13 ms·

The right to data ownership is the only way to take on Big Tech

237 points by timthorn 3y ago

3c0 3y ago
the thing is, even if you "own" your data you still need to give it to companies to use their product. unless everyone runs software locally, in which case the majority of the populace needs to learn how to use devices rather than falling for the trashy "itjustworks™" chromebooks and convenience devices that milk them for data profits whilst appearing cheaper and better to integrate into their lives. especially with google - you cant run services like theirs locally really, and even if you request your data, you cant ever really find out how they use it or what they have done with it. its the illusion of ownership. data isnt ownable. its simply transferable.
- _chu1 3y ago
  Maybe the only way to fix this is to use the route you named, make people host locally and make technology harder to use.
  - j45 3y ago
    I’m not sure what is linking the two here for you. People seem to host their own data locally on their phones just fine
- MrJohz 3y ago
  That's pretty much the whole point of the data ownership concept in the EU, though - force these companies to tell you exactly what they're using, and exactly how they're using it. I don't really think there's a feasible alternative. Most people don't have the means, time, or knowledge to self-host all of the tools they use, and as a consumer, I can't really tell how a company is going to use the data I give them. In cases like that, the only solution is regulatory structure.
- n4r9 3y ago
  I guess there's two things going on here. Firstly, whether the company takes the data with your full knowledge and consent. Secondly, whether they use it in a transparent (or at least ethical) manner. For the first of these, I quite like how on Android now the user has great control over what data is made available to which apps. The app needs to explicitly request access to camera, location, files etc... . You can toggle this on or off at will, and specify that it can only read the data while the app is active. I can imagine having regulation which enforces this type of privacy control for all tech service providers. The second is much harder, because it's difficult to know what the company is doing behind closed doors. However we can at least check telemetry and demand that it is minimal and anonymised where appropriate. We can also apply much harsher penalties to companies that flout the rules. Of course, all of this relies on government that acts in the genuine interest of its people and without hands in industry back pockets. We can but hope.
  - pierat 3y ago
    > For the first of these, I quite like how on Android now the user has great control over what data is made available to which apps. The app needs to explicitly request access to camera, location, files etc... . You can toggle this on or off at will, and specify that it can only read the data while the app is active. I can imagine having regulation which enforces this type of privacy control for all tech service providers. And the Android stock permissions are laughable and a pure joke. Go look at Xposed Framework, and you'll find ways to unwind every permission, either direct deny, or "make fake data" plugins. There's even fake contact plugins, GPS faker plugins, you name it. Google only implemented the worst-of-worse deny permissions, because doing a good job would be against their interests.
    - n4r9 3y ago
      I'm sure there are plenty of ways to improve how Android does it, I was just using it as an example that I've had personal experience with. I'm not sure if the ability to make fake data is an essential part of owning one's data, but would be interested to hear arguments for it.
skilled 3y ago
https://archive.ph/o2Fqo https://archive.ph/o2Fqo
memefrog 3y ago
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elric 3y ago
Isn't this what Tim Berners-Lee's Solid Project is trying to solve? It's an interesting nut to crack. https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/
- suckitsam 3y ago
  I feel like these kinds of solutions can necessarily only protect boring data - my phone number, date of birth, favorite color, and mother's maiden name. I can't see how I could ever get the interesting/profitable/problematic data (my location history, my neighbor's doorbell videos of me, call records, purchase history at Target, and which ads I click on) into something like that.
  - j45 3y ago
    Except this guy already had doubt towards his little www project once. Beginning with your own data and metadata is very different than data about you.
    - suckitsam 3y ago
      Yeah, I'm just not sure personal data is actually The Problem. Sure, ̶b̶a̶n̶k̶ ̶r̶o̶b̶b̶e̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶t̶e̶c̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶r̶a̶u̶d̶ Identity Theft is a Bad Thing, and this would seemingly minimize the number of SQL dumps my birthday and SSN appears in, but that isn't exactly The Data that Big Tech feeds off of.
      - j45 3y ago
        Data you create by your usage of computers is generally yours. Where that data is content and the interactions themselves, it's also different.
cm277 3y ago
Argh... not even. We don't own the power or water meters that serve our house, nor do we get shares/equity in our water/power consumption. While these are services that are actually critical for survival and most of them are actual monopolies, the power/water utilities don't make insane amounts of profit, they don't have market caps in the trillions and they don't have the most lobbyists in DC/Brussels. You know why? because they are regulated and taxed. But no, we don't mention these words around advertising, or providing internet access or the main computing/communication channels for ~80% of the world population (smartphones/social media). Why not? are they somehow special? more important than power or water? FFS, I dont want to own or manage my data any more than I want to think about how many liters of water or KWh I am going to consume today. I want these companies to be brought down to size and become part of the democratic polity, not unelected dynasts over life and industry.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  Yes. But. even regulation needs a framework to think about how to regulate. And personal data makes an excellent framework, and saying I own data about me is a good way to make the ownership and control relevant, and allows lots of different approaches. It's feasible to imagine most (western) countries agreeing "data about a person or their digital actions" being something that can be put into their laws. It's hard to imagine everyone agreeing "this regulatory body will oversee data" The EU was first out the gate, and it's enrolling but heading towards restrictions on all usage then allowances for medical and academic research (you publish, you were allowed) and restrictions on personalised advertising. It's going to get messy, but I think DuckDuckGo has the right balance - if I search for "trainers for old men" Inwill get adverts for that. But they won't "remember" my search the next time. Honestly I will be amazed if the conversion rates for DuckDuckGo and Google are different enough to justify the suck that is internet advertising today.
  - cm277 3y ago
    I don't disagree, but I think the idea of owning your personal data is a red herring and/or a stalling tactic. The GDPR and its equivalents were a necessary first step, but I dont see how privacy can stop the market abuses and the rentier behaviors of the FAANGs. Privacy is great, claiming your legal rights over your data is great, but at a market/economy level it's probably a net plus for larger companies that can be compliant and/or work around its restrictions. So, instead of talking endlessly about data ownership and micro-transactions and god knows what else we've been arguing for (checks notes) 30 years, we could just ask to regulate the tech giants. Cap their rentier rates (30% on the app stores? really), their monopoly behaviors (you are both the largest ad server and the auctioneer? really?), etc, etc, etc-freaking-etera.
Genghis_Khan 3y ago
Let's decompose "our" data just a bit: data that we ourselves intentionally create (e.g., pictures we take, documents we write) and the observations of others about our activities (e.g., server logs, transaction data). The former seems (!) straightforward to address, while the latter seems fraught. After all, if I own all data about my comings and goings, then so does a corrupt politician his. If we go too far in restricting the recording and sharing of our observations about others, however automatic they may be, we might accidentally spring a speech-stifling genie.
- n4r9 3y ago
