People Still Think APIs Are About Giving Away Your Data For Free

After eight years of educating people about sensible API security and management, I’m always amazed at how many people I come across who still think public web APIs are about giving away access to your data, content, and algorithms for free. I regularly come across very smart people who say they’d be doing APIs, but they depend on revenue from selling their data and content, and wouldn’t benefit from just putting it online for everyone to download for free.

I wonder when we stopped thinking the web was not about giving everything away for free? It is something I’m going to have to investigate a little more. For me, it shows how much education we still have ahead of us when it comes to informing people about what APIs are, and how to properly manage them. Which is a problem, when many of the companies I’m talking to are most likely doing APIs to drive internal systems, and public mobile applications. They are either unaware of the APIs that already exist across their organization, or think that because they don’t have a public developer portal showcasing their APIs, that they are much more private and secure than if they were openly offering them to partners and the public.

Web API management has been around for over a decade now. Requiring ALL developers to authenticate when accessing any APIs, and the ability to put APIs into different access tiers, limit that the rate of consumption, while logging and billing for all API consumption isn’t anything new. Amazon has been extremely public about their AWS efforts, and the cloud isn’t a secret. The fact that smart business leaders see all of this and do not see that APIs are driving it all represents a disconnect amongst business leadership. It is something I’m going to be testing out a little bit more to see what levels of knowledge exist across many fortune 1000 companies, helping paint of picture of how they view the API landscape, and help me quantify their API literacy.

Educating business leaders about APIs has been a part of my mission since I started API Evangelist in 2010. It is something that will continue to be a focus of mine. This lack of awareness is why we end up with damaging incidents like the Equifax breach, and the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook scandal. Its how we end up with so many trolls on Twitter, and an out of balance API ecosystems across federal, state, and municipal governments. It is a problem that we need to address in the industry, and work to help educate business leaders around common patterns for securing and managing our API resources. I think this process always begins with education and API literacy, but is a symptom of the disconnect around storytelling about public vs private APIs, when in reality there are just APIs that are secured and managed properly, or not.