> My personal data is an asset. And it belongs to me.

> Anyone who has my data for any purpose owes me my cut.

It's well established in the US that you do not in fact own your data. You don't own your school records or employment records. You don't own your medical records or your credit records. In general the best you have is a right to view those records and that's only in certain cases.

Because Freedom Markets™?

Pretty sure it's the same across the world, really. Try getting your medical records expunged in Cuba or your search records expunged in China. I bet you have the same success as in the US.

Maybe you should look at free people in mostly free countries, instead of dictatorships.

For instance, the EU and Switzerland.

Have you successfully gotten Google or Facebook or your doctor to purge your records in Switzerland?

Are you suggesting some corporations have become more powerful than our lawfully elected governments?

I’m suggesting that “data about you” is not the same as “your data” and never has been.

I honestly don't know how to distinguish between "me" and "about me".

These discussions always go full meta. Makes my head hurt.

Being a simple bear, I try to distill these paradoxes (freewill, love, death, what is art) down to something actionable. Hence my conclusion, after much thought and effort (eg securing medical records), that "I am my data, my data is me." and therefore I own it.

If privacy is the ability to control what is publicly known about yourself, the best (practical, prescriptive) way I can think to do that is via property rights.

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I appreciate your reply. I'm going to revisit my beliefs, conclusions. Starting with the currently generally accepted definitions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authentication

> I honestly don't know how to distinguish between "me" and "about me".

> These discussions always go full meta. Makes my head hurt.

You go to the store to buy a carton of eggs. The store now has data about you and your purchase. If you pay with credit card, they have a record tied to your identity. If you pay with cash, they still have a record of what you bought with your eggs, and nothing stops them from scribbling your name on the copy of the receipt they keep.

You have no right to demand that the store cease possession of this data. They might use this data (in aggregate) to determine when they need to restock eggs. They might use this data (along with other purchase records) to determine that butter should be stocked next to the eggs. They might discard this data as soon as books are reconciled or they might retain this data in perpetuity. This was the case is 1920 and it's the case now. We like to talk about "big data" as if it changed the fundamentals, but all it actually changed was the scale.

Well. This is where we'll disagree then.

No entity has any right whatsoever to retain any data about me, for any purpose.

Your rights end where mine begin. My right to privacy trumps everyone else's profit motive.

Edit: Scratch that. Our disagreement is more fundamental. I believe humans have a fundamental right to privacy. You don't.

I absolutely believe in the right to privacy. But I don’t think the right to privacy extends that far. I think it’s kind of unreasonable that everyone else loses their rights to record data to protect your right to privacy. This runs counter to the first amendment and makes journalism impossible. It also makes it impossible to do things like monitor the police.

Good points.

I'm torn between liking this view of personal data as property and also liking the view of Richard Stallman and the FSF that "intellectual property" is a legal fiction that we ought to resist. What does it actually mean to "own" data, and is "property" the best metaphor to represent a set of personal data control rights?

I hear ya. Pinko commie liberal me abhors the idea.

Legal fictions like "property", "money", and "rights" are practical innovations that make society work better (eg more moral, greater public good). Kinda like the tech tree in games like Civilization.

The books "The Mystery of Capital" and "Nonzero" influenced me a lot. Good starting points, optimistic, and more right than wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_Polar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wright_(journalist)

Until something better comes along...

RMS' objection to "intellectual property" isn't an objection to the concept of property in general, but rather an objection to conflating the rights that are associated with tangible property with the rights that are granted by copyright law and patent law. The canonical example is the language of "theft" used by organisations like the MPAA to refer to copyright infringement - RMS would say that illegally copying a copyrighted work doesn't deprive anyone else of their copy of said work, unlike stealing a sandwich from someone.

RMS might disagree with me here, but I think the same thing can be said in this case - we need more precise terminology that accurately describes the types of infringement when it comes to misuse of PII.

> My personal data is an asset. And it belongs to me.

Hm. How would this work for (say) a social security number? Does it belong to you? Does every number anyone chooses to identify you belong to you?

Any non government entity storing data about me (PII and beyond) can only do so with my (revokable) permission and owes me my cut.

In Switzerland, anyone collecting data about other people must make a public declaration of that collection, and may not keep such records about people who disagree with being thus documented ("fiché").

There is a similar law in the UK: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_1998

Which itself is based on an EU directive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

This is to be replaced with an updated version between now and Brexit (that’s just going to add to the fun!): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regu...

For the curious: There's an English translation of the Federal Act on Data Protection.

https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19920153/...

Okay? People signed up for Yahoo accounts so that Yahoo could provide them email, messaging, fantasy sports, and other account-based webapps. How is their possession of the records of those accounts some kind of property crime? This isn't Equifax.

I'd buy a negligence argument, but there's no much to find fault with regarding possession.

You agree to give up your data in return for services. Yahoo mail, or gmail for that matter aren't actually free. You are trading your data for a service.

No contract may take away a person's rights.

I don't understand. You believe you have the right to have no records of yourself written anywhere. You believe it is impossible to contract away this right. You've given HN an individual identifier for yourself, and also furnished your political views (a specially protected category under the GDPR) to its database.

Aren't all your comments proof of Y Combinator's human rights violation against you? Shall we have HN shut down and its operators jailed? Obviously this isn't the world we live in, but isn't it the one you're arguing for?

Maybe you can't give permission to have data treated carelessly, but it seems absurd to say you can't give permission to have data collected at all. Opening an account with Yahoo is surely consent to let Yahoo have a record of that account.

Guessing you don't support the right to be forgotten.

No, the "right" to edit other people's memories and disappear information from the public domain is the dystopian hellscape on the first page of 1984.

On the contrary, it is commonplace for contracts to take away your rights.

A common example is an arbitration clause, where you sign away your rights to use the courts to resolve disputes.

Some rights, but not all rights. You cannot (in any country I am aware of) contract away your right to life, nor turn yourself into a slave in exchange for your debts being forgiven.

The latter used to be possible, if I understand serfdom correctly.

Question is, should data rights be alienable or inalienable?

Thank you for articulating, explaining stuff better than I can.

If you're talking about what rights you should have, that's fine. Currently, however, there is no defined right in the US such that service providers like google, Facebook, etc can't make use of the data they acquire from you. If you consider data on you to be more valuable than the service provided, don't use the service.

Does it really belong to you if you have no control over it?

So you do understand.