  > After all, if I own all data about my comings and goings, then so does a corrupt politician his. Surely laws can differentiate between private and public domain? I'm able to store private documents in my house without anyone knowing about it. So is Donald Trump. But he can't legally keep classified state documents there indefinitely. Perhaps if he was more discreet about it he wouldn't have been caught. But there's a clear distinction in the law either way.
- layer8 3y ago
  Rights always have to be balanced against each other, as they often are conflicting. This is true in general, and nothing new here. The right to own the data about your personal private life exists in Germany, for example, where it is called “informational self-determination”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determinati... “This basic right warrants in this respect the capacity of the individual to determine in principle the disclosure and use of his/her personal data. Limitations to this informational self-determination are allowed only in case of overriding public interest.”
datadrivenangel 3y ago
Data ownership sounds great but is incoherent as a concept as we get lower down the IP to information spectrum. Intellectual Property has strong protections under copyright law. If I copyright a photo, or publish a book of my web browsing history, I can sue the pants off anyone who attempts to use it with permissions outside of fair use. The protections are strong, and the enforcement mechanisms are strong (though expensive). Automated information collection (data), does not have strong permissions, because there is a fundamental blurring of system logs and user tracking. It is necessary to know what external systems are interacting with your systems to ensure system integrity and availability (can't IP ban without knowing IP addresses). So there is obviously legitimate collection and usage of this data. Not to mention weak enforcement mechanisms for privacy. So weak protections, weak enforcement (and enforcement is still expensive).
- butokai 3y ago
  Your suggestion of publishing a book with one's browsing history really sounds interesting. Did anybody try something along these lines? I had never thought about privacy as part of the same spectrum as IP protection.
- seydor 3y ago
  It doesn't have protection because the law did not protect it, and indeed the law protects the big tech, up until today. It's not incoherent
- pulvinar 3y ago
  A problem is that facts are not copyrightable, in the US anyway[0]. You can copyright your browsing history book but anyone can use the facts in it or even republish them in a different format with their own copyright. [0] Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
- jart 3y ago
  This comes so close to speaking the truth. Take the thought to its logical conclusion. I think of online services like I think of my local bodega. You can't run a store if it's illegal for you to see or have any knowledge about the people who walk into your store. No store owner ever said, "I have a legitimate need of being able to see the people who walk into my store, just so I can prevent theft, and I immediately forget about all my customers after 48 hours." Store owners want to be able to develop relationships with the people who walk into their stores. That requires getting to know the person. Finding out what things they like. So they can make sure their shelves are stocked with their favorite things. And that's basically all tech companies want. When people talk about privacy in this context, it comes across to me like someone who doesn't want anyone to know they've visited the local porn store. Not that far from the truth if we consider how consumers used the web during its first decade of history. The web has evolved since then but that culture stuck and turned into policy. Tech is profoundly anti-social by default, and the only way that tech companies can be successful (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) is by overcoming that to create spaces where people can know the people they're interacting with online. So when people say they don't think tech companies should be able to have knowledge or information about people, what they're really saying is they don't want tech companies to be successful.
DrScientist 3y ago
In reality isn't this really quite simple - it's the theft of privacy. Data is the concrete thing of course, and therefore potentially useful to then put a legal framework around - but in the end it's really about the right to privacy. The loss of privacy is done by clever joining of the dots - each individual data point in itself is often not that important. It's the activity - the joining of the dots - back to a person - which is the stalking like behaviour - that's the problem. Ie the activity you need to regulate is the connecting of the dots back to a real world person. Let's call it the 'Digital Stalking Act'
- hooby 3y ago
  Why not call it "The right to privacy"? Come to think of, we should even add that to the declaration of human rights! Wait a minute...
  - DrScientist 3y ago
    As is often the case with these things - declaring high level rights is easy - practical enforcement is the hard part.
    - jgeada 3y ago
      Hard in this forum frequently means technically hard, but I think in this context you mean "politically hard". I do not think there is a major technical problem, at the core the easiest solution is to just stop collecting arbitrary data on everyone. The issue is that the people with money and power do not want to give up control of the data they have on everyone else. It is very hard to make someone understand this if their income and power depends on not understanding it.
      - DrScientist 3y ago
        I meant legally hard to define. Some data is important to collect - I expect my bank to keep a record of my financial transactions! I just don't want them to sell them on, or use them for services I didn't sign up for. And an 'opt-out' system isn't sufficient - it needs to be an opt-in system. An opt in system that isn't by a forced game of yes/no bingo - it has to be one where the customer has to take the initiative. You don't get bombarded with extra stuff being put into your basket at the supermarket checkout and then asked a series of 20 questions about whether you want to take the extra things. You shouldn't with digital services either. Now the hard part is that legal definition between what's the data reasonably required for the service and what's taking the piss. I'm arguing one way to define that is whether the data use involves joining dots between transactions in a way that's not required for the immediate transaction or service.
specialist 3y ago
I am my data, my data is me. I own myself, of course. So I also own any and all data about me. The constitutional right to privacy (sovereignty over oneself) is the start. This article's notion of price setting is derived from the right to privacy. -- I'd love to hear any and all proposals about determining the price of demographic data. Surely, the Big Tech companies do this already. Analyzing current accounting practices is terrific place to start. One interesting proposal for price setting is to treat warehousing demographic data (on the corporate balance sheet) as a liability vs an asset. The idea being to proactively manage risk (of the inevitable data leaks, ransomeware, etc), right?
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Accounting methods/practices are private. You just get to see the income statement and balance sheet that is produced from this voodoo. Perfect example: Kroger is taking the full charge for their opioid settlement in a single year but future investors and managers will be burdened with the actual payments for decades (tax law allows this). This is the thought process baked into these accounting methods that you normally are not privy to. Bonuses for me now, pain for you later. https://www.baldwin.senate.gov/news/press-releases/challenge-tax-deductions-by-opioid-companies https://www.baldwin.senate.gov/news/press-releases/challenge...
  - j45 3y ago
    Your bank balance is private. Accounting methods and practices are not private, they are standardized. Where it comes to your own money personal or business, you get to see all of the chart of accounts, ledgers, etc.
    - datavirtue 3y ago
      If they are using cash I know exactly what's going on by looking any balance sheet or income statement. If they are accrual I have no idea what lies beneath the surface. Everyone is on accrual. For a public company you get a balance sheet and income statement. Good luck. You have to audit them and all of their subsidiaries. But you can't because you don't have access to any of the books. It just leaves everything open to "creative accounting." It has been a proven vector of corruption and high crimes. Recently (pre-pandemic) the guy that cracked Madoff released an analysis of GE claiming that they have been cooking their books for years--outright accusing them of fraud. GE and their media sycophants denied it adamantly. Story goes away without any proof whatsoever. Maybe the guy is nuts? I'm suspicious. Day traders LOVE GE for the ups and downs. They bought at $9 and now the stock is $132. In that case no one cares if the books are cooked as long as they can ride the wave. Feel free to read about Enron on Wikipedia. There are plenty of case studies and the world will keep producing more.
