Who Controls the Data?

Who Controls the Data?

Proposals seek to transfer control of personal data, rebalancing power between platforms and users in the digital age

Eduardo Felipe Matias

In a widely discussed exchange at the time, during a U.S. Senate hearing in April 2018 as part of the investigations into the misuse of Facebook users' personal data following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Senator Jon Tester from Montana argued with Mark Zuckerberg: You’ve said several times during this hearing that I own the data. I’m going to tell you, I think that sounds good, but in practice, “you’re making about 40 billion bucks a year, and I’m not making any money. It feels as you own the data.”

Behind this comment lies the fact that, contrary to what the traditional concept of ownership might suggest, the data we constantly provide to social networks does not allow us to derive any financial benefits. All the profits go to the platforms, which accumulate wealth and power by processing and selling this information.

This dynamic is marked by a lack of transparency. Platforms keep users uninformed about how their behaviors are monetized, making it difficult to fully understand the concessions they are making. Some technologies, like cookies that track our online activities, have made the collection of personal data nearly invisible, creating a significant power asymmetry between users and platforms.

Some proposals aim to change this game. This is the objective of a tool announced in July this year by Inrupt, a startup founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. Named Data Wallet, it was developed based on the Solid protocol, designed to decentralize the internet. The Data Wallet allows individuals to securely store and manage information such as educational certificates and purchase histories, deciding which data to share, for how long, and with which companies.

For Berners-Lee, while Web 1.0 was shaped by browsers and websites, and Web 2.0 by apps and platforms, Web 3.0 will be defined by empowering people over their data. In this new phase, data architecture would be distributed and user-centered, eliminating the need for centralized platforms.

Essential for this to happen, interoperability and portability are two ideas embedded in this project. The former refers to the ability to use the same data across different platforms without significant conversion or adaptation. The latter relates to users’ ability to transfer their data between platforms—something similar to open banking, which allows a customer of a given bank to share information such as regular payments or spending habits with other financial institutions.

In the context of platforms, portability would enable someone to transfer, for example, their social graph—a data structure that represents how people are connected to each other through friendships, professional ties, or shared interests—from one platform to another that offers better conditions, such as greater privacy, more ethical treatment, or even monetary compensation. This could have significant effects on the market, promoting greater competition since smaller companies could access data previously monopolized by large corporations.

On a collective level, another proposal that seeks to give users control over their information is the establishment of data trusts, legal structures designed to allow the independent management of data for the benefit of a group of people. The concept is derived from traditional trusts, where trustees manage assets like properties or investments. In this case, data trustees, who would also have a fiduciary duty to act in their clients’ best interests, could be instructed by them either to monetize their personal data or to promote the common good, such as by providing medical records to improve the healthcare system as a whole.

This latter orientation aligns, to some extent, with another proposal, the idea of data commons, which involves transforming personal data into a shared resource accessible to everyone. This acknowledges that data aggregation also has a positive side and can benefit humanity in areas as diverse as urban mobility, education, or public safety.

Proposals like these would radically disrupt how the internet functions and is financed today. It’s questionable whether platforms, when compelled to pay for user data, would remain motivated to offer their products for free. Even if they did, and assuming they were willing to dedicate a significant portion of their earnings to this, distributing the results among billions of users might not yield enough revenue to make up for the convenience of some services that, in the end, prove useful—if we divided Meta’s profits in 2023 by the number of active users on its platforms that year, each user would receive less than $10.

This raises questions about the financial viability of some of these projects. Nonetheless, proposals like these aim to provide alternatives to the current model, which, by relying on the surveillance and continuous extraction of people’s data online, has resulted in the erosion of privacy and other harms of the digital age. Therefore, discussing them is undoubtedly worthwhile.

Eduardo Felipe Matias?is the author of the books “Humankind and its borders” and “Humankind against the ropes”, winners of Premio Jabuti, and coordinator of the book “Startups Legal Framework”. PhD in International Law from the University of Sao Paulo, he was a visiting scholar at the universities of Columbia, in NY, and Berkeley and Stanford, in California, is a guest professor at Funda??o Dom Cabral and a partner in the business law area of?Elias, Matias Advogados.

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Article originally published in Portuguese at época Negócios magazine: Como evitar que as big techs controlem os nossos dados? | Na Fronteir@ | época NEGóCIOS

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#column #NaFronteira #EpocaNegocios

#Data #BigData #Web3.0 #digitalage #innovation #technology #datawallet #datatrusts

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