Original / Your Data Should Belong to You — and not to the Big Tech Companies
Author / Andrew Yang
Translation / Zhou Yuhan
Word count/ 875
Reading time / 3 minutes
Andrew Yang[1], Chinese name Yang Anze, Chinese-American entrepreneur, former candidate of the Democratic Party in the 2020 US presidential election. He is the second Chinese in the history of the United States to announce his candidacy for the presidency, with the campaign slogan Humanity First. On February 12, 2020, Andrew Yang announced that he would withdraw from the presidential election and later joined CNN as a political commentator. He is a firm proponent of data ownership and has launched the Data Dividend Plan, which aims to call on everyone to regain their data ownership and earn income from it.
This article is an essay he wrote during the campaign expressing his views on data ownership. Enjoy.
During the campaign, I have always advocated that our data should belong to us. This may seem obvious and reasonable; but the reality is that our information is being sold and resold every day by tech giants and data merchants without us knowing it.
This matter is no small matter. Facebook, which made its fortune on user data, is now a $650 billion company. But how much did we profit from it? Because of traffic, each of us has been reduced to a commodity that can be packaged and sold.
Not only can they profit from it, but they can also influence our behavior and attitudes by analyzing our likes and dislikes. We are being pushed into positions that are contrary to the spirit of democracy, healthy minds and free will. True, they didnt sell us anything; but we ourselves became commodities, sold to those who needed to analyze us and sway us.
what should we do?
Here, I am happy to announce that there is a new written law that actually protects our data rights.California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)[2] Already entered into force on January 1 this year. The Act states that every Californian has the right to:
Know what personal information the company collects
access his/her data
Know with which third parties the company has shared/traded this information
Opt out of sharing your information at any time
……
Some technology companies are lobbying California regulators to try to weaken or delay the implementation of this bill, but this is in vain-the bill will be officially implemented on July 1.
Nevada has already passed a similar bill, and other states have initiated similar legislation. In order to promote data authentication and privacy protection, Humanity Forward andThe Data Dividend Project[3] Cooperation can help everyone fight for their own data rights. We know that ordinary people are at a complete disadvantage against big corporations and dont know how to regain control of their data. After all, these tech companies have billions of dollars in funding and hundreds of lawyers at every turn. How can ordinary citizens compete with it? The Data Dividend Project aims to call on most Americans to negotiate and take back the data rights that currently fall into the hands of technology giants and data merchants. Only a sufficiently uniform and loud voice can wake them up who are pretending to be asleep.
The reason why the Data Dividend Plan is so named is to change the current situation of the abuse of private data. Since you agree to share your data, only you—and not any other person or organization—can get paid for the data being used. If someone can use your data to make money, should this person be someone else besides yourself? We should be clear that this is another revenue that we deserve and not expect Congress to push through.
I hope the Data Dividend Program excites you as much as I do. Lets fight for human rights, for our data, our property, our future. They are ours. All we want is for it to be returned to its original owner.
