Data Ownership in the Digital Age: Who Really Controls Your Information?

 Data Ownership in the Digital Age: Who Really Controls Your Information?

Introduction

With the introduction of this digital age, the way people convey messages intimately and the mode of business practice has dramatically changed. Currently, people share their information anywhere and at any time, be it through publishing images or buying goods and services. In exchange, companies, governments, and other organizations gather this data for one purpose or the other, but who actually owns this information? The question of who owns this data has emerged as one of the biggest questions of our age. Every time we click, every time we interact online, we create loads of data, frequently, without much freedom to decide what becomes of it.

Information is one of the scarce resources in the contemporary world. However, there is always confusion over the rights of ownership of the collected material as well as the rights to its commercial exploitation. In this article readers will find out what is data ownership, what are the concerns regarding data privacy and protection, and how various parties such as business, governments, and consumers regard they own personal data. Overall, readers are going to have a better sense of conceptual understanding of data ownership and exactly why people’s information should be safeguarded in the new world of technology.

The Rise of the Data Economy

Traditionally economic activities have been dominated by tangible products and exported services. Today, however, data has emerged as of the most desirable commodities globally due to the essentiality of information in the world today. With product search and messages, every single exchange that takes place online produces data. It is then gathered, sorted, and utilized to gain insight into consumers, market strategies, and product and service enhancement by various companies. This has created what might be termed a ‘new data economy’ where companies, which, in many instances, we have not consciously chosen, are making money from the data we produce.

Every time you type into a search engine, share on social media, or just surf a website, organizations are storing information about you. They may follow your location, your history of visited sites, your buying history, and even your interests. And that, in turn, enables businesses to develop rich consumer insights, which are then employed to deliver advertising and content. The more often you make payments, the more they know you; the more they know you, the better they can predict what you might like – so you become valuable to them.

However, just as companies make huge profits out of your data, the consumer is mostly in the dark most of the time. This happens out of moments where individuals consent to data collection without prior knowledge of the activities by accepting the terms and conditions or privacy policies, which they do not read most of the time. The disparity between users and corporations focuses on how much the latter knows the former and how much the latter can be known by the former.

Who Owns Your Data?

At the heart of the data debate lies the question: Who truly owns your data? At first glance, it appears as though it should be easy, and well, it is because it is your data anyway. Yet, once data has been gathered by a company or an organization, ownership issues become much less clear-cut. I would like to third that most of the internet giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc, have COGS that say your data is theirs, not yours. These platforms often claim that ‘they’ own the data because ‘they’ are the ones who collect it, process it, and analyze it in order to provide the platforms’ respective services.

For instance, when you type Google Search, each of the inputs you type in as your search query goes into Google’s data pool. Likewise, when you tweet or use a hashtag on Twitter or share a picture on Instagram, you are instantaneously filling their servers with content that can be used by them for marketing, analysis, or even sold to other organizations. In these cases, however, the white world is this company while you, as the customer, merely own the data in a technical sense.

But does this imply a lack of ownership of personal information/ data by individuals? Not entirely. Recently, governments of various countries have started solving the problem of data ownership by implementing legislation for consumers. There is specific legislation that provides some additional protection to citizens, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) governing the EU territory. The General Data Protection Regulation has specific and stricter requirements about when data can be collected and stored, and users can demand that the company delete or modify their data.

However, in many regions of the world, they are unavailable. For instance, the protection of data privacy laws in the United States depends on the states as individual regulators or no laws at all. Therefore, firms persistently harvest, trade, and utilize additional recognizable individual information while there is completely inadequate guard to protect people’s privacy.

The Role of Data Brokers

At the moment, there is limited discussion and a limited amount of legal awareness of the rising and rather discrete but undisputed player in the digital data market, the data broker. A data broker is an organization that compiles, processes, and markets personal data to third parties. They get information from web pages, social networking profiles, purchase history, and even from offline stores. They accumulate this data and then facilitate consumer profiles that can be sold to companies that wish to market to those consumers.

The data brokers industry remains relatively unconstrained, and people can be unaware of whether their data is being traded. These companies generate their revenues from selling the information to advertisers, financial institutions, insurance firms, and, more importantly, other companies who may need to develop their marketing strategies or evaluate risks.

With data brokers, little or no information is given about their operations. Limited available means of information imply that the consumers rarely know what type of data is collected, how it is analyzed, or who gains access to it. Worse still most of the activities of data brokers are done covertly, this therefore means that an individual has little control over her data. These companies are able to continue operating unchecked, making large profits on the sale of people's personal data while the user does not receive any personal benefits from the transaction.

