Elias Bizannes: You don’t nor need to own your data

One of the more lucid and eru­dite thoughts on data ownership.

One of the biggest ques­tions the Dat­a­Porta­bil­ity project has grap­pled with (and where the entire indus­try is not at con­sen­sus), is a fairly basic ques­tion with some pro­found con­se­quences: who owns your data. Well I think I have an answer to the ques­tion now, which I’ve now cross-validated across mul­ti­ple domains. Given we live in the Infor­ma­tion Age, this cer­tainly mat­ters in every respect.

So who owns “your data”? Not you. Or the other guy. Or the gov­ern­ment, and the Micro­GooHoo cor­po­rate mono­lith. Actu­ally, no one does. And if they do, it doesn’t matter.

Peo­ple like to con­flate the con­cept of prop­erty own­er­ship to that of data own­er­ship. I mean it’s you right? You own your house so surely, you own your e-mail address, your name, you date of birth records, your iden­tity. How­ever when you go into the details, from a con­cep­tual level, it doesn’t make sense.

Tagged as: Security

Author: Khürt
I'm a husband, a father to two very smart kids, an information security manager and a web developer. I'm a Mac geek who loves photography, hefe-weisse ale and Ethiopian coffee. I'm @khurtwilliams on twitter.