IF DATA IS THE NEW OIL, ARE TECH COMPANIES ROBBING US BLIND?
“The defense of this practice is that these companies provide ‘free’ services, and that they deserve some reward for their innovation and ingenuity,” Dr. John Danaher, a lecturer at the School of Law at NUI Galway, who writes about the intersection of the law and emerging technology, told Digital Trends. “That may well be true, but I would argue that the rewards they receive are disproportionate. The other defense is that many companies provide for some revenue-sharing agreements with more popular users, such as YouTube. That’s becoming more true, too, but it’s only a handful of users who can make decent money from this.”
In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier suggests that users should receive a micropayment every time their data is used to earn a company money.
...a formula could easily be established to determine both where data originated and how important the data was in shaping certain decisions. Not all data is created equal. While some of the systems human data helps train just requires us to click a link or upvote a comedy special, other types require high levels of expertise. One illustration of this is translating a document from one language to another. Although tools like Google Translate are increasingly effective, the reason these machines are able to work as they do is because they draw on data that was previously provided by human users.
Hanna Lützen, who translates the Harry Potter books into Danish gets paid for that particular job by a publishing house, but Google then pays her nothing if those combined 1 million+ words help make its language translation system smarter so it can translate your love letter to a girlfriend in Denmark.
Precedents like the E.U.’s “right to be forgotten” ruling against Google show how laws are still catching up with the realities of new digital technology. But according to John Danaher, enforcing this may be a tough legal case to argue.
“The case I would make against the practice is moral, not legal,” Danaher continued. “General rules of contract law are taken to apply to the agreements that users click when signing up for a service like Facebook. As long as Facebook draws the user’s attention to their terms and conditions, and as long as those terms and conditions do not breach public policy and unfair terms rules, they are held to be binding on the user. In my opinion, this just shows the inadequacy of current approaches to contract law, since it is well-known that people are willing to accept even the most outlandish terms and conditions.” (During a 2014 experiment, unwitting participants in London agreed to give up their eldest child by agreeing to public Wi-Fi terms.)
See the full story here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/data-ownership-question/