The question is, if it belongs to me, can I voluntarily give it up even under the known condition I can't ask for it back? I mean, it belongs to me right? That's where these laws often run afoul. You can have more freedom with consequences, or less freedom with restrictions.

Be clear what you mean by voluntary.

I agree that preventing a person to choose to sell something they own is a restriction on their freedom. But problems arise when the negotiation of that exchange is unilateral, relegated to EULAs and contracts which are incomprehensible, non-negotiable, and mandatory to purchase the product, and performed in a less-than-perfectly-efficient market.

It would be one thing if I could buy a Tesla, a Nest, or log onto a site with ads, and the process included a step where I could elect to share my data, to not share my data, or to give them the data and promise not to ask for it back, with different price points for each.

It's another thing when giving people the freedom to give up certain rights results in all manufacturers requiring people to exercise that freedom in order to purchase products.

The market is far from efficient. There is no car that's just like a Tesla but costs more by the value of this data exchange. There is no negotiation of the contract with Tesla, it's built into the purchase price and required by the legal department.

Observing that the market is pervasively inefficient in a way that leads to a bad outcome, and devising regulations that correct the inefficiency, is precisely why we have laws and governments.

I'd be fine if the only way to get a Tesla was to deliberately sign over your rights to the data. But nobody reads the EULA and the vast majority of consumers have no idea that this is something they're agreeing to. I'd really like for us as a society to rethink how consumer consent could work in a way that doesn't require everyone to be a lawyer. But given that most of the rules around this have been constructed implicitly by lawyers and judges I'm not sure how that could happen.

What about used car sales? Are you now unable to sell your car, unless the buyer agrees to the TOS?

This is precisely how covenants work on real estate, and is how things like homeowners' associations perpetuate themselves: the original builder, or the first owner to join the HOA, attaches a covenant which will require all future owners to also join the HOA and follow the HOA's policies.

In prior times, such covenants were also used to try to racially segregate property, by forbidding sale to a person of a race the covenant's creator disliked (such covenants are technically still valid, but unenforceable by US courts).

And they're sometimes used for other things, too; I recall there was a house near my college's campus that the college wanted to purchase and use, but the owner had set up a restrictive covenant that would forbid any later purchaser/inheritor from selling it to the college.

So, have you read through and completely understood the 39 pages of TOS and Privacy Policy docs required to post on HN? Do you consider those who have not to also be "idiots"?

Data isn't "property", it should be an unalienable right, like an author's moral rights over his work: it's yours but you can't sell it or otherwise dispose of it.

Isn't authors selling the rights to their work basically how the entire book industry works?

That's the copying right, not the moral right. The moral right is the right to be identified as the creator and the right to maintain the integrity of the work in subsequent copying.

So, they can't sell that, as the GP is proposing, or they generally just don't under the current economic system? Because I'm pretty sure Dean Koontz does a variation of this, where he outlines the story but someone else actually writes the book, and it's published under his name.

That's a work-for-hire, in which the authorship of the work (and thus the moral rights) is agreed by all participants before the work starts to be FooCorporation.

Classic work-for-hire includes ghostwritten novels and autobiographies, corporate reports, web pages, and most likely every line of code you've ever written while employed by a corporation.

There are jurisdictions where moral rights cannot be sold, and others where they can, but work-for-hire nearly always sidesteps the issue.

It depends on the jurisdiction. In some countries like the UK they can be indeed waived, but in others like France moral rights are inalienable -- any contract wherein you give up these rights is null and void by law.

Selling the rights to publish your book is different from giving up all the rights you have over your book. The latter is something that (IANAL...) you can't do in many jurisdictions.

I suppose GP's implication is that that known condition won't be permissible.

If that law gets passed, you'll no longer "own" the device you bought that collects that data, but will be granted a license to use it.

I'm sure clever lawyers can come up with a definition of "own" that excludes such trickery.

it would be funny to write license agreements for money. They don't actually "own" the money you "gave" them, you just grant them a license to use your money. Just reciprocate the license. Just put the EULA sticker on all your big bills and they are forced to whatever you want, right?

When computers were new, IBM would not sell computers to customers, but rent them out. Since most people nowadays seem to pay for cell phones, tablets, etc. in monthly installments and “need” to get a new model as soon as the one they have is fully paid off, I’m sure a jump to leasing/renting devices is a very small one in practice.

You already are renting/paying a monthly use license fee if you "buy" a phone from your carrier with a monthly payment and the ability to upgrade after x months.

I did this by accident when I "bought" an iPhone a few years ago and was told I couldn't keep it after I water damaged it and got a replacement. I started buying devices outright after that.

Landline telephones used to operate similarly, before the massive AT&T breakup. Time is a wheel.

considering how some manufacturers are monetizing the center console and support applications; go check out onstar to see an example but Audi does it to; you can bet they would want to charge for access as they are providing a service to store it.

Got to amazed at chutzpah some companies have, my favorite whipping boy is Onstar. Here my nice little car has the ability to notify authorities in a crash BUT only if I pay for that service. Now on one hand I would not mind a nice small fee per month, say five bucks or less for something that would infrequently used if ever, but with Onstar the lowest cost is 24.99 a month!!

fwiw, when I had my car new they would even send driving reports, like when the system decided i accelerated to hard, braked too hard, and such. Real joy in what they collect AND sell to third parties

Laws are flexible, it's easy enough to cover that loophole.

There's no real justification for anyone having that right. The device manufacturer/website owner/etc does the work of creating the data, yet you think it's yours?

I have no legal basis for this but it seems apparent to me that there is a difference between data you generate vs data generated for you. For instance, in Microsoft Word if I type a book, I obviously own that data because I myself entered it into the system. However I don't believe I can claim ownership over passive data that was collected during my use of the system.

