What do we really "own" anyway?

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web has been around for almost two weeks now, and it's been making quite a stir. I've joined the fray, first with this post on the ProjectVRM blog, and then with an email to the authors of the bill. Marc Canter, one of those authors, posted it.

I favor the bill. Others, some of whom I respect a great deal, don't. One is Dave Kearns, who says Nobody "owns" my identity data. Sez Dave,

Very little identifying data, in fact, do I actually "own" in the sense that I can do what I please with it. I don't, for example, "own" my social security number, my credit card accounts, my mailing address, my wife (that's a co-owned relationship), etc. At best, I might be thought to be able to control the distribution of the identity data within certain very well defined parameters.

Another is Eric Norlin, who adds this comment to Dave's post:

Totally agree, dave. Andre, Phil and I spent six solid *months* coming at "ownership" from every angle back in 2002, and the only *real* way forward is to give up on "ownership" per se and focus on "control."

You do not *strictly speaking* own MOST of your identity data, but you should be able to *control* it.

Ownership is a black hole that will suck the life out of the progress folks are trying to make here.

The two colleagues of which Eric writes are Andre Durand and Phil Becker. Along with Dave Kearns and many others in the Identity Gang, Andre and Phil have thought long and hard about digital identity issues.

Eric is right to assert that control is a better way to approach what we do with what we perceive to be "our" data. But if he's right that ownership is a "black hole", the real problem isn't falling into it, but crawling out of it. That's because the concept of ownership is deeply, profoundly and unavoidably built into the way we understand and talk about ourselves and how we operate in the world around us.

We often say "possession is nine-tenths of the law". When my kids were small, I came up with a corollary: "Possession is nine-tenths of the three-year-old." At the time I thought it was a joke, but there turned out to be a deeper truth to it.