datavirtue 3y ago
I like that data is not own-able. If I own data, corporations can own data. Not cool.
- esafak 3y ago
  They do own data.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    And it is, indeed, not cool.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    How? By keeping it locked away? That's their only protection. If it gets out of the gate they have no claim.
pjmlp 3y ago
It turns out that the general public rather have AOL and Compuserve, than public distributed computing.
- j45 3y ago
  Users wanting to be used lol. Let’s mail out cds while we’re at it.
cm2012 3y ago
Data privacy is one of the least important issues of our day. People (especially on HN) foam at the mouth about it but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates.
- srcreigh 3y ago
  The opportunity cost of the advertising industry is incalculable. Entire industries are snuffed because kingpin ad networks can make a few dollars per year per person by having a free app with ads in that space. Less choice for the consumer, less competition, lower quality.
  - jraby3 3y ago
    There are pretty clear benefits to some advertising. Email, YouTube, calendar, maps are all incredibly useful services we are lucky to have. There needs to be a line or safeguard as well as an option to pay a reasonable price for these free services to keep your data safe. YouTube is unfairly overpriced for the ad free option as are most of these free services.
    - srcreigh 3y ago
      The greatest loss of the 21st century is how far behind we are in all the industries you list. Not to mention news. The option to pay today’s kingpin isn’t any recompense.
    - fangorn 3y ago
      Maybe it's nothing, or maybe it's freudian, but email existed before Google, so did calendar. Youtube was an acquisition. Maps, well, there are great alternatives now that do not require anal-probe-level surveillance to find an address or a route. Just publicly fund the services that are useful to people. If "government" (i.e. us) can pay for a square for people to meet at, why not "digital spaces"? And if someone's thinking "but government will use this data to surveil people!" - this ship has sailed, they have access to everything that's not e2ee, and even that's not guaranteed. Government is practically the only body that can be expected to follow laws and act with people's best interest in mind. Some governments even do, just need a non-dystopian one... And yes, there's commercial space in government/local authority-operated places. That's fine, just make sure to boot those that decide to install the equivalent of cameras and microphones on their storefront.
sparrowInHand 3y ago
I dont think that Big Tech can be "taken on" anymore. Its everchanging automatable behaviour, that is capable to exploit all systems through the smallest oversight. You would need to criminalize a mindset - "parasitic intent".
- queefburglar69 3y ago
  [flagged]
tomjen3 3y ago
No. What we must have is the right of interoperability. If a service has both a server and client then it needs to be considered a defecto monopoly unless it allows any other client access to its servers. It doesn’t solve any problem for me that I can download my Facebook messages, I need to be able to choose any messenger app to write to my friends. Basically, bring back pidgin.
deleted 3y ago
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throwawaycities 3y ago
"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. ... We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy ... We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. ... Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and ... we're going to write it." Eric Huges, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993) https://acypherpunksmanifesto.eth.limo https://acypherpunksmanifesto.eth.limo This war was lost a long time ago. Capitalism isn’t the answer, capitalism is the reason both the tech industry and legal industry paved the way for data, privacy, traffic and owned by big tech for them to solely monetize. People and their data are being farmed to work and create value for others and most are paid less than enough to keep food on their table and a roof over their head, once they no longer produce value they are shipped to the glue factory. It’s not a bug of capitalism, it’s a feature and big tech has optimized for it with data.
Supermancho 3y ago
From the byline: Competition enforcement by nations has had little impact. This doesn't "take on" big tech in terms of antitrust. Giving a platform with hundreds of billions of dollars another hoop to jump over (which any competition would also then need to include) is an inconvenience, to further solidify their market hold.
- DrScientist 3y ago
  A good point - large incumbents often welcome complex regulation - as they act as a significant barrier to new entrants. However you could argue that companies like Google or Facebook were new entrants into the advertising market and unfairly competed with traditional players by breaking existing norms ( around privacy or taking editorial responsibility for promoted content ). Or the gig economy type of companies like Uber ignored existing employment law. Sometimes it's just about enforcing existing expected standards in new situations to create a level playing field. If you set the regulation at the level of what, and leave the how up to the companies - then you leave scope for competition and innovation in how to achieve the objective.
kmeisthax 3y ago
>But in the spirit of experimentation, should we not try the one thing we have not actually tried online yet – capitalism? Garbage quote. The Internet has been largely an ancap[0] wet dream. Rules are enforced by unaccountable corporations wielding monopoly power and one-sided contracts and enforcing laws through summary judgment and tattooing "POOR IMPULSE CONTROL" on people's heads. The only thing we're missing is the 3D Internet and ancient Babylonian computer viruses. The EU already implemented data ownership, it's called GDPR. The points where it differs from a vanilla property right are there specifically because tech companies have already made data "too cheap to meter". If you just build a property right around data, the tech companies will just say "your data is the price of admission to a free service", and people will accept that because... - Monopoly status is a form of power equivalent to that of government[1] - People on the business end of power have no negotiating leverage This is how dragnet surveillance became legalized in America[2]. SCOTUS argued that if you tell someone where to send a message or connect a call, that information has no expectation of privacy. AT&T would then go and put EULA roofies[3] into everyone's phone service that let them sell your phone numbers. Government and private surveillance coevolved from there into the privacy nightmare we have today. In order to fix this we need to change the starting conditions. Also... >Academics and the digital NGOs, a familiar looking blob, hate the prospect, in part because it leaves them with a diminished political role, if any at all. I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean beyond the usual right-wing knock against civil libertarians and people with well-rounded educations. [0] Short for "anarcho-capitalist", which is a contradiction in terms for reasons that should already be evident from everything else I already said. [1] Conversely, government is just a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland [3] A colorful term Louis Rossmann uses to refer to contractual clauses you'd never agree to but for your lack of negotiating power.
- Karunamon 3y ago
  people will accept [paying with their data to access a free service] because monopoly status is a form of power equivalent to that of government Sort of agreed, but monopoly status is the status of having no meaningful competition, which company/service does this apply to? The other problem is that ~nobody can articulate a way that this "data for access" arrangement has actually harmed, or even so much as inconvenienced them.
pentae 3y ago
I always wonder about what do service providers do when the person who's data you've collected is a bad actor such as someone abusing the service, committing credit card fraud or running a bot network? They too can just submit a request on all your fraud data and have it deleted? And if the answer is "well in those cases you can make an exception" well where is the line drawn, and how?
lefstathiou 3y ago
