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Data Custody

Data Ownership vs Custody for the 21st Century – Part 1

Data ownership is a topic important to me. Recently I have been thinking of ways to increase awareness of the matter among at least people in technology – not even the broader public. As I began diving into what I would call it – nomenclature is important; the words we use as a pointer to something affects the way we relate to it – I experimented with terms like digital liberty. Or ‘info-steading’, like homesteading. It turns out I’m not great at catchy terms.

But as I cycled through terms that would best capture why ownership of your own data is important, my thinking naturally expanded to what ownership actually means. Does it mean self-hosting your contacts, calendar, email? Does it mean storing your documents, photos, music, video only on your own hard drives? What is the benefit in each case?

If defined as self-hosting/self-storage as opposed to ‘cloud storage’, what about your browsing history and bookmarks? What does giving up Safari or Chrome sync across your phone, iPad and laptop yield in terms of you owning that data? Streaming Spotify and Netflix means these services own your viewing/listening data instead of you. For you to own your data, it means not using them and instead buying all your music, movies and TV shows. For your bank to not own your financial data, you’d pay and be paid entirely in cryptocurrency held in some offline wallet. Investing is going to be quite difficult. It’s all possible, but what does the trade-off look like for you?

Ultimately it’s the wrong question. It’s not an absolutist question about whether you or some other party owns your data. Today’s world – and the last couple of decades – has meant that to acheive any reasonable quality of life, you will end up sharing your data, in fact in many cases your data – or at least, data about you – will primarily reside with some other party.

Part 2 follows.