Opinion | The key question for the new economy: who owns the data?
- Recognising and protecting property rights to each individual’s data or all individuals’ data is vital to determining the fate of the new economy
Property rights have been crucial to society since time immemorial, but as technology evolves, rights too are changing, presenting new challenges.
We are in the throes of the fourth industrial revolution, driven by advances in, and the proliferation of, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data. The importance of big data in the new economy is like that of oil in the old one.
But associated with the unprecedented efficiency and convenience of the new economy, one of the biggest challenges we are facing is the aggressive violation of individuals’ rights, including privacy.
The essence of the issue is property rights, which now extend to rights over individuals’ personal data. Traditionally, property rights referred to control of tangible assets, such as gold or oil, or control of intangible assets like patents and copyrights. In the digital era, technology can create huge amounts of intangible assets from individuals’ data without their knowledge. How the data is used could bring not only great benefits but also, potentially, great harm. This raises a crucial question: who has the right to control over these new assets?