Random opinion here: I don't think privacy safeguards will have material impact on big tech and on the whole. They own the platforms we engage on and can thus channel engagement with or without privacy guards in place. I think the only solution to this, and I personally don't care to implement it so just discussing this intellectually, is to disallow M&A. These firms have reached such scale that they can overpay significantly for every next generation platform (that could eventually compete against them) and protect the moat. Otherwise we we will only see shakeups when paradigm shifts occur, only to see the companies leading the shake ups get acquired... OpenAi comes to mind as the only credible threat to Google in recent years, only to see it get swallowed by MSFT. Its difficult for any company to be at the bleeding edge of innovation forever, so they must be prevented from acquiring all innovation forever.
- dcow 3y ago
  The article is suggesting the solution is to shift the conversation to data ownership from privacy controls. Are you bucketing data ownership in with privacy controls and dissenting, or just making a tangential comment?
  - lefstathiou 3y ago
    Sorry I typed this on my commute so I didnt flush it out. What I believe (and didnt say) is that data ownership and privacy controls are important issues to individuals, but are not meaningful drivers of ongoing performance and market control of big tech. I don't believe their power lies in their access to my data, it lies in their control over the infrastructure I used to earn my living, engage with the world, etc. Thus, to mitigate their control (assuming you want to), I believe we need to look to solutions that garner competition. MSFT collects rent on the corporate enterprise via Azure, they own corporate documentation via Office, they own the corporate code repository via Github, and they own the corporate identity via LinkedIn.
- deleted 3y ago
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- ianburrell 3y ago
Aerroon 3y ago
Your browser/smartphone is voluntarily sending over the data. You could argue that MS/nvidia are doing shady things with telemetry on Windows/gpu drivers, but most of the data collection happens on websites. "Hello, we would like permission to use your data for advertising." "Ok"
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  Exactly! It's not unlike Netflix voluntarily sending me the data for a movie which I should be able to copy and share at my leisure.
greenie_beans 3y ago
i've not been able to use instagram on a web browser for a few weeks. i think it's because i don't share much data with them. help! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37422389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37422389
olah_1 3y ago
“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.” The problem with solutions like Nostr is that users don’t own their data. Relay operators do. Once you post data to a relay, you are giving ownership to them. They decide if it lives or dies, not you.
- dack 3y ago
  this is why users should just have their own relay and we should make it easy to do that
  - olah_1 3y ago
    Agree. A cheap home device that you can plug in would be very cool. Note that this is at odds with a school of thought in Nostr that says each different niche app or niche interest should use a different relay. Your suggestion would be a different way of thinking. Primarily one that is focused on maximizing different event kinds for each niche use case rather than having less event kinds and more single-purpose relays.
benkillin 3y ago
I have not read the featured article, but based solely on the headline I have this to contribute: check out Veilid. [Veilid](https://veilid.com https://veilid.com) was featured at DEFCON 31, and has this to say on their index page: " Veilid allows anyone to build a distributed, private app. Veilid gives users the privacy to opt out of data collection and online tracking. Veilid is being built with user experience, privacy, and safety as our top priorities. It is open source and available to everyone to use and build upon. Veilid goes above and beyond existing privacy technologies and has the potential to completely change the way people use the Internet. Veilid has no profit motive, which puts us in a unique position to promote ideals without the compromise of capitalism."
passwordoops 3y ago
The way to fight big tech is to actually enforce existing anti-monopoly laws, like what Lina Khan is trying to do at the FTC
lossolo 3y ago
There should be a standardized API so people can easily move their data from one provider to another, proving that they are person X on platform Y and transferring all their content (tweets, posts, videos, etc.) with just a few clicks using OAuth. It's technically possible and would make changing platforms easy, making entry of new participants in the market a lot easier.
deleted 3y ago
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oneepic 3y ago
On everything related to data privacy and Big Tech, I must admit I'm mentally blocked on one point. How do most people think of this? I'm not sure most Americans, for example, know or care about this topic. There are broadly related topics they care about though, like not getting hit by fraud. Is there a simple argument that most people would understand and agree with? I would think that's a better place to start for making a change. The other argument is, if it's too complex for most people, then a gov agency could regulate it (like most people want to enjoy water without worrying about the source), but that's a giant can of worms for other reasons. I'm not trying to start a discussion on that topic.
PCalvanelli 3y ago
Technically speaking, how do you ascribe ownership of bits to an individual?
- deleted 3y ago
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karaterobot 3y ago
> But advocates of strong competition law also have a problem. Very often, the authorities are all bark, and no bite – and the European Union is one of the worst offenders in this regard. In other words: legislation has failed, it's time for more legislation. My observation is that most people don't care about their data being used by Big Tech. Not as much as they care about short term convenience, momentary distraction, long-term addiction, or the catastrophic possibility that they may miss out on something popular. The way to "take on" Big Tech would be for people to change their real preferences for what Big Tech offers. In practice, this would mean not using Google, Meta, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, and so on. That's it, that's the option. Failing that (which is the contingency we should expect) nothing, including legislation or regulation, will have the effect you want it to have. We keep getting what we ask for and then wringing our hands over it.
GenericDev 3y ago
Hell yeah brother! It's our data, we should own it. How come I can "buy" a movie on Amazon prime, but I can't download it to any device I want? How come I can only stream on spotify and not purchase digital albums? Our rights have eroded so quickly and so deeply that people forget one of the biggest selling points of the original iPods was carrying around YOUR music. Everything is a subscription. You'll own nothing, and like it. It's our data, it's our privacy. We should be able to own and control both.
- andrewxdiamond 3y ago
  Ironicly everything you’ve listed here is an example of companies expressing their rights to control their data. You don’t own music or movies, they aren’t your data. Data rights are for data about you and your behavior. If you retained copyright over all the data you produce by existing, you would be on the same level as companies today
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    Except when you've paid for it? Then it's your data. This is not rocket science.
    - andrewxdiamond 3y ago
      You didn’t pay for the right to own those movies, you paid a small fee for a license to consume their data within the bounds of the contract they laid out. No one here is trying to outlaw Copyright, which is the mechanism that lets companies do as OP says; limit you from downloading their data. Data sovereignty is not at all related to streaming movies or music and this comment confuses people who are curious to what the effort really is about.
      - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
        Copyright regulates distribution, not consumption. What people mean by "own" is to own a digital file of the content that can be viewed at any time, anywhere, as long as the onus on keeping backups/moving the file around is on the consumer.
mempko 3y ago
We should own our data. But another way to take on big tech is just to break them up into small tech. Good old fashion monopoly busting. Sometimes old tools still work in the modern world.
mushbino 3y ago
Things like this would be much easier to accomplish if tech workers unionized. We don't necessarily need it for compensation, although many could benefit, but having a say in what we build is incredibly important.

