Who Owns “Your” Data

Data protection regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), all presume that the individual “owns” her or his individual personally identifiable information (PII). However, the law of data ownership is far from settled. — https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3987369

Data has been called the “new oil” by some people. Something of immense value which is causing people to mine, or collect, it from various sources. This has been going on for a while, but is getting even more prevalent in a digital age. By 2025, Big Data is estimated to be worth $229.4 billion. Or $229,400,000,000.00 if you prefer to see it written out. (Strategic Tech Investor, 2021 – https://strategictechinvestor.com/2021/02/thousands-of-pages-of-new-data-are-created-every-second-and-you-can-cash-in-on-the-company-thats-tracking-it/

Where is Data Coming From?

Personal data collection started with those forms you’d fill out for the warranty when you bought a toaster, or other device. Now includes every time you make a purchase on a credit or debit card, enter info into a social media site, or perform a web search. All of that information is “sucked in” to be processed in one way or another.

With the advent of the modern cell phone and smart houses, they can do this even without you “doing anything”. For example, your phone keeps track of where you are, light sensors, networks nearby, etc, and can send that data where ever it wants. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5572675/) Your ring camera turns on when someone approaches the door. Your nest thermostat can track any changes you make (do you change the temp based upon if you are out of town on vacation? ). All of this data has to go to the “cloud” so you can access it via your phone, which means it is easier to hack.

This doesn’t even get into the data collected by Alexa, Siri, or other smart devices. They estimate that people have an average of 3 to 4 connected devices per person (phone, laptop, digital TV, etc). I think that estimate is on the low side, or will be soon, as we have connected cars, doorbells, thermostats, lights, etc.

Every time you sign up for a service, you have to say that you’ve read the terms and conditions. But they estimate that 91% of people don’t read it, often because it is boring, legalese. That number jumps to 97% for younger people. https://www.businessinsider.com/deloitte-study-91-percent-agree-terms-of-service-without-reading-2017-11

Yet often users don’t feel like that they have a choice. Imagine going through life without being able to use a smartphone, digital TV, or even perform an Internet search. Each of these have T&C attached to it, that you are agreeing to by using the service… and posting something on your wall saying you don’t give _____ company the rights to use it doesn’t keep them from using it, because you already agreed to the T&C which they specifically state can change. https://tech.co/news/understand-online-terms-of-service-2018-05 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dont-fall-for-viral-facebook-hoaxes/

How Much Data is Being Generated

“There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated.” (This was 2016 and 2017 for reference.) https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-read/?sh=2f4cc22460ba

They estimate that in 2021 we created 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. That should be about 94 zettabytes a year by 2022. (That is 94,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data, as a zeta byte is equal to one trillion gigabytes. For reference, an hour of high def video is about 3 gigabytes, so approximately 166,666,666,666 feature length movies in High Def.) This includes things like instant messages, social media posts, news, work data and more. Most of this data is probably unimportant, at least by itself. But merged with other data, it can become quite important.

How Data is Being Used

Fitness trackers have been used to identify secret bases (https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-fitness-trackers-privacy/), and even target soldiers. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-commander-killed-krasnador-intl/index.html

You might assume this data is yours, but every time you sign up for a service, you are giving permission for a company, and possibly their “friends” to use this data. And there is value to this data, even if you don’t see the value in it. Often a piece of data by itself may not mean much, however, with it being used as part of larger sets of data, it can have a larger impact. This data may be used by the company, shared publicly (like when you check in to your favorite restaurant), or sold to other data brokers/users.

The more data one has, the more one can do with it.

Think about something small, like your paycheck. The government can tell approximately how much you were paid based upon the taxes the collected. However, they also get access to bank data. Now they can tell when you get a large deposit. Can that indicate illegal activity – like being paid “under the table” or a large gift or sale? Did you pay the appropriate taxes on that? They can come after you for something like that.

Sometimes it can be a corporation that wants data. They might ask for it, and in exchange give you some info back – but what can they do with your data, and your neighbors, and their neighbors, etc. https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/02/owns-data/

Or, what if they start bringing in data from different sources from the same location? For example, Amazon bought Ring, created Alexa, and bought Roomba maker iRobot. Each of those is innocent enough, however, when you realize that Ring can track who is coming and going from your location and knows how many people are normally there, as well as the Roomba figuring out your house layout, this provides some interesting information to the person who owns that data… and I’ll give you a hint, it’s not you. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/amazon-roomba-irobot-acquisition-monopoly/671145/

Whether this is to create an anti-competitive advantage for itself, or to create a way to capture more data, is yet to be seen.

Why Companies Have Become Obsessed With Your Data

What’s the Ethical Question?

The question becomes two-fold, actually. First, who owns the data? And second, what is being done with it?

Big data can track environmental factors to protect sensitive locations, from pollution, traffic, etc. It can also be used to “encourage” consumers to buy more stuff, which leads to waste and poverty as it makes it harder for the individual to save money and keeps them in debt.

Big data can find potential causes for disease in the healthcare industry, determine who is more likely to be a safe driver to keep insurance rates down, or how to maximize profit at a casino by keeping those who suffer from a gambling addiction to suffer even more. This is also true for online advertising. Ever go to a website, and then all you see is ads for that website… yep, me too. Welcome to being tracked 24/7 online.

Things like the GDPR and CCA are difficult to follow for small businesses, who might not be using that data anyway, and still don’t necessarily go far enough to protect you from larger businesses. Many items are now being sold at a loss, often so the company can collect data from a user to sell, and that is how they turn a profit. Remember, if you are not the customer, you are the product – this is especially true for social media sites.

A perfect example of this is social media sites. They need to collect data to know what to show you based upon your friends, likes, who you interact with, etc. However, they also use this information to sell targeted ads to you. The number of ads they share, and how they share them, including your own likeness in some cases, can create a system which allows for users to be manipulated. This doesn’t count the times when meta, formerly Facebook, has run social experiments on its users without informing them. – https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/

Some laws require data sharing, and if you aren’t doing anything illegal, it should be OK, but does that mean that from a privacy perspective it still is?

Now is the time to discuss these questions.

Who Owns “Your” Data was originally found on Access 2 Learn