If I kill someone with a hammer, is that the hammer company's liability? If not, then creation of an object (once sold) does not warrant ownership of said product and accompanying data.

> There's no real justification for anyone having that right. The device manufacturer/website owner/etc does the work of creating the data, yet you think it's yours?

That's BS. The real justification for anyone having that right is that 1) the data is about them and 2) they own the machine that collected/created the data.

> The device manufacturer/website owner/etc does the work of creating the data, yet you think it's yours?

They did the work of creating a device for sale. After the sale, their rights to the device end and the data should be owned by the new owner.

Does this mean that when I crash my Tesla into someone, Tesla is liable for it? After all, they did all the work of creating the car...

No, it's my device that creates the data, so it is mine. Otherwise, does the typewriter manufacturer own the stories you type?

I agree that you should own the data that was created because of your interaction with the device, but I do not agree that the reason is that you own the device.

Here's an example: You go to the library (or a privately owned web cafe), and write your stories there. It doesn't matter that you don't own the device. It's still your data.

I don't think that analogy holds up. Maybe: does the typewriter manufacturer own meta data such as letter frequency, average work length, etc that their product calculates based on your usage?

No, of course not.

Once money exchanged hands, it's not their product, it's mine, as is _all_ of its output, including logs, etc.

Otherwise, I'd call it 'spyware'.

This already isn't the case in many instances where you don't actually "own" the thing, you just have a license to use it.

If I buy a machine that manufactures widgets I own the widgets. Why should it be different for machines that produce bits?

You mean GDPR?

No, I mean all data, not just PII. If a Nest measures the temperature in my house I want to own those data points.

It's often data about you, in which case it's linked to you in which case it falls under GDPR. This crash data is definitely about you, as general driving data would be. Your home's temperature won't be, so GDPR indeed won't apply there, but GDPR is a good first step. (I mean, EU already had it since 1995, but in USA it would be a good first step.)

I agree that your proposal would be a good extension. Or at least that it should be the default, and you'd need to sign for being okay with not owning the data. Or that those devices contain warning stickers.

If the nest information is tied to your address (which is clearly personal), doesn't that make it personal information?

If they can retrieve whose house it was, then yes. But if they send it to the mothership and aggregate or anonymize it, then not. For example if they show you your house's temperature history, I assume it falls under GDPR because it's tied to your account so it's included with data about you.

Then, and I'm being serious: don't put a Nest in your house. You know what these things are, and you know what the company who makes them does.

Nest shouldn't have any rights to that data any more than Microsoft should have rights to novels written in Word.

I don't have a Nest, but it becomes increasingly difficult to buy things that don't produce data. I think we should adapt our laws before everything you can buy is "smart".

I get your point but I think arguing information about the state of your home is PII would be fairly straightforward.

Then pick any non-PII data point you like.

That doesn't really work because if it isn't PII, then they don't know who it belongs to (not having even your name is a field, or else it would be PII) and can't verify it belongs to you before giving it to you.

Like visiting websites while not logged into anything in generating tons of data, but it can't be easily linked back to you.

It would be possible to link some of it back to session IDs or other things you could be linked back to your device, but that doesn't show it was you using the device, so they may be releasing data belonging to someone else using your device to you. And that is before we get into possibilities like cookie hijacking or other methods of falsely tying your device to that generated data.

You're bringing up a separate argument. One worth having, but not in this thread.

The argument here is that the company knows who the data belongs to, and the person above is saying that they shouldn't be able to abstract "you" away from the data and claim it as their own property.. especially because, as we know, most anonymization techniques have serious flaws that in fact do allow individuals to be identified after close scrutinization.

The temperature of your house at certain times can be used to figure out when you were at home, what rooms you were in, when you went to bed, if you're just at home alone, or someone else was at home when you were there too.

Sounds like PII!

So, if you have a DSLR camera on a tripod set to a timer, and you do not actually take the picture, you have no claim to copyright of that image, even though the device you owned created it?

Wasn't this a copyright claim against Wikipedia, where an ape picked up a camera and took a selfie, and Wikipedia et al decided that meant the camera owner had no copyright claim over the image?

yes.

The court system is not, in fact, a dumb automaton that is bamboozled by questions like this.

... Yet. I read this in a cynical 90's AT&T commercial "You Will..."

Timed photo definitely has copyright. Continuous surveillance footage is an open question.

But the post you're replying to wasn't about copyright at all.

I'd like to go one step further and want the power to delete it, or be deleted, when I want.

If I'm allowed to take the 5th to not incriminate myself and not reveal my memory (data in my head), I should be similarly allowed to delete my data when it is my data in my device.

It'd be an interesting case to take to the Supreme Court.

If you wrote it down in a journal then you no longer have the right to claim 5th amendment privileges on what was written. Why would it be the case that what you put into your smart phone is more protected than what you write in a book?

http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

Excellent, that is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for and it seems the link you mentioned above almost directly applies.

I think they would view that as destruction of evidence.

The next step in your scenario is "that security camera has data on me, I want it deleted".

Not really, especially if the cameras are 3rd party owned. My comment was explicitly about my own devices, with the argument being that they are an extension of my brain/memory as opposed to evidence in the traditional sense.

The link provided by wang_li applies and it seems such questions have come up in the past in front of courts, and honestly I won't be surprised if they come up again.

I believe GDPR does cover the security camera scenario, there was a comment here about a week ago from someone who successfully petitioned the German police to delete all footage of him at some protest

https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/cctv/ at least in the UK, you can request people who have CCTV footage of you, and also note that people have to delete CCTV when they no longer need it (how long that should be is arguable), so people have to delete CCTV without being prompted to. and this is not new with the GDPR, it's from the old law, from 1998, I think.