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Discussion on: How does the web look if everyone owned their own data?

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Ian Kirker

That you have a link to an address book entry is your data, the address info itself, and the information that that link resolves to my address book entry, is mine. You would have a list of anonymous links which would recover the data from the right places to create your address book entries.

The real question is, whose data is the fact that you have permission to access my address book entry? Because permissions data about the entry would be mine, but the fact that those permissions concern you make it yours...

And when someone accesses my address book entry, the fact that someone accessed it would be information about my personal information, whereas the fact that it was you who accessed it is information about you.

I guess it would be possible to have a key that means we both together can link up that log entry and see that it was you who accessed my entry. (Like matching an IP address to a person, but if the IP address was just a globally unique random ID.)

If that sort of thing were mandated, you wouldn't be able to de-anonymise any of that data without the other party's consent or at least without their stored data, which would make security and law enforcement evidence gathering of this type a trickier business.