Taking a look at a concept that's been talked a lot over the last few years, especially in the context of social media
Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come
Data Ownership as a conversation changes when data resides primarily with people-governed institutions rather than corporations.
Who owns your data?
A Supreme Court case about a bank robbery could redefine your digital rights.
Linked Data is a Political Agenda
Dan Shipper 📧 on Twitter / X
The smallest technical decisions become humanity's biggest pivots:The same-origin policy—a well-intentioned browser security rule from the 1990s—accidentally created Facebook, Google, and every data monopoly since. It locks your data in silos—and you stayed where your stuff… pic.twitter.com/G87qsuPHxN— Dan Shipper 📧 (@danshipper) July 9, 2025
Olares - Empowering Users to Reclaim Data Ownership
Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data
(September 2020) - Data is nonrival: a person's location history, medical records, and driving data can be used by many firms simultaneously. Nonrivalry leads to increasing returns. As a result, there may be social gains to data being used broadly across firms, even in the presence of privacy considerations. Fearing creative destruction, firms may choose to hoard their data, leading to the inefficient use of nonrival data. Giving data property rights to consumers can generate allocations that are close to optimal. Consumers balance their concerns for privacy against the economic gains that come from selling data broadly.
Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving Beyond “Free”
Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving beyond "Free" by Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez-Hernández, Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl. Published in volume 108, pages 38-42 of AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018, Abstract: In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capi...
Wildland (@WildlandIO) on X
An open protocol for data management that allows users to have sole ownership of their data. Join us! https://t.co/AqwplMcG9u Developed by @GolemFoundation
Living in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future (Paperback)
Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.”To live in data in the twenty-first century
Can “Conscious Data Contribution” Help Users to Exert “Data Leverage” Against Technology Companies?
Tech users currently have limited ability to act on concerns regarding the negative societal impacts of large tech companies. However, recent work suggests that users can exert leverage using their role in the generation of valuable data, for instance by withholding their data contributions to intelligent technologies. We propose and evaluate a new means to exert this type of leverage against tech companies: "conscious data contribution" (CDC).
B-Sides: Permissioned data is a love triangle - Nick's Blog
This is a B-sides post with unpolished thoughts that didn’t make it into the main article.
A Polycentric Governance Lens on Data Infrastructures
Funding policies for data infrastructure promote open data sharing to drive positive social impact. However, concerns regarding the long-term management of data within and across distributed infrastructures can hinder data sharing. We draw upon the concept of polycentric governance to demonstrate how collaborative practices of data curation, in preparing and maintaining data for (future) sharing, provide a solid foundation for understanding data governance within data infrastructures. Based on a qualitative case study of a distributed ecological network, we investigate the conditions under which data are managed as a shared resource by local actors to ensure the long-term (re)usability of data. We contribute to CSCW by conceptualising data curation as a complex form of governance practice with multiple centres of decision-making, each of which operates with some degree of autonomy in data infrastructures. A polycentric governance lens on data infrastructures advances the CSCW conception of data curation as a collective governance practice that can cultivate a data democracy culture within and across organisations, empower individuals to be accountable for their data, and foster a mindset shift toward decentralised data governance.
Custodians of the Internet
A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...
No one wants to own their data until the platform where their data lives enshittifies to the point of unusability and/or starts selling their data in ways they didn't expect. Like, 99% of ppl are here because Elon owns Twitter. I get why people don't care, but they tend to eventually every time.
Aye > Data Ownership as a conversation changes when data resides primarily with people (..). > Instead of arguing for what kinds of data we ought to be able to download from the corporate silos, the platforms should be asking us what kinds of data they may copy from *our* servers.
Erlend Sogge Heggen
The web can be made personal again. blog.muni.town/personal-data-storage-idea/