237 points by timthorn 3y ago

3c0 3y ago

the thing is, even if you "own" your data you still need to give it to companies to use their product. unless everyone runs software locally, in which case the majority of the populace needs to learn how to use devices rather than falling for the trashy "itjustworks™" chromebooks and convenience devices that milk them for data profits whilst appearing cheaper and better to integrate into their lives. especially with google - you cant run services like theirs locally really, and even if you request your data, you cant ever really find out how they use it or what they have done with it. its the illusion of ownership. data isnt ownable. its simply transferable.

_chu1 3y ago
Maybe the only way to fix this is to use the route you named, make people host locally and make technology harder to use.
- j45 3y ago
  I’m not sure what is linking the two here for you. People seem to host their own data locally on their phones just fine
MrJohz 3y ago
That's pretty much the whole point of the data ownership concept in the EU, though - force these companies to tell you exactly what they're using, and exactly how they're using it. I don't really think there's a feasible alternative. Most people don't have the means, time, or knowledge to self-host all of the tools they use, and as a consumer, I can't really tell how a company is going to use the data I give them. In cases like that, the only solution is regulatory structure.
n4r9 3y ago
I guess there's two things going on here. Firstly, whether the company takes the data with your full knowledge and consent. Secondly, whether they use it in a transparent (or at least ethical) manner. For the first of these, I quite like how on Android now the user has great control over what data is made available to which apps. The app needs to explicitly request access to camera, location, files etc... . You can toggle this on or off at will, and specify that it can only read the data while the app is active. I can imagine having regulation which enforces this type of privacy control for all tech service providers. The second is much harder, because it's difficult to know what the company is doing behind closed doors. However we can at least check telemetry and demand that it is minimal and anonymised where appropriate. We can also apply much harsher penalties to companies that flout the rules. Of course, all of this relies on government that acts in the genuine interest of its people and without hands in industry back pockets. We can but hope.
- pierat 3y ago
  > For the first of these, I quite like how on Android now the user has great control over what data is made available to which apps. The app needs to explicitly request access to camera, location, files etc... . You can toggle this on or off at will, and specify that it can only read the data while the app is active. I can imagine having regulation which enforces this type of privacy control for all tech service providers. And the Android stock permissions are laughable and a pure joke. Go look at Xposed Framework, and you'll find ways to unwind every permission, either direct deny, or "make fake data" plugins. There's even fake contact plugins, GPS faker plugins, you name it. Google only implemented the worst-of-worse deny permissions, because doing a good job would be against their interests.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    I'm sure there are plenty of ways to improve how Android does it, I was just using it as an example that I've had personal experience with. I'm not sure if the ability to make fake data is an essential part of owning one's data, but would be interested to hear arguments for it.

skilled 3y ago

https://archive.ph/o2Fqo https://archive.ph/o2Fqo

memefrog 3y ago

[dead]

elric 3y ago

Isn't this what Tim Berners-Lee's Solid Project is trying to solve? It's an interesting nut to crack. https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/

suckitsam 3y ago
I feel like these kinds of solutions can necessarily only protect boring data - my phone number, date of birth, favorite color, and mother's maiden name. I can't see how I could ever get the interesting/profitable/problematic data (my location history, my neighbor's doorbell videos of me, call records, purchase history at Target, and which ads I click on) into something like that.
- j45 3y ago
  Except this guy already had doubt towards his little www project once. Beginning with your own data and metadata is very different than data about you.
  - suckitsam 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm just not sure personal data is actually The Problem. Sure, ̶b̶a̶n̶k̶ ̶r̶o̶b̶b̶e̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶t̶e̶c̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶r̶a̶u̶d̶ Identity Theft is a Bad Thing, and this would seemingly minimize the number of SQL dumps my birthday and SSN appears in, but that isn't exactly The Data that Big Tech feeds off of.
    - j45 3y ago
      Data you create by your usage of computers is generally yours. Where that data is content and the interactions themselves, it's also different.

cm277 3y ago

Argh... not even. We don't own the power or water meters that serve our house, nor do we get shares/equity in our water/power consumption. While these are services that are actually critical for survival and most of them are actual monopolies, the power/water utilities don't make insane amounts of profit, they don't have market caps in the trillions and they don't have the most lobbyists in DC/Brussels. You know why? because they are regulated and taxed. But no, we don't mention these words around advertising, or providing internet access or the main computing/communication channels for ~80% of the world population (smartphones/social media). Why not? are they somehow special? more important than power or water? FFS, I dont want to own or manage my data any more than I want to think about how many liters of water or KWh I am going to consume today. I want these companies to be brought down to size and become part of the democratic polity, not unelected dynasts over life and industry.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago
Yes. But. even regulation needs a framework to think about how to regulate. And personal data makes an excellent framework, and saying I own data about me is a good way to make the ownership and control relevant, and allows lots of different approaches. It's feasible to imagine most (western) countries agreeing "data about a person or their digital actions" being something that can be put into their laws. It's hard to imagine everyone agreeing "this regulatory body will oversee data" The EU was first out the gate, and it's enrolling but heading towards restrictions on all usage then allowances for medical and academic research (you publish, you were allowed) and restrictions on personalised advertising. It's going to get messy, but I think DuckDuckGo has the right balance - if I search for "trainers for old men" Inwill get adverts for that. But they won't "remember" my search the next time. Honestly I will be amazed if the conversion rates for DuckDuckGo and Google are different enough to justify the suck that is internet advertising today.
- cm277 3y ago
  I don't disagree, but I think the idea of owning your personal data is a red herring and/or a stalling tactic. The GDPR and its equivalents were a necessary first step, but I dont see how privacy can stop the market abuses and the rentier behaviors of the FAANGs. Privacy is great, claiming your legal rights over your data is great, but at a market/economy level it's probably a net plus for larger companies that can be compliant and/or work around its restrictions. So, instead of talking endlessly about data ownership and micro-transactions and god knows what else we've been arguing for (checks notes) 30 years, we could just ask to regulate the tech giants. Cap their rentier rates (30% on the app stores? really), their monopoly behaviors (you are both the largest ad server and the auctioneer? really?), etc, etc, etc-freaking-etera.

