Who Really Owns Your Information?

We are all data creators. But who is creating value from our data?

By Xische Editorial, February 10, 2020

Source: HST6/Shutterstock

We are all data creators. Thanks to the rapid rise in global connectivity facilitated through cheap smartphones and internet infrastructure worldwide, we all create large amounts of information. From location data to search history and health records, we are walking creators. It doesn’t matter your social class, background, age, or nationality. We are all connected in the information we create. But there is a big caveat. While we create information, we don’t necessarily have the means to use it. 

A handful of private companies primarily based in the United States have the power to realise the value of the data we create. They have designed the algorithms and have the computing power to turn our random streams of information into actionable material for advertisers and behavioural scientists. Most governments or small businesses don’t have nearly the same capability to harness the power of data. That’s a problem. 

In their new book, Capital is Dead author Mckenzie Wark argues that a new “vectoralist” class has arisen out of these powerful companies. As a new global ruling class, they have control over the means to process, store, and analyse data. 

“The vector of information includes the capacity to transmit, store, and process information,” they explain at the beginning of the slim book. “It is the material means for assembling so-called big data and realizing its predictive potential. The vectoralist class owns and controls patents, which preserve monopolies on these technologies. It owns or controls the brands and celebrities that galvanize attention. It owns the logistics and supply chains that keep information in its proprietary stacks.” 

There is a lot happening in this paragraph but the themes overlap with several ideas that we have watched closely at Xische Reports. A handful of companies have designed the systems of data to such a degree that they are now able to predict our behaviours. This is what the Havard professor Shoshanna Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” and it represents a major challenge to how power in society has traditionally been managed. That blends into another major challenge: How these all-powerful companies are regulated (and taxed) by governments. 

When Professor Zuboff’s book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, was published last year, we noted that the core business principle at work in the technology world is to collect as much data about our experiences as possible. The trend began with the collection of our browsing and search history and spread into all of our digital behaviours. It then migrated into all of our location data with the rise of mobile software like Android or Google Maps. More recently, it has come to include matching our online behaviour with real-world shopping habits, as Google did in 2017.

The goal is to acquire as much data about our experiences as possible so as to create a full picture of our behavioural responses. This profile is enhanced by machine-learning intelligence that has become remarkably effective at predicting what we will do, or take an interest in, or buy. Such valuable data can then be sold to any business that may want to know what actions we’ll take and how they can influence our future decisions. 

Wark is taking this principle to its logical conclusion by stating that the companies that control these mechanisms have actually replaced the traditional capitalist structures that govern the global economy. That’s because the way we go about creating the information vital for these new systems to function is not the same as traditional forms of labour. Logging into Instagram, which can sometimes feel laborious, is certainly not a form of labour. Yet, these actions produce a commodity that the tech giants are able to control and capitalize on. 

The issue here is one of scale. Isolated, an individual’s personal data is not valuable. Data becomes valuable when it is amassed and analyzed in aggregate, but very few companies control both the access to vast amounts of data and the ability to process that data to create value in the new data marketplace. Governments, who have access to data but lack computational ability, and smaller businesses, who have ability but are limited by access, are locked out of the vectoralist class. This concentration of data capital has important ripple effects across society.

Ultimately, these are the contours of the fourth industrial revolution and we don’t know how to fundamentally address these challenges at the present moment. It’s one reason why debates over data regulation are so critical to the health of our societies and the global economic system as we currently understand it. Critical works such as Capital is Dead and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism established debate over the nature of our current challenges. Governments of all sizes need to take bolder action to ensure that safeguards are put in place and the private sector doesn’t get too carried away with its own power.