Privacy Is Just the First Step, the Goal Is Data Ownership
It&#x27;s been a while since I disagreed this much with a privacy-related article. It&#x27;s a good reminder to me that the privacy community is reasonably diverse, and that different people can advocate for the same policies for very different reasons.<p>I advocate for privacy a lot, but my end goal definitely isn&#x27;t data ownership. If anything, I&#x27;d like to see IP protections start to go in the opposite direction. I&#x27;m not against the idea of copyright as a purely practical invention, but I certainly don&#x27;t believe anyone has an intrinsic moral right to a monopoly on creative or factual information.<p>So I take some issue with the idea that privacy is just a gateway to something else. To me, privacy and anonymity <i>are</i> the end goal. There&#x27;s not a secondary, deeper issue behind that. I&#x27;m not mad that Facebook is making money off of my information, I&#x27;m mad that they were able to get it in the first place.<p>This is important, because when you transition to talking about data ownership as the underlying problem, then you start to lose ground on questions like, &quot;why is it important that the government not be able to track my GPS location anytime they like? What was really wrong with programs like PRISM?&quot; Because Government privacy concerns don&#x27;t really have anything to do with data ownership.