Who Owns the Data?

Data is the new oil, they say. That seems obvious when you think of Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent, writes Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century. And yet, we give our data away so easily:

“People are happy to give away their most valuable asset – their personal data – in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It is a bit like African and Native Americans tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European colonialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets.”

We are heading for a future described below:

“What will happen when we can ask Google, “Hi Google, based on everything you know about cars, and based on everything you know about me (including my needs, my habits, my views on global warming, and even my opinions about Middle Eastern politics) – what is the best car for me?”

Or maybe we’ll be asking Facebook or Alexa/Amazon that question, but the point is the same.

If we, as individuals and as a society, don’t figure this out soon, it may be too late:

“Humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive at all if they are disconnected from the network.”

Today, we feel that way only figuratively. But tomorrow, it might be literally: insurance companies may refuse you cover unless they have data about you, companies may refuse to hire people about whom they know nothing. And then it will become a vicious cycle: the more they know, the better they get at giving you what you need… but also at manipulating you.

And then there’s the question of how much influence/manipulation will be done by those with all that data about you. Or given to others, accidentally or deliberately, for those purposes.

Do we need to turn to tech folks, not political folks, for a solution:

“Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place could engineer some technological solution?”

Google already thinks of everything as an engineering problem to be solved. Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook aren’t exactly humble on such matters. And the Chinese, well, who knows how good they are at this? But would you trust any of them to solve this problem?

So is our only option to evolve a solution ourselves, collectively?

“Who owns the data? Does the data about my DNA, my brain and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation or to the human collective?... How do you regulate the ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse.”