Everything we do generates data, and Big Tech is chasing new ways to use it for their AI systems without compensation. The time for data ownership rights has arrived.
Patrick Hruby | COO, DrumWave
Originally published in full by the Mercury News on June 6.
We’ve spent the past two years fighting and eventually “solving” the wrong problem. Ever since Apple declared: “Privacy, that’s iPhone,” more than 150 countries have passed laws addressing internet privacy concerns. And yet, this hasn’t stopped an AI industry from being built on capturing data, our data, in order to train their models.
Privacy was a red herring. We are all data-poor and need to become data-rich. We need to be paid for our data. Naturally, the AI industry is resisting. It is difficult for an industry to understand something when its business model depends on not understanding it. (A tip of the hat to Upton Sinclair).
Let’s not fight the wrong problem again. We are all justifiably enamored by the renaissance promised by AI in the fields of medicine, education, and beyond. Rather than attempting to legislate the output of these models (from the legitimate to the bizarre), we should focus on the inputs. Data ownership rights and people being paid for their data are the key to unlocking this future without the economic asymmetries that resulted from previous technological shifts.
New legislation to support personal data ownership is already being proposed. For example, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s February 2019 proposal for a data dividend for all Californians to be paid for their data, and the Own Your Own Data Act, to grant users with property rights to all the data they generate on the internet that was proposed by the U.S. Senator John Kennedy. Brazil’s Congress is now actively considering the Data Empowerment Act introduced last year.
Click here to read the full opinion piece as originally published by The Mercury News on June 6.
Patrick Hruby is the COO of DrumWave, a Silicon Valley-based data platform focused on monetization and powered by extreme data-value engineering and visualization. His career spans more than two decades, including his prior role as CEO of Movile, a longtime investor in LatAm tech companies, and senior executive roles at Facebook (Meta) and Google.