> Sure but if you learn a dirty secret about me then the default state of affairs is that I can kill you or steal your server. A law which prevents that murder or theft is "artificial." Your position as I understand it is that you have a legal right to that data AND legal protection from "natural" modes of recourse.

Well, yeah, I don't want to unravel the fundamental foundations of civil society, and I don't think you do either. Absolutely nothing we're talking about here is anywhere close to that important, and I think it's reasonable to take those as fundamental premises. So yes, I think I have a right to not be killed and to not have my equipment stolen, and I think suggesting otherwise is ridiculously hyperbolic. That's not "putting our disagreement in context", that's you saying "we have laws about murder so why not laws about how data about people can be used", which as a comparison is ridiculous on its face.

> Because this is a thread about an analogy - how our relationship with online data mimics the relationship serfs had with the land they worked aka data feudalism.

I responded to a comment that started with the sentence "We can't let a few companies own our data.". I responded, specifically, to the framing as "our data", and offered a counterpoint for why that framing begs the question. I have no interest in trying to draw analogies to the dark ages or to any other political models, when it's far more straightforward to talk about data, websites, potential policies, potential legal restrictions, and potential outcomes.

> Then I'm not sure what you're doing here. The discussion is explicitly about framing our relationship with our data as feudalism.

No, this thread is about data and the uses and control of it. See above.

> To you my labor

Nope, I said absolutely nothing about labor. Where did you even get that from? If you're going to make up positions and then argue against them, you're just talking to yourself. And one of many problems with making up analogies is that you might then be inclined to make invalid assumptions about other unmentioned aspects of those analogies associated with any given position.

> When this discussion started I was really interested in seeing what your personal problems are with feudalism.

Off the top of my head? People regularly died of numerous causes that are almost unheard-of today, had very few rights of their own, had a drastically shorter expected lifespan, had essentially no prospects for improving their lot in life, had minimal access to basic information or even basic literacy, and a hundred other problems, quite aside from likely not being able to leave and seek whatever meager prospects might exist elsewhere. None of which have anything to do with people visiting websites, interacting with web applications, and voluntarily providing data. So no, I'm not interested in talking about the state of society in the dark ages.

> Non-feudalism discussion:

Thank you for this.

> Well no, I do see it as my data.

If you're walking down the street wearing a blue shirt, and someone is sitting on the street corner keeping a tally of shirt colors, is that "your data"? I don't see any reasonable basis on which you could claim that. More importantly, it's not a framing that provides a helpful basis on which to draw conclusions.

Now, on the flip side, to provide a point on the other end of the spectrum, I do think it's dangerous and unreasonable to allow people to run facial recognition on cameras pointed at street corner and post timestamped location information of everyone they recognize. I have no problem with prohibiting that (given appropriate care to define the scope of the prohibition), and despite that I still wouldn't frame that as "because it's the data of the people walking by". I'd frame it as "allowing the publication of that information would do great harm, restricting it is a relatively small imposition, and such a restriction (assuming careful scoping) doesn't stop people from doing more reasonable things in the process".

> Prove it? There's nothing to prove, you and I have a philosophical disagreement about the nature of ownership and data.

If that philosophy leads to conclusions about what actions we should take regarding the use and control of data, then those conclusions require supporting arguments based in premises we can agree on. Right now, you're pre-supposing that "data about you" is something you should have control over, which I would counter by saying that "data in my head, or recorded by me" is not generally something you should have control over. If you want to draw conclusions based on that, they'll all be conditional on that premise, which you have yet to provide any arguments to support.

> If I am in front of you in line at a bank and while signing a form you glimpse my credit card number

I think we should redesign credit cards to operate using asymmetric keys rather than passing around an "open secret" that anyone can use to issue charges. But apart from that, I don't think it's useful to argue about whether it's "your data" or "data about you"; I think it's useful to talk about what can be done with that information. For instance, if someone spots that number and proceeds to use it to attempt to make charges, I'd call that some sort of theft or fraud.

> What if your coworker figures out your HN password?

Then I have bigger problems. I'd appreciate it if they told me first, so I could fix the gap in my security that allowed them to get it. And in certain circumstances (with more high-value accounts), one could argue that publishing that information before I've had the opportunity to change it could do irreparable harm (though any potential restriction on that would need exceptional care to avoid restricting legitimate security research). On the other hand, sites like "haveibeenpwned" keep huge databases of information about people, and use that information for the legitimate purpose of helping people. And if the compromised password ends up in a database of "known/common passwords", I don't see any reason I or anyone else should have any claim over that; it's a simple fact.