Digital Marketing and Targeted Advertising

Global Sales of personal data are mainly in two areas: Digital marketing and Targeted advertisement. Using information about your habits, likes, and ages, businesses can offer advertisements that will lead to buying. For instance, if you’re always searching for equipment for sports, you will start getting ads for athletic and fitness-tracking apparel. All this personalization tends to make adverts more effective, which means that businesses are able to earn more money from advertising.

While targeted advertising may not appear to be a big issue, it has increased worrying issues with privacy. Because of the vast volumes of data that companies gather, these organizations can compile highly specific and, at times, unsuspecting dossiers on people. They can follow you like your shadow, from the keywords you type into a search engine and products you purchase online to your age and gender.

Additionally, these target ads may give an everyday experience of being watched or followed. The more companies know about you, the more they can design your experiences online, and this is something that, most of the time, feels like an intrusion. As much as Timberg and others report on how these companies are slowly extracting value from the audiences, people are increasingly aware of how much data is harvested from them to control their behaviours, hence the growing disillusionment with social platforms.

The Ethical Dilemma of Data Collection

Ethical issues related to data gathering are diverse. On the one hand, companies state that they provide a service in return for data, and many users volunteer this information. For instance, most social media applications are available at a basic fee; however, one has to provide their data to the application providers. This model leads to further questions of whether it is ethically right to gain from individuals' data without making it clear to them what the data is being used for.

Further, consent is the second ethical consideration to be discussed. Is it really voluntary consent to give out data when users agree on terms of service they can barely comprehend? Most users do not bother to click through the privacy policies or the terms of service of the apps and sites that they use, and therefore they have no idea that their information is being harvested and resold to third parties. Sometimes, it may seem that to carry on with the usage of such a platform, one has to agree with these terms only.

This ethical dilemma is further made worse by the fact that data is usually gathered without a user’s consent. For instance, today, many sites deploy cookies to monitor the actions of their visitors when those people have never actually signed up to have their activity follow them. These tracking technologies can help in creating a more comprehensive report on users, and this report is sold to advertisers. The lack of transparency in these practices has raised so many questions on issues of privacy and control of personal information.

Government Regulations and Protection of Personal Data

The government remains an important factor that bears great influence in the control of the collection, management, and usage of personal data. In the last ten years there have been efforts to pass data protection legislation that will allow for the protection of individuals’ rights to privacy while allowing companies to gather information. The EU’s GDPR, for example, has been described widely as one of the most robust data protection laws globally. It states that those companies that intend to gather any personal data require prior consent, and individuals have permission to request data, rectify it, or erase it.

Nevertheless, many countries do not follow the same laws. In the United States, for instance, data protection laws may be patchy; some states, bar none, but others have enacted laws governing the protection of user data. Currently, data protection laws are not well standardized around the world, this make it difficult for the consumers to understand there rights on data protection, it also enables companies to avoid data protection regulation by operating across jurisdictions with weaker data laws.

The problem of data privacy is as pressing today as it has ever been, and as a result, governments across the globe are having to act. If it is by using new regulations or by implementing what is already in place, there is evidence that data protection must be enhanced to realize the privacy of individuals.

The Future of Data Ownership

The use of personal data increases as technology advances and becomes more sophisticated. The emergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and big data as major phenomena put into question the ownership of data and their protection. These technologies allow Businesses and Governments to gather more information and process it in real-time than was possible before, and concerns have been raised about how much ownership we will have over our data in the future.

The analysis of ownership will gradually shift and be intensively aimed at returning control to individuals in the future. Some organizations are already beginning to consider a decentralized paradigm in which users would have control over data. Blockchain technology, for instance, has the flexibility to present the features of clarity and security in transactions of data. It means that if these technologies keep on getting improved, they could give additional ways through which one can own their data as compared to the existing system.

Conclusion

Who owns data is not an easily answerable question in today’s informational environment. As personal data has emerged to be human’s most valuable resource in a commercial context, people concurrently lose the right to choose how to manage their data. Starting from so-called data brokers up to the discussion on the principles of ethical advertising emerging from the data economy clients’ requests a reflection on privacy, consent, and fairness. States practice establishing laws to protect personal data, however, the laws are basic and uncoordinated leaving many people exposed. With advancements in technology, a good example is the issue of data ownership, which plays a central role in technological advancement since the advanced world requires stronger data protection and simple disks. Finally, of course, more people should know their rights and how they can defend themselves against invasions of their privacy in the contemporary global world.