What Is Data Ownership?

This is the concept of being able to own and control the data that you put on the internet. Obviously there's only so much you can do to limit the spread of your content on the internet, but when you exercise data ownership, you get to control where the data lives.

Who cares about that? It seems like it's a lot more effort than it's worth.

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I talk a bit more about it in this other blog post, but the gist is: if you don't own your data, that means that some corporation is handling all of your photos, all of your messages, all of your files. That means every moment you have saved—every picture of your kid's graduation, that video of their first steps, the naked pictures you took of yourself (don't lie), your financials, and your private conversations—are all beholden to whether or not a corporation feels like storing them.

What You Can Do About It

The easiest thing you can do is to make sure you've got your data backed up. There's literally nothing stopping Google or Apple from locking you out of all of your photos forever, and they don't need a reason to do so. They own the servers, they own your account, and they are completely in control of access to it.

More than that, it's actually possible to have your own hard drives in your own house and work to make them accessible from all of your devices, but for most people that is more effort than it's worth. But, if you and your friends all worked together to do it, and you had someone willing to learn how to click all of the buttons, then it's totally possible.

In the Context of Social Media

Now, we all know that pictures and files can be moved around as much as we want we used to do it all the time without The Cloud. If you don't want your photos on Google Photos anymore, you can just move them to iCloud without much of a problem or you could even just keep them on your phone. It'll take some time, but it'll happen. With social media, that's usually not the case.

With social media, companies lock down all kinds of information behind their apps and servers and databases and such. There's nothing* you can do to move your Instagram account to another app with all your photos and followers and likes and stuff. (There are ways to get your posts out of Instagram and onto other apps...but it's not easy).

There are, however, a ton of smaller social media apps that let your move your posts, your likes, your follows, and all of that stuff around. Imagine a world where moving around on social media was as easy as copying a file from Google Drive to iCloud.

Here's more information about how this is possible and why it matters below, but again: it's about having control over your digital life. We've spent so long giving our entire digital lives to corporations who have sold it off to data mining companies to enrich themselves to our detriment.

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