Genghis_Khan 3y ago

Let's decompose "our" data just a bit: data that we ourselves intentionally create (e.g., pictures we take, documents we write) and the observations of others about our activities (e.g., server logs, transaction data). The former seems (!) straightforward to address, while the latter seems fraught. After all, if I own all data about my comings and goings, then so does a corrupt politician his. If we go too far in restricting the recording and sharing of our observations about others, however automatic they may be, we might accidentally spring a speech-stifling genie.

n4r9 3y ago
> After all, if I own all data about my comings and goings, then so does a corrupt politician his. Surely laws can differentiate between private and public domain? I'm able to store private documents in my house without anyone knowing about it. So is Donald Trump. But he can't legally keep classified state documents there indefinitely. Perhaps if he was more discreet about it he wouldn't have been caught. But there's a clear distinction in the law either way.
layer8 3y ago
Rights always have to be balanced against each other, as they often are conflicting. This is true in general, and nothing new here. The right to own the data about your personal private life exists in Germany, for example, where it is called “informational self-determination”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determinati... “This basic right warrants in this respect the capacity of the individual to determine in principle the disclosure and use of his/her personal data. Limitations to this informational self-determination are allowed only in case of overriding public interest.”

datadrivenangel 3y ago

Data ownership sounds great but is incoherent as a concept as we get lower down the IP to information spectrum. Intellectual Property has strong protections under copyright law. If I copyright a photo, or publish a book of my web browsing history, I can sue the pants off anyone who attempts to use it with permissions outside of fair use. The protections are strong, and the enforcement mechanisms are strong (though expensive). Automated information collection (data), does not have strong permissions, because there is a fundamental blurring of system logs and user tracking. It is necessary to know what external systems are interacting with your systems to ensure system integrity and availability (can't IP ban without knowing IP addresses). So there is obviously legitimate collection and usage of this data. Not to mention weak enforcement mechanisms for privacy. So weak protections, weak enforcement (and enforcement is still expensive).

butokai 3y ago
Your suggestion of publishing a book with one's browsing history really sounds interesting. Did anybody try something along these lines? I had never thought about privacy as part of the same spectrum as IP protection.
seydor 3y ago
It doesn't have protection because the law did not protect it, and indeed the law protects the big tech, up until today. It's not incoherent
pulvinar 3y ago
A problem is that facts are not copyrightable, in the US anyway[0]. You can copyright your browsing history book but anyone can use the facts in it or even republish them in a different format with their own copyright. [0] Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
jart 3y ago
This comes so close to speaking the truth. Take the thought to its logical conclusion. I think of online services like I think of my local bodega. You can't run a store if it's illegal for you to see or have any knowledge about the people who walk into your store. No store owner ever said, "I have a legitimate need of being able to see the people who walk into my store, just so I can prevent theft, and I immediately forget about all my customers after 48 hours." Store owners want to be able to develop relationships with the people who walk into their stores. That requires getting to know the person. Finding out what things they like. So they can make sure their shelves are stocked with their favorite things. And that's basically all tech companies want. When people talk about privacy in this context, it comes across to me like someone who doesn't want anyone to know they've visited the local porn store. Not that far from the truth if we consider how consumers used the web during its first decade of history. The web has evolved since then but that culture stuck and turned into policy. Tech is profoundly anti-social by default, and the only way that tech companies can be successful (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) is by overcoming that to create spaces where people can know the people they're interacting with online. So when people say they don't think tech companies should be able to have knowledge or information about people, what they're really saying is they don't want tech companies to be successful.

DrScientist 3y ago

In reality isn't this really quite simple - it's the theft of privacy. Data is the concrete thing of course, and therefore potentially useful to then put a legal framework around - but in the end it's really about the right to privacy. The loss of privacy is done by clever joining of the dots - each individual data point in itself is often not that important. It's the activity - the joining of the dots - back to a person - which is the stalking like behaviour - that's the problem. Ie the activity you need to regulate is the connecting of the dots back to a real world person. Let's call it the 'Digital Stalking Act'

hooby 3y ago
Why not call it "The right to privacy"? Come to think of, we should even add that to the declaration of human rights! Wait a minute...
- DrScientist 3y ago
  As is often the case with these things - declaring high level rights is easy - practical enforcement is the hard part.
  - jgeada 3y ago
    Hard in this forum frequently means technically hard, but I think in this context you mean "politically hard". I do not think there is a major technical problem, at the core the easiest solution is to just stop collecting arbitrary data on everyone. The issue is that the people with money and power do not want to give up control of the data they have on everyone else. It is very hard to make someone understand this if their income and power depends on not understanding it.
    - DrScientist 3y ago
      I meant legally hard to define. Some data is important to collect - I expect my bank to keep a record of my financial transactions! I just don't want them to sell them on, or use them for services I didn't sign up for. And an 'opt-out' system isn't sufficient - it needs to be an opt-in system. An opt in system that isn't by a forced game of yes/no bingo - it has to be one where the customer has to take the initiative. You don't get bombarded with extra stuff being put into your basket at the supermarket checkout and then asked a series of 20 questions about whether you want to take the extra things. You shouldn't with digital services either. Now the hard part is that legal definition between what's the data reasonably required for the service and what's taking the piss. I'm arguing one way to define that is whether the data use involves joining dots between transactions in a way that's not required for the immediate transaction or service.

specialist 3y ago

I am my data, my data is me. I own myself, of course. So I also own any and all data about me. The constitutional right to privacy (sovereignty over oneself) is the start. This article's notion of price setting is derived from the right to privacy. -- I'd love to hear any and all proposals about determining the price of demographic data. Surely, the Big Tech companies do this already. Analyzing current accounting practices is terrific place to start. One interesting proposal for price setting is to treat warehousing demographic data (on the corporate balance sheet) as a liability vs an asset. The idea being to proactively manage risk (of the inevitable data leaks, ransomeware, etc), right?

datavirtue 3y ago
Accounting methods/practices are private. You just get to see the income statement and balance sheet that is produced from this voodoo. Perfect example: Kroger is taking the full charge for their opioid settlement in a single year but future investors and managers will be burdened with the actual payments for decades (tax law allows this). This is the thought process baked into these accounting methods that you normally are not privy to. Bonuses for me now, pain for you later. https://www.baldwin.senate.gov/news/press-releases/challenge-tax-deductions-by-opioid-companies https://www.baldwin.senate.gov/news/press-releases/challenge...
- j45 3y ago
  Your bank balance is private. Accounting methods and practices are not private, they are standardized. Where it comes to your own money personal or business, you get to see all of the chart of accounts, ledgers, etc.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    If they are using cash I know exactly what's going on by looking any balance sheet or income statement. If they are accrual I have no idea what lies beneath the surface. Everyone is on accrual. For a public company you get a balance sheet and income statement. Good luck. You have to audit them and all of their subsidiaries. But you can't because you don't have access to any of the books. It just leaves everything open to "creative accounting." It has been a proven vector of corruption and high crimes. Recently (pre-pandemic) the guy that cracked Madoff released an analysis of GE claiming that they have been cooking their books for years--outright accusing them of fraud. GE and their media sycophants denied it adamantly. Story goes away without any proof whatsoever. Maybe the guy is nuts? I'm suspicious. Day traders LOVE GE for the ups and downs. They bought at $9 and now the stock is $132. In that case no one cares if the books are cooked as long as they can ride the wave. Feel free to read about Enron on Wikipedia. There are plenty of case studies and the world will keep producing more.

