This is something I've been thinking about lately.<p>If you are walking across the street and I watch you do it, does that mean I need your permission to remember watching you cross the street (aka store data) and make decisions based on your previous actions?<p>Further, should I need your permission to tell other people about you crossing the street?<p>Seems to me that in this example, "data" (which is really just my interpretation of an observation) is owned by me and not you. It is after all my sensing & storage systems that collected the data.<p>What are your thoughts?
Crossing the street is a hugely public thing to do, and is not something any reasonable person would consider information they own. So most would class it as public domain and maybe data collected could be used to make decisions.<p>But this does lead to interesting scenarios, where some parts of the country are <i>not tracked</i> and others which <i>are tracked</i>. Private areas, your data would not be recorded and hence be your own.<p>So I guess your data is yours if no one else records it.
i think we should switch to talking about information , not data. data is like photons, they are mediators. An agent owns his information content which is his internal thoughts and intentions. Everything he makes in your online property is a trace. The traces belong to the owner of the online property. Just like how your footsteps on my home belong to me, while your foot belongs to you. Data are measurements of those traces, thus they belong to you as well. The self-ownership of the agent's information content is not compromised.