Whose data is it anyway?

And every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
~Police, Every Breath you Take

It's not exactly a secret that as we move around the internet, interact with search engines and seek guidance from AI bots, we spread a deep data trail as we go, one that has become increasingly valuable. That's because AI models are data-hungry monsters. 

One of the big questions facing us as we plunge deeper into the age of AI is who owns the data that companies are collecting on us. That came into glaring focus this week when Google announced it was buying Spirit Airlines' internal business and employee data for $10 million. It's worth noting that the haul doesn't include passenger profiles, PII and loyalty-program records, but what was included was a doozy.

That data set includes "decades of payroll, travel and recruiting files, along with about 100 million emails, 80,000 email accounts and millions of additional digital items," per the Wall Street Journal. If I were a former employee, I would be pissed too.

Spirit Airlines' business, you may recall, went up in flames in May when the 40-year-old airline, which had declared bankruptcy last year, shut down after a $500 million government bailout failed to materialize. That meant a court would decide how the various pieces of the business would be sold off to pay off creditors. It turns out one of those valuable assets was the company's data set. As Dan Shaughnessy would say, "Swell." 

The airline's flight attendants union didn't take the news well, protesting to the bankruptcy court that the privacy of former employees was at risk, causing a delay, at least for the moment, while the court looked at the union's protest.

Google for its part says the data will be cleaned and anonymized by a third-party service, and there is really no reason for the former employees' concerns. Nothing to see here, right? But how clean is clean? A third party is supposed to certify that the data meets privacy requirements, but the employees themselves have no way of knowing how thorough that process will be, and therein lies the problem.

As I wrote on LinkedIn this week, this is precisely why companies owning our data without limits is so dangerous. If you have no control over your data, and the data is an asset to sell off for parts, it can be used in ways you never intended.

Data ownership in the brave new world

The data ownership question is not new. For years now in my conversations with startup founders, they would talk about the product they were creating, but often talk about how the data created by users by the simple act of using the program, might be more valuable. That was true a decade ago, and it's even more true now.

Among the data control advocates is the founder of the World Wide Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee. In a 2022 interview on Northwestern University's Untangling the Web podcast, he put it this way: "We believe philosophically that everybody should be able to control your own data." He helped found a startup called Inrupt in 2018 to make that happen. 

In a 2018 blog post announcing the launch of his company and its open source project, Solid, Berners-Lee wrote: 

Imagine if all your current apps talked to each other, collaborating and conceiving ways to enrich and streamline your personal life and business objectives? That’s the kind of innovation, intelligence and creativity Solid apps will generate. With Solid, you will have far more personal agency over data - you decide which apps can access it.

(You can learn more about how Inrupt works in my 2020 TechCrunch story here.)

Perhaps Berners-Lee was simply ahead of his time. That vision is remarkably current in today's agentic environment, where software and agents are expected to communicate with one another. It also shows that with some imagination, we can find ways to keep control of our data, and as Berners-Lee put it, decide how it gets used.

Unfortunately, Berners-Lee's vision has not taken off the way the web itself did, and if the market can't create a viable solution, it may be left to governments to legislate one. In the meantime, we are left with situations like Spirit, where a company's data gets liquidated by creditors while the people who created it have no say in the matter.

~Ron