Andrew Yang proposes that your digital data be considered personal property | Hacker News Reader

Andrew Yang proposes that your digital data be considered personal property

fastcompany.com

65 pointsjonbaer20 comments

Andrew Yang has been one of my favorite things about this election cycle. Very focused on issues instead of politics-as-usual, able to explain the impact of automation on the economy in a mainstream way, and presenting proposals that (even if seem strange at first) have rationale behind them.

Even if he doesn't make it to the end, he's already moving the Overton Window.

Yang isn’t moving the overton window, he’s breaking it.

This is something that absolutely has to happen in today's ever increasing digital world. Companies are making billions from our data and digital footprints, it's time we got a slice of that and a say in how it's used.

Exactly there shouldn’t be a difference between texts and a hand written letter

Or a photo on my phone or a physical photo.

It’s mine I own it.

All the people should be paid who are using Facebook and the other similar platforms as content providers. The better the individual's audience the more the payment should be. This should be the next killer app.

Should be? Sure. Will be? Never. Nobody will run a social media site that pays users when a social media site that does not is making money hand-over-fist.

There also needs to be laws that let people own imagery or content created in their likeness to prevent things like deep fakes and extortion

I'm not entirely up to speed on what the laws are like internationally, but where I'm at there's the concept of "portrait rights" which basically amounts to you having rights to a photo made of you. The photographer gets the copyright, but he's not allowed to distribute the photo without your say so since you own the portrait rights. There's a couple of fairly sane exceptions such as crowd photos, you need to be the actual subject of a work for portrait rights to apply.

It'd be a fairly boring application of these laws to say that you have portrait rights to any deepfake of you.

Furthermore I think refering to a deepfake as an image in your likeness is selling it short. A deepfake is more akin to a mashup of a lot of photos of you. A deepfake doesn't just look like a person, it's made from photos of that person.

Not sure how this line of thinking would apply to other countries, but it seems like a viable framework for regulating the whole thing to me.

I think it's odd, I believe copyrights are owned by the photographer. I think they should have specific claim to the copyright, but at any time should be required to take down and destroy pictures when a person in said picture decides they don't want to be in it. Though w/ digital-ness that may be nigh impossible, maybe they could make a DRM image that if you delete the master all images across the web cease to work. That would definitely be an interesting technology.

Not sure if implementing DRMs is a good thing.

Impossible to enforce.

Agreed. GDPR already discussed this, and the only reasonable and enforzable thing they could agree on was "clear use and purpose of storing your data".

What I don't see fit is that some people is willing to give away their privacy for a fee, and we haven't accommodate that!

The headline maybe, the actual proposal seems quite reasonable to enforce:

- The right to be informed as to what data will be collected, and how it will be used

- The right to opt out of data collection or sharing

- The right to be told if a website has data on you, and what that data is

- The right to be forgotten; to have all data related to you deleted upon request

- The right to be informed if ownership of your data changes hands

- The right to be informed of any data breaches including your information in a timely manner

- The right to download all data in a standardized format to port to another platform

Speaking as European this just seems to be "let's copy that legislation".

That would just become another ok dialog before the content. Edit-I stand corrected, see below.

People need actual property rights to charge a fee for their data. The monetary value companies obtain from users through advertisers or other consumers is a measure of this value.

It’s an entire market that does exist but is being taken from the producers.

> That would just become another ok dialog before the content.

No, explicitly not. That is in my opinion one of the great points of the GDPR legislation. Mandatory consent is not consent at all and hence void and websites have to accept "no" as the default answer.

Ok so everything you said, and endow people with property rights over their data. They should be able to lease access to this data to websites in turn for goods and services. They should also be able to sue for misappropriation of this property like all other property. Etc etc.

> They should be able to lease access to this data to websites in turn for goods and services.

Should they? Then you get back to same problem as before: "Allow us to spy on you or pay $$$".

Instead privacy is treated as right and you can simply say "no, neither of those". Note that this does not say anything about ads. It is still perfectly legal to show ads, just the whole privacy invasion on top of it is excluded.

We need something like a new bill of rights for the electronic age

- Ensure Fourth Amendment protections apply to all digital communications

- Restrict electronic public surveillance and retention of data by the government obtained by electronic means in public.

- Restrict government access to public electronic surveillance data created by private entities based on Fourth Amendment limits: by warrant only

If the Founders could have anticipated the way we communicate today they would certainly have included electronic data in "papers and effects."

And they also could not have anticipated the ease with which government can now collect data electronically and through public surveillance on millions and millions of people, cost-effectively. While there can be no expectation of privacy in a public space, there is something fundamentally different about your activities in public being recorded, and stored for an indefinite period, without any suspicion of wrongdoing. That should be addressed in law.

I’d go a step further and create amendments that self-amend based on developments in technology.

I fear lawyers would both love and destroy such an amendment.

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