Why is your data still a corporate commodity? – Metro Platform – Medium

The word'collect' may be first word that springs to mind here, but it's not an accurate word. Tech companies have carefully chosen their words to frame personal data as something that we possess and "allow" them to collect, whereas the truth is that we give them'information' and they turn that information into'data', a physical, digital commodity which is often referenced as the oil of the 21st Century. What this means is that data -- the stuff that powers AI -- is a corporate commodity, created and owned by corporations, driven by the corporate interests of capitalism as opposed to ethical interests of the public. That model made sense once, when data was only narrowly useful in select corporate environments and we didn't all have internet-connected supercomputers in our pockets, but today that model is not only stunting growth in the emerging AI industry, it's downright dangerous to democracy in ways exemplified by Facebook and Emerdata (Cambridge Analytica) in recent months. I want to first take a look at what "data" is and its two primary uses: transporting information and combining information.