A growing chorus of digital rights activists argue that Users Product or Stakeholder? users should be treated not as passive resources but as stakeholders—with rights to transparency, consent, equity, and even profit-sharing.
This shift reframes data as something akin to intellectual property or labor. After all, if your actions are creating value for tech companies, shouldn’t you have a stake in that value?
Some proposed models include:
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Data dividends – where users get vietnam phone number list compensated for their data.
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Personal data vaults – allowing users to store and manage their own data.
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Cooperative data ownership – where communities of users collectively govern and monetize their data.
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Right to explanation and redress – where users can demand accountability from algorithms and systems that use their data.
But such changes require your sales with phone verified email lists legal reform, technological infrastructure, and a massive cultural shift away from surveillance capitalism.
Who Should Own Your Data? Users Product or Stakeholder?
Ownership in the digital world is a tricky concept. Unlike a physical object, data can be copied, stored, and analyzed infinitely. So the question isn’t just who owns your data, but also:
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Who controls access to it?
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Who profits from it?
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Who can delete or transfer it?
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Who is responsible if it’s misused?
A strong argument can be made that you should brazil business directory have primary rights over your data—because it originates from your life, your behavior, your body. But most legal systems don’t treat data this way. Instead, ownership is implied through control. And right now, that control rests largely with corporations.