Who Owns Your Data?

Who should control your personal information?

Data.  Measurable.  Sustainable.  Analysis. Cost-benefit analysis.  Statistics.

My heart goes all aflutter at those words.  I really love statistics.  I am a total geek.  Spreadsheets soothe my soul.  I am not alone in my love for data.  With people as diverse as Bono and Hans Rosling (declared a data visionary by Bill Gates) preaching the importance of data and applying data-driven solutions to the world’s most intractable problems, we are told that our programs must be data-driven to be important enough to receive attention and funding, to be real enough to merit solutions. 

If you don’t have data, you don’t have a problem worth fixing.

This week the tech world wobbled at the news that the new iPhone would require the user’s permission to share data with apps.  Not surprisingly, the conversation has centered about what this means to companies, with nary a word about what it means to humans.  You know - the customers, the consumers, the flesh-and-blood people paying the bills.

The sharpest focus was on what this change would mean to Facebook.  If Facebook could no longer mine every aspect of your online life, what would that mean?  The Chief Sociopath, Mark Zuckerberg, drones on about user experience, and the ‘benefits’ to the user, distracting from how, when, where, and for what our every keystroke is mined and sold. 

Not to go totally old school and pedantic on you, but the basic tenets of capitalism rest on the concept of supply and demand.  Therefore, no app company, including Facebook, would need to have even a moment’s worry if the consumer values the ads and the curated news feeds so much that they wouldn’t think of clicking ‘don’t track’ on their new iPhone.  The demand would remain, and Facebook could continue to mine our data to sell targeted ads and continue to make billions without disruption.  Conversely, consumers who disliked Apple’s approach of allowing the consumer to customize their browsing experience, could….not buy an iPhone.  I know, radical concepts, we humans making choices ourselves. 

In the old days (>20 years ago), approved data came largely from large organizations and government sources.  It was painstakingly gathered, vetted, approved and disseminated, generally 3-5 years after the time period in question.  A highly resource-intensive process involving reams of paper and officials at all level of government and coordinating organizations, the reports were/are used to inform high-level decisions regarding the allocation of funding and resources and to analyze outcomes as they circled through committees, departments and bureaucracies.  With that responsibility and access to data came power to make decisions which affect all our lives.

Then came Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter.  Is it a coincidence that our wildly expanded obsession with data occurred at roughly the same time that data became so widely available and so enormously profitable?  Of course not.  But our ability to collect data on a staggering, previously unthinkable scale does not mean that we know how to handle the new freedom and responsibility that data has given us. With technology changing at warp speed, we haven’t had the time to understand the implications of collecting or holding unlimited data, or to see how actively sharing data might look, though the European Union has dug in and started to look at the shifting power dynamics and actually think about putting ‘we the people’ back into the equation.

Large organizations (and governments) are having the most difficult time with the data revolution.  They haven’t caught up to the new realities that technology has rendered and the shifting power dynamics.  They can’t comprehend that data is now available to almost anyone.  Not a month goes by that I’m not notified of some data breach by some company with whom I’ve had no choice but to share my personal data with in order to function on a daily basis (finance, medicine, commerce, recreation).  Even more sinister, increasing numbers of notifications that more of my personal information has been found on the dark web, being mined by ever more sophisticated criminals.  And the response is typically ‘too bad, so sad’.   Hire a company to monitory your data, and hand over all your data to them so they know what to monitor, and pay them a monthly fee.

Protecting your own data is considered the cost of doing business, for you.

Data is out there and it is freely available to anyone who wants to search, it is not just for the powerful and well-funded anymore, yet data is primarily exploited by the few men who have amassed the most unimaginable level of wealth in history, and increasingly by criminal elements.  Yet data does help us to tackle some of the world’s most difficult problems, including data on how data is currently being exploited.  

So how do we slow down this runaway train and begin to think about data differently? I think we need to start by understanding the mix of fear and power.  Fear of what will happen with the data when it is out of control.  Fear that power will be diminished if data they now ‘own’ is shared.  Fear that power will be misused in the hands of others, the hubris that ‘we know best’.  

There is a legitimate concern about data being used in a way that is ultimately damaging, because once data enters the hands of humans, it immediately becomes biased and impure.  Just as with beauty, statistics are in the eye of the beholder.  Any statistician with a grain of ability can slice and dice statistics to support or discredit a story.  But here’s the rub, data is useless without analysis.  That’s right, data is absolutely useless unless you know what to do with it, which creates a self-limiting component to data.  The true power of data still lies in analyzing it and using it effectively, and since big data is a new phenomenon, what constitutes ‘effective use’ is subject to ongoing debate - both practical and ethical.  

Once we have the raw data we need to manipulate the data ethically and responsibly in a way that does not cause harm, we also need to leverage the data more effectively.  Can this be done only by established organizations as it has been done in the past or can this be done by an individual, a small organization, or a social movement?  I can not predict how data will be evaluated and used in the future, but I’m tending towards the belief that data will be used in an entirely different way than it has been used traditionally, that it will be used far more from the bottom-up than from the top-down, but definitely that data and power can not be concentrated in the hands of a few non-elected men. 

The power that comes from empowering an individual, acknowledging them and making their voice heard, to know that their life matters, their views, their struggles, their loss, or their pain, is the stuff of revolution.  It has the potential to upend the status quo, and that is frightening to the powerful.  We have seen the phenomenon with Twitter and the Arab Spring uprisings, and in the January 6 insurrection and attack on the Capital, aided by Facebook.  This harnessing of technology to drive powerful social change is something I doubt the tech bros truly anticipated, but they sure aren’t interested in giving up that power.  Once you put information in the hands of many, it changes the dynamics of power, which is what makes it so frightening to those defending the status quo and their own section of turf.  

With only two decades of tech data, the power has shifted sharply from government to tech firms and corporations, a violent swing of the pendulum.  Time to start hauling the pendulum back towards the center.  Providing ‘we the people’ with the option of not having our data harvested is an adjustment in the right direction, but it’s not enough.  We need more robust discussions about who owns the data and how the data can be used.  I’m thrilled with the enormous step in this direction the Apple has taken with the app approval process, and even though I usually hang on to my phone until it is truly obsolete, I expect I’ll be buying control of my own data via a new phone, even though I know this means Apple themselves will be harvesting more of my data as I use the new phone.