Some say data is the new oil. In a recent article titled: "IF DATA IS THE NEW OIL, ARE TECH COMPANIES ROBBING US BLIND?" the interesting question of property ownership is implied. Do you actually have the right to own your data, your digital self? Are tech companies stealing your data legally by terms of service agreements most people can't/wont read?
The essential bargain that’s driven by today’s tech giants is the purest form of cognitive capitalism: users feed in their brains — whether this means solving a CAPTCHA to train AI systems or clicking links on Google to help it learn which websites are more important than others. In exchange for this, we get access to ostensibly “free” services, while simultaneously helping to train new technologies which may one day put large numbers of us out of business.
Is this the bargain the average Steemit user wants? What exactly is the Steemit bargain? It seems Steemit pays you for your transparency and data. At least on Steemit you get paid something tangible and something you can sell to pay your rent, taxes, etc. Facebook have an economy of "likes" which also can be bought and sold just as Steem Dollars can but Facebook likes aren't on Coinmarketcap and exchanges. In general even if you can buy popularity on Facebook you cannot make money directly blogging on Facebook.
“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.”
And this validates the function of the Steemit experiment to find out if users would prefer to get paid for their data. Apparently the majority of users prefer to post for free or even at their expense (on their own dime) as there are people who know about Steemit but who still prefer Reddit, Facebook, etc. Is the demand really there for it? Do users prefer the paternal protected feeling they get from a centralized hierarchical company answerable to the US government (and other governments)?
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.
Where does Steemit fit into this? Steemit seems to be a "never forget you" technology. The right to be forgotten cannot ever be enforced as long as technologies like Steemit exist. So to say the law is catching up with technology is in my opinion less than astute.