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.

Some understand the MacBook Air

Charles Miller gets the Air.

If you think about it, everything that Apple have left off the MacBook Air is something that 90% of the population don’t need 90% of the time. If my MacBook Pro didn’t have Firewire, or only had one USB port, or even didn’t have an optical drive, I don’t think I’d even notice more than once a month, and I’d not find it hard to compensate for their absence those few times.

(Via The Fishbowl: Heavier than Air.)