is heightened.
• In 2023, a lawyer from the Social Security Administration wrote to the Fair Elections Center that “while SSA records provide an indication of citizenship, they do not provide definitive information on U.S. citizenship,” so it is very concerning that SSA data can now be used to eliminate Americans from voter rolls without further verification.
• Until now, undocumented Immigrants who lawfully paid federal taxes on their earnings using an Individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) were promised that their personal information would remain confidential. DHS access to the IRS database completely undermines this protection, making it much less likely that they will file. This reduces government revenue and will result in increased taxes for the rest of us.
• We are seeing more frequent and broader hacking operations affecting federal agencies by foreign states and other actors (see https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-charges-12-chinese-contract-hackers-and-law-enforcement-officers-global and https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/us-treasurys-workstations-hacked-cyberattack-by-china-afp-reports-2024-12-30/ and https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-OPM-Data-Breach-How-the-Government-Jeopardized-Our-National-Security-for-More-than-a-Generation.pdf). By combining databases as DHS/USCIS is doing, hundreds of millions of Americans’ data may be compromised by hackers.
• For all of these reasons, I ask DHS/USCIS to terminate the changes to the SAVE program.

#confidentiality #data #dataSilos #dhs #hacking #immigration #irs #nationalDataPrivacyActOf1974 #privacy #recordKeeping #repurposingData #save #socialSecurity #ssa #systemicAlienVerificationForEntitlements #uscis

Data silos -- why they’re flawed and what to do about it [Q&A] #QandA #DataSilos

https://betanews.com/2025/07/25/data-silos-why-theyre-flawed-and-what-to-do-about-it-qa/

How can health and fitness #dataSilos still be legal? Whatever happen with the #GDPR’s #DataPortability requirement?
“Strava’s API debacle highlights the messiness of fitness data” — Victoria Song, The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303124/strava-fitness-data-wearables

Living in this timeline has been wild.

I'm proud to have been a part of #MySpace, #OpenID, and the #OpenWeb / #SemanticWeb.

I'm sad to see the #WalledGardens, #hiddenCode, and #dataSilos.

Today I got my #steam end-of-year review, wich is a perfect example of what I am talking about here. It says I played only 1 (one!) game over the whole year!

I do not have a huge amount of time for gaming, but this is just not true. I played a lot on other platforms.

If those platforms stored the data to my #solid pod, I could get an integrated view of my whole #gaming experience in 2023.

#datasilos are blocking our view on the truth.

📢📢NEW BLOG POST FROM SPONSOR

We interviewed SemanticPartners and asked them a few questions regarding their main products, their role in the Semantic Web Community, and about their vision.

Read the interview here: https://semantics-org.github.io/page/news?page=2023-07-26

#semanticsconf #datasilos

For many years I've observed the following in parallel:

1. General confusion (and in some cases disdain) about the notion of a #SemanticWeb

2. Steadfast effort by a community to keep the vision going, stealthily, as exemplified by the #LODCloud (#DBpedia,, #Wikidata, #Uniprot etc..) and Schema.org (#SchemaOrg)

3. #DataSilos and all the impedance they inflict on the agility of individuals and enterprises alike on the rise i.e., #DataAccess and #DataFlow are still challenging, unnecessarily.

Data issues have been around for a long time, however, combining them with multicloud deployments is a new challenge. Enterprises must plan ahead to prevent data silos from forming as a result of multiple cloud services being used. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3687309/data-is-a-stumbling-block-for-most-multicloud-deployments.html#tk.rss_all #DataIssues #Multicloud #DataSilos

The #fediverse breaks up the data silos for social media posts. But we need to break up *all* the data silos and take back control over *all* the data produced by the apps and services we use. The #solidproject aims to do that, by putting all data to personal data stores under the user's control and make them interlinkable and reusable by different apps and in different usage contexts by us and the people in our lives. That's why it is called social linked data. #solid #LinkedData #DataSilos

@atomicpoet,

Regarding "Personal data is the new oil." [1], the #Fediverse will take us to a better place where "Personal data is the new electricity" conducted via hyperlinks [2].

Oil reflects the current extractive (and polluting) mindset that drives #Web20 #DataSilos and #SurveillanceCapitalism.

Electricity aligns with technological inflection that ushers in a new frontier :)

[1] https://blog.atomicpoet.org/#Personal-data-is-the-new-oil

[2] https://medium.com/virtuoso-blog/what-is-a-sparql-endpoint-and-why-is-it-important-b3c9e6a20a8b

#HyperData #LinkedData #SemanticWeb #WebWeWant

Open standards enable loose-coupling of disparate components. For instance, #Identity, #Identification, #Authentication, #Authorization, and #Storage need to be loosely-coupled to end the cycle of "smash and grab" #DataSilos.

Here's a #GIF that demonstrates how our #VirtuosoRDBMS handles a variety of #authentication service providers re #SPARQL Query Service endpoint login, change-login, and logout states.

#OAuth #OpenIDConnect #Mastodon #AppleSignIn #Twitter #SSI

In a team of researchers and coders we are working with urbanepraxis.berlin on a software prototype, funded by the Senate for Culture in Berlin.

The prototype consists of a set of digital tools for archiving the documentation of art on the web, in feeds, blogs, websites.

The goal is to reclaim the art archives from the data silos, from feeds, from lost websites.

The prototype #artdocarchive will consist of a mirror/host, a parser and an interactive visualization.

Blog #reclaimyourarchive will launch soon, open source software prototyping happens until end of February.

Project concept and coordination by Anna Schäffler and me.

#archives #artdocumentation #webarchiving #datasilos

Are Data Silos Undermining Digital Transformation? - At a time of seemingly ultrarapid digital disruptions, digital transformation in a... - https://readwrite.com/are-data-silos-undermining-digital-transformation/ #datamanagementplatform #digitaltransformaition #dataandsecurity #datagovernance #readwrite #datasilos #tech

RT @NGI_DAPSI: Does the topic #datasilos interest you? 🔐

Then check out the success story of IDISS: Tooling, which makes complex #data transformations simple!
👉 https://dapsi.ngi.eu/success-story-idiss-tooling-which-makes-complex-data-transformations-simple/

🐦🔗: https://nitter.eu/NGI4eu/status/1559835261973905408