What we talk about when we talk about data ownership

Economists have been making lots of noise lately about what digital data ownership means.

Some are saying that when a person creates data, she is actually doing work — so she should be paid by the company that’s using her data. Others say that although she is creating data, she’s doing it using a service provided to her for free, and that’s the trade. Most agree that thinking about paying for data is confusing, because the average user would only see pennies.

It seems to me that they’re missing the point. There is certainly outrage over data rights, but it’s not focused on a desire to be paid back for the data. It’s something much more elemental.

In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, we’ve realized that data is not simply fodder for more personalized advertising. We have a new desire to understand where our data is going, and to control what it’s used for, because we have a growing fear of the possible applications. There’s a general feeling that a lot of things are happening with our data behind closed doors. Apparently, some organizations are already using it to attempt to manipulate us, to short-circuit our decision-making. Many more companies are having unintended effects on our society as a whole, as they use skewed data to train AI brains, resulting in systems that cement our biases and drive us further apart from one another.

There’s another, more squishy discomfort, too. Nobody likes being treated as a number — the commoditization of our experiences and preferences feels uncomfortable.

It’s harder to point at specific instances to be upset about, but I think many of us feel a nagging sense that when data about whether we like patent leather or suede shoes, PBS or HBO gets scooped up alongside the preferences and personalities of millions of others, it’s too impersonal. We feel like we’re being used.

So, I would argue that we don’t really care about being paid for our data. We care about having visibility into what our data is used for, the power to intervene if we don’t like where it’s going, and the reassurance that we’ll benefit in the long run. We also have this feeling that the data that we create does, at least partly, belong to us, because it describes who we are as individuals — and we want to feel that this ownership is acknowledged and valued. This acknowledgement can take many forms, including payment for high-value data, but it isn’t primarily about the economic transaction.

When we think about data ownership, let’s realize that we’re not talking about a commodity. We’re talking about information that has seemingly infinite nuance, that attempts to describe the similarities and differences among human beings.

We can’t toss it about so casually, and we need to challenge ourselves to come back to first principles. How does the information collected on each person get used? Let’s map it. How do we want it to be used? How do we give power back to the individual, to ensure that we aren’t undervalued or commoditized?

These aren’t simple questions, but they’re the right ones to be asking.