https://medium.com/@nsmolenski/what-does-it-mean-to-own-your-data-514dfdd29208

I’d like to begin with this question because it prompts us to clarify what we mean when we talk about ownership of personal data. The question of whether or how we “own” our data has given rise to considerable controversy and debate as of late, but as is the case with many controversies, they arise in part because we haven’t really taken the time to define our terms.

What do we mean by “ownership,” and how does the adjective “digital” modify or nuance that meaning? In this brief piece I suggest a few ways we can begin thinking that question which point to the need for a structural social analysis — one that goes beyond the terms of a debate that have been primarily commercial, juridical, technical, and ethical. The reason a deeper structural analysis is necessary is because the fields above — commerce, law, technology, and ethics — derive their purchase largely from the particular local assumptions that frame the parameters of the problems and solutions they can possibly define and solve. This is why the social technologies of the past make little sense to us: whether it’s determining the number of cattle owed your tribesman for illegally breaking bread with his mother in law, or using a divining rod to cast for water currents to dig a well, these represent creative ways of meeting survival needs and resolving social tensions that no longer exist today as matters of everyday concern. Structurally, however, the problems of appropriate intimacy, restitution, and sustainability persist under different (also local) guises. So does the perennial problem of ownership and its derivative, property.