datavirtue 3y ago

I like that data is not own-able. If I own data, corporations can own data. Not cool.

esafak 3y ago
They do own data.
- teddyh 3y ago
  And it is, indeed, not cool.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  How? By keeping it locked away? That's their only protection. If it gets out of the gate they have no claim.

pjmlp 3y ago

It turns out that the general public rather have AOL and Compuserve, than public distributed computing.

j45 3y ago
Users wanting to be used lol. Let’s mail out cds while we’re at it.

cm2012 3y ago

Data privacy is one of the least important issues of our day. People (especially on HN) foam at the mouth about it but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates.

srcreigh 3y ago
The opportunity cost of the advertising industry is incalculable. Entire industries are snuffed because kingpin ad networks can make a few dollars per year per person by having a free app with ads in that space. Less choice for the consumer, less competition, lower quality.
- jraby3 3y ago
  There are pretty clear benefits to some advertising. Email, YouTube, calendar, maps are all incredibly useful services we are lucky to have. There needs to be a line or safeguard as well as an option to pay a reasonable price for these free services to keep your data safe. YouTube is unfairly overpriced for the ad free option as are most of these free services.
  - srcreigh 3y ago
    The greatest loss of the 21st century is how far behind we are in all the industries you list. Not to mention news. The option to pay today’s kingpin isn’t any recompense.
  - fangorn 3y ago
    Maybe it's nothing, or maybe it's freudian, but email existed before Google, so did calendar. Youtube was an acquisition. Maps, well, there are great alternatives now that do not require anal-probe-level surveillance to find an address or a route. Just publicly fund the services that are useful to people. If "government" (i.e. us) can pay for a square for people to meet at, why not "digital spaces"? And if someone's thinking "but government will use this data to surveil people!" - this ship has sailed, they have access to everything that's not e2ee, and even that's not guaranteed. Government is practically the only body that can be expected to follow laws and act with people's best interest in mind. Some governments even do, just need a non-dystopian one... And yes, there's commercial space in government/local authority-operated places. That's fine, just make sure to boot those that decide to install the equivalent of cameras and microphones on their storefront.

sparrowInHand 3y ago

I dont think that Big Tech can be "taken on" anymore. Its everchanging automatable behaviour, that is capable to exploit all systems through the smallest oversight. You would need to criminalize a mindset - "parasitic intent".

queefburglar69 3y ago
[flagged]

tomjen3 3y ago

No. What we must have is the right of interoperability. If a service has both a server and client then it needs to be considered a defecto monopoly unless it allows any other client access to its servers. It doesn’t solve any problem for me that I can download my Facebook messages, I need to be able to choose any messenger app to write to my friends. Basically, bring back pidgin.

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throwawaycities 3y ago

"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. ... We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy ... We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. ... Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and ... we're going to write it." Eric Huges, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993) https://acypherpunksmanifesto.eth.limo https://acypherpunksmanifesto.eth.limo This war was lost a long time ago. Capitalism isn’t the answer, capitalism is the reason both the tech industry and legal industry paved the way for data, privacy, traffic and owned by big tech for them to solely monetize. People and their data are being farmed to work and create value for others and most are paid less than enough to keep food on their table and a roof over their head, once they no longer produce value they are shipped to the glue factory. It’s not a bug of capitalism, it’s a feature and big tech has optimized for it with data.

Supermancho 3y ago

From the byline: Competition enforcement by nations has had little impact. This doesn't "take on" big tech in terms of antitrust. Giving a platform with hundreds of billions of dollars another hoop to jump over (which any competition would also then need to include) is an inconvenience, to further solidify their market hold.

DrScientist 3y ago
A good point - large incumbents often welcome complex regulation - as they act as a significant barrier to new entrants. However you could argue that companies like Google or Facebook were new entrants into the advertising market and unfairly competed with traditional players by breaking existing norms ( around privacy or taking editorial responsibility for promoted content ). Or the gig economy type of companies like Uber ignored existing employment law. Sometimes it's just about enforcing existing expected standards in new situations to create a level playing field. If you set the regulation at the level of what, and leave the how up to the companies - then you leave scope for competition and innovation in how to achieve the objective.

kmeisthax 3y ago

>But in the spirit of experimentation, should we not try the one thing we have not actually tried online yet – capitalism? Garbage quote. The Internet has been largely an ancap[0] wet dream. Rules are enforced by unaccountable corporations wielding monopoly power and one-sided contracts and enforcing laws through summary judgment and tattooing "POOR IMPULSE CONTROL" on people's heads. The only thing we're missing is the 3D Internet and ancient Babylonian computer viruses. The EU already implemented data ownership, it's called GDPR. The points where it differs from a vanilla property right are there specifically because tech companies have already made data "too cheap to meter". If you just build a property right around data, the tech companies will just say "your data is the price of admission to a free service", and people will accept that because... - Monopoly status is a form of power equivalent to that of government[1] - People on the business end of power have no negotiating leverage This is how dragnet surveillance became legalized in America[2]. SCOTUS argued that if you tell someone where to send a message or connect a call, that information has no expectation of privacy. AT&T would then go and put EULA roofies[3] into everyone's phone service that let them sell your phone numbers. Government and private surveillance coevolved from there into the privacy nightmare we have today. In order to fix this we need to change the starting conditions. Also... >Academics and the digital NGOs, a familiar looking blob, hate the prospect, in part because it leaves them with a diminished political role, if any at all. I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean beyond the usual right-wing knock against civil libertarians and people with well-rounded educations. [0] Short for "anarcho-capitalist", which is a contradiction in terms for reasons that should already be evident from everything else I already said. [1] Conversely, government is just a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland [3] A colorful term Louis Rossmann uses to refer to contractual clauses you'd never agree to but for your lack of negotiating power.

