Information is the real currency of the present day and likely will be for the future. At least until that meteor gets here. It’s been that way for a long time, actually. Think all the way back to World War Two. Information was the key to the war. Whoever controlled the flow of information, the transmitting of it, the encrypting and decrypting of it, would be sure to be the victor.
The Enigma machine was an early encryption device used by the Nazi’s to transmit their most important orders and reports. They considered it to be absolutely secure. Fortunately, they were wrong. The allies were able to decrypt the messages, allowing them to forestall many attacks and shorten the war, saving untold lives as a result.
Today, information and its rapid processing, understanding, and application control trillions of dollars in the global economy. Countries, businesses, and of course individuals rise and fall based on their command of the available data. With that much riding on it, the question of who owns which data has become more important than ever. Not only is it more important than ever, but it is also more complicated. Or so it would seem.
In the case of a patent, or a story, a song, some individual work of creativity, the question of who owns that intellectual property is a fairly simple one. Whomever the creator is, owns the property. However, it becomes much more complicated when it comes to all the piles and piles of data that are generated every minute. Let’s look at an example we’ve mentioned in the space a couple of times before.
John Deere includes a number of sensors on its farm equipment that feed data relating to the machine’s performance and crop yields back to the company. Now, who owns the data? The farmer who generated it? The company for making the equipment that collects it and then pays for the server space to store it, or the company that owns the servers?
Once upon a time, the question was simple to answer, the answer was always based on who owned the servers. Of course, that was in a time before cloud computing and IoT devices. Data was something that company generated by analyzing its own internal production and sales figures and then stored on its own private servers. Now, data might be stored in multiple servers around the world. It might be gathered through the use of IoT devices embedded in machines that rely on the work of people not employed by the company. For many, this situation creates a tangled legal web with a tendency to default either to past practice or whatever is in the company’s terms of service.
That seems simple enough, but we all know nobody actually takes the time to read, much less understand all the legal niceties of their podcast aggregator before downloading it. They are simply too cumbersome and draconian. Some companies actually make an effort to respect their customers and have terms that reflect that. Whoop for example regards the data generated by people wearing their health tracking devices as belonging to the customer, not the company. Until recently, WhatsApp was in this category. Nevertheless, not enough companies take this approach and are determined to try and claim ownership over the data in its entirety.
TARTLE disagrees. We believe the solution is indeed a simple one – the data rightfully belongs to whoever is generating it. If you think about it this is actually what the default was before we started collecting and storing everything in remote servers. A company kept track of its own data and used it how it saw fit. If a person wanted to know their health information, they tracked it using devices that they paid for but weren’t connected to the internet. It only got complicated because others decided that they should have access to your data, an attitude only feasible because of our constantly being connected. Take that away and everyone’s data is just that, their data. It doesn’t have to be complicated at all. It just needs to be recognized that the default assumption before the cloud was the right one.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
