Then I suggest we get to know each other when we have the opportunity.

I don’t know that activists need to be known in general. There might be people in the MyData community that see themselves as activists yet don’t think it is needed for them to be known in order to be effective. Still, I believe, due to the topic and particular dynamics of power, that there is a need for at least one person in the MyData community to be an activist, and that this person needs to be okay with talking of their own experience of data as an activist. So, yes, you know “why” I have de facto become a celebrity activist. I Note that I said at least one. In my mind, ideally, if there would be many such people, it would speed up things.

As for being an activist or not, I would answer it this way: I want to have an voice in politics around personal data. I think this is part of being in a forward-looking democracy. Sadly, just speaking up to the giants directly is already a revolutionary act at the moment. So, yeah, I am an activist, in the sense that the most visible people to speak up in a dictatorship are always labeled as such, even by their slightly less radical peers (sometimes called the reformers). But before truly being activists, they might be doctors, lawyers, janitors, or teachers, yearning to do their profession well and without all these efforts being necessary.

In my case, I am eager to be a mathematician applying my knowledge to problems in the personal data space for a while, before maybe moving on to other topics.