Karunamon 3y ago
people will accept [paying with their data to access a free service] because monopoly status is a form of power equivalent to that of government Sort of agreed, but monopoly status is the status of having no meaningful competition, which company/service does this apply to? The other problem is that ~nobody can articulate a way that this "data for access" arrangement has actually harmed, or even so much as inconvenienced them.

pentae 3y ago

I always wonder about what do service providers do when the person who's data you've collected is a bad actor such as someone abusing the service, committing credit card fraud or running a bot network? They too can just submit a request on all your fraud data and have it deleted? And if the answer is "well in those cases you can make an exception" well where is the line drawn, and how?

lefstathiou 3y ago

Random opinion here: I don't think privacy safeguards will have material impact on big tech and on the whole. They own the platforms we engage on and can thus channel engagement with or without privacy guards in place. I think the only solution to this, and I personally don't care to implement it so just discussing this intellectually, is to disallow M&A. These firms have reached such scale that they can overpay significantly for every next generation platform (that could eventually compete against them) and protect the moat. Otherwise we we will only see shakeups when paradigm shifts occur, only to see the companies leading the shake ups get acquired... OpenAi comes to mind as the only credible threat to Google in recent years, only to see it get swallowed by MSFT. Its difficult for any company to be at the bleeding edge of innovation forever, so they must be prevented from acquiring all innovation forever.

dcow 3y ago
The article is suggesting the solution is to shift the conversation to data ownership from privacy controls. Are you bucketing data ownership in with privacy controls and dissenting, or just making a tangential comment?
- lefstathiou 3y ago
  Sorry I typed this on my commute so I didnt flush it out. What I believe (and didnt say) is that data ownership and privacy controls are important issues to individuals, but are not meaningful drivers of ongoing performance and market control of big tech. I don't believe their power lies in their access to my data, it lies in their control over the infrastructure I used to earn my living, engage with the world, etc. Thus, to mitigate their control (assuming you want to), I believe we need to look to solutions that garner competition. MSFT collects rent on the corporate enterprise via Azure, they own corporate documentation via Office, they own the corporate code repository via Github, and they own the corporate identity via LinkedIn.
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ianburrell 3y ago

Aerroon 3y ago

Your browser/smartphone is voluntarily sending over the data. You could argue that MS/nvidia are doing shady things with telemetry on Windows/gpu drivers, but most of the data collection happens on websites. "Hello, we would like permission to use your data for advertising." "Ok"

kelseyfrog 3y ago
Exactly! It's not unlike Netflix voluntarily sending me the data for a movie which I should be able to copy and share at my leisure.

greenie_beans 3y ago

i've not been able to use instagram on a web browser for a few weeks. i think it's because i don't share much data with them. help! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37422389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37422389

olah_1 3y ago

“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.” The problem with solutions like Nostr is that users don’t own their data. Relay operators do. Once you post data to a relay, you are giving ownership to them. They decide if it lives or dies, not you.

dack 3y ago
this is why users should just have their own relay and we should make it easy to do that
- olah_1 3y ago
  Agree. A cheap home device that you can plug in would be very cool. Note that this is at odds with a school of thought in Nostr that says each different niche app or niche interest should use a different relay. Your suggestion would be a different way of thinking. Primarily one that is focused on maximizing different event kinds for each niche use case rather than having less event kinds and more single-purpose relays.

benkillin 3y ago

I have not read the featured article, but based solely on the headline I have this to contribute: check out Veilid. [Veilid](https://veilid.com https://veilid.com) was featured at DEFCON 31, and has this to say on their index page: " Veilid allows anyone to build a distributed, private app. Veilid gives users the privacy to opt out of data collection and online tracking. Veilid is being built with user experience, privacy, and safety as our top priorities. It is open source and available to everyone to use and build upon. Veilid goes above and beyond existing privacy technologies and has the potential to completely change the way people use the Internet. Veilid has no profit motive, which puts us in a unique position to promote ideals without the compromise of capitalism."

passwordoops 3y ago

The way to fight big tech is to actually enforce existing anti-monopoly laws, like what Lina Khan is trying to do at the FTC

lossolo 3y ago

There should be a standardized API so people can easily move their data from one provider to another, proving that they are person X on platform Y and transferring all their content (tweets, posts, videos, etc.) with just a few clicks using OAuth. It's technically possible and would make changing platforms easy, making entry of new participants in the market a lot easier.

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oneepic 3y ago

On everything related to data privacy and Big Tech, I must admit I'm mentally blocked on one point. How do most people think of this? I'm not sure most Americans, for example, know or care about this topic. There are broadly related topics they care about though, like not getting hit by fraud. Is there a simple argument that most people would understand and agree with? I would think that's a better place to start for making a change. The other argument is, if it's too complex for most people, then a gov agency could regulate it (like most people want to enjoy water without worrying about the source), but that's a giant can of worms for other reasons. I'm not trying to start a discussion on that topic.

PCalvanelli 3y ago

Technically speaking, how do you ascribe ownership of bits to an individual?

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karaterobot 3y ago

> But advocates of strong competition law also have a problem. Very often, the authorities are all bark, and no bite – and the European Union is one of the worst offenders in this regard. In other words: legislation has failed, it's time for more legislation. My observation is that most people don't care about their data being used by Big Tech. Not as much as they care about short term convenience, momentary distraction, long-term addiction, or the catastrophic possibility that they may miss out on something popular. The way to "take on" Big Tech would be for people to change their real preferences for what Big Tech offers. In practice, this would mean not using Google, Meta, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, and so on. That's it, that's the option. Failing that (which is the contingency we should expect) nothing, including legislation or regulation, will have the effect you want it to have. We keep getting what we ask for and then wringing our hands over it.

GenericDev 3y ago

Hell yeah brother! It's our data, we should own it. How come I can "buy" a movie on Amazon prime, but I can't download it to any device I want? How come I can only stream on spotify and not purchase digital albums? Our rights have eroded so quickly and so deeply that people forget one of the biggest selling points of the original iPods was carrying around YOUR music. Everything is a subscription. You'll own nothing, and like it. It's our data, it's our privacy. We should be able to own and control both.

andrewxdiamond 3y ago
Ironicly everything you’ve listed here is an example of companies expressing their rights to control their data. You don’t own music or movies, they aren’t your data. Data rights are for data about you and your behavior. If you retained copyright over all the data you produce by existing, you would be on the same level as companies today
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Except when you've paid for it? Then it's your data. This is not rocket science.
  - andrewxdiamond 3y ago
    You didn’t pay for the right to own those movies, you paid a small fee for a license to consume their data within the bounds of the contract they laid out. No one here is trying to outlaw Copyright, which is the mechanism that lets companies do as OP says; limit you from downloading their data. Data sovereignty is not at all related to streaming movies or music and this comment confuses people who are curious to what the effort really is about.
    - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
      Copyright regulates distribution, not consumption. What people mean by "own" is to own a digital file of the content that can be viewed at any time, anywhere, as long as the onus on keeping backups/moving the file around is on the consumer.

mempko 3y ago

We should own our data. But another way to take on big tech is just to break them up into small tech. Good old fashion monopoly busting. Sometimes old tools still work in the modern world.

mushbino 3y ago

Things like this would be much easier to accomplish if tech workers unionized. We don't necessarily need it for compensation, although many could benefit, but having a say in what we build is incredibly important.