We live in the Digital Era! Everything in our lives has gone digital now. We talk online, we share online even our definition of having fun is playing a game together online. Our lives are completely governed by the internet & online gadgets. From storing our documents to creating files, there’s hardly anything that doesn’t involve the internet. In fact, there’s hardly a job left that doesn’t involve making use of the internet. Every moment that we spend accessing the internet, we are producing data. And as is obvious, as more we are walking towards digitization, more data we are creating every day, so much that according to a survey, of all the data there is on the internet today, around 90% of it was generated in the last 2 years.
Now, it isn’t just data that has been increasing in the last few years!
Another aspect that has seen a rise is the number of cybercrimes. The pace with which cybercrimes have been rising in the last few years is scary. And it’s not just the number, but also the types of cybercrimes we witness these days call for stronger solutions, that we don’t have today.
This makes us wonder if our data is secure at all or not? Are we as free in the digital world, as we are in our materialistic physical world?
Well, the fact of the matter is that we are not.
Digital freedom is something that we are often promised to us, but it is never truly delivered. There’s no one to guard our data in the digital world.
Even though every tech company will make promises, they tell you how much your data means to them & how they are doing their best to secure it, but when the time of testing truly comes, these promises disappear like a cloud of smoke.
In a way to change this scenario, the need for Data Ownership has arisen from time to time. Data Ownership has come up as the ideal solution to ensure data protection, everywhere at all times on the internet. It implies that every individual should have the sole control over their data to be able to decide who accesses it.
The WHY & the HOW?
Now to understand whether or not it is the ideal solution for data protection, we will consider two aspects of it, viz. What are the reasons that Data Ownership should be granted and How can it be granted?
WHY own your data?
To understand the need for data ownership on the internet, we need to consider a few aspects, as given below.
Your Data is Threatened
Everything from your documents to files is saved online these days. All this data, with nothing & no one to secure it, is very vulnerable to fall into the hands of malicious entities that can use it to cause you to harm in many ways, like identity theft, stealing sensitive data, destroying your data and worse.
All this valuable data of ours, we often entrust it in the hands of various online platforms, that promise to provide you ‘complete security & ease of access to your data’ and often do the opposite by easing their security, thus giving complete access of the data to anyone & everyone.’ And this is what causes your data to be threatened by these multiple cyber threats that can cause immense loss of data.
Though some might argue that you are solely responsible for taking care of your data; even after taking all precautions, data can be lost. Especially in cases of breaches, wherein the data of a mass of people is threatened, the data that was the company’s responsibility! So, basically here your data is lost even though you were not directly targeted.
Your data is accessible to many
By many, we mean the companies that allow you to save the data on their platforms & the applications on your device. These companies have access to most of your data if not all. And they don’t get access to your data in a fraudulent unethical way. It is often you who allows them to access your data. That’s right, you put your own data at risk. And you do this just to access a few more features of the application.
Every time you download an application on your device, it asks you for certain permissions to work smoothly. Also, it comes with a set of terms & conditions, that you agree to before installing them. The problem is that you often agree to these things, without even reading it & not thinking much of it & that is your mistake. You allow your own data to be accessed by them, by agreeing to their terms, thus putting your data in trouble.
No place is safe on the internet!
Though you might believe the promises of big tech companies, the reality is that your data is nowhere near safe on the internet. The major reason for all this is that the internet is majorly owned by only a few tech companies, and we use their space to store our data. To give you an amount, around 99% of all the content, thus data on the internet is owned by only the top 5 global internet companies. This means that what we call our own space3 on the internet, actually belongs to one of these companies, that is allotted to us. If the place on the internet isn’t ours, how can we expect the data to be?
This makes our data vulnerable to multiple cyber threats. Because if in case, that company faces a breach, the data that is lost isn’t of the company, but of the people, like you. Also, if someone from these companies tries to steal your data, they can & then who knows what they might do with it. Our data’s security is always at these companies’ mercy.
But if you own your data on the internet, you can stop this from happening as you will be in complete control of what happens to your data.
But there is a solution….
Now, that we’ve established WHY you need to understand, let us establish, HOW you can do it?
Though it might seem almost impossible, there is a solution for us to secure our data on the internet through Data Ownership. When you completely own your data, only then can you completely secure it. The only way this can happen is when you own a part of the internet to store your data because data security can only be truly achieved when you own a part of the internet.
Now, how this can be done is that there are some platforms that let you own a personal domain on the internet, which you can use to store all your digital data. You can link all your mail & social media accounts to it to ensure your data’s security there. And these platforms are so safe that no one but you can access it, acting almost like your own digital home.
