Apple News Facebook Twitter 新浪微博 Instagram YouTube Wednesday, Mar 15, 2023
Search
Archive
English>>

Who owns data? World’s top minds roll out insightful hints

By Wang Yuan in Hangzhou (People's Daily Overseas New Media)    16:40, June 26, 2019

Photo via Pixabay

Data makes its massive imprints almost everywhere. It’s even working behind the scenes when you hail a ride or pay on a face-scanning tablet.

But here is a question for you: Do you actually own your own data? Or does it belong to someone else, who can keep it or manipulate it?

The issue has come under the limelight as many people are concerned over data ownership, an oft-debated issue at a time when digital technologies are on the rise.

The world’s most distinguished socioeconomic titans, including several Nobel laureates in economics, such as Michael Spence and Sir Christopher Pissarides, added their top-notch remarks on data ownership on June 25 at the Luohan Academy, an Alibaba Group-backed think tank in Hangzhou, East China’s Zhejiang province.

“We should be aware how we perceive and deal with digital data and to what extent we understand privacy as tradeoff,” Michael Spence, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, said during the opening remarks at the Academy.

It is a pressing issue for launching a foray to introduce proper data management, and this is also where firms and organizations could be teasing breakthroughs in the digital era, Spence added.

Speaking at the Academy, Zhang Zhengyun, a PhD candidate at Harvard University, cast her eyes on how the future e-commerce industry may activate more players in fueling the possibility when using and applying data.

“Young and small firms can be particularly price-sensitive,” Zhang commented as she considered firms and platforms as key drivers in leveraging valuable data and information and then aggregating higher demand for traffic. “Data is even able to influence a firm’s future strategy,” she added.

Meanwhile, information is already becoming “the new collateral in the digital economy,” according to Bengt Holmstrom, the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics. Holmstrom said information is the making financial data more fraud-proof, as it is “based on digital recognition and contains a plethora of data.”

Small borrowers might need no collateral to secure credit, as lenders can know the reputation of a borrower even better than the borrower himself, according to Holmstrom.

“It’s a digitized infrastructure,” echoed Sir Christopher Pissarides, a 2010 Nobel laureate.

According to Pissarides, data has been and will never be a rigid or fixed property or ownership; instead, it moves up in the grid rather than simply being monetized. “It’s all about how far a platform can be reaching.”

(For the latest China news, Please follow People's Daily on Twitter and Facebook)(Web editor: Jiang Jie, Bianji)

Add your comment

We Recommend

Most Read

Key Words