Digital identity is privately owned by corporations, not by the person it identifies

Evidence

And yet, astoundingly, our digital identity belongs neither to us nor to the state. Strewn across countless privately owned digital realms, it has many owners, none of whom is us: a private bank owns your ID codes and your entire purchasing record. Facebook is intimately familiar with whom – and what – you like. Twitter remembers every little thought that caught your attention, every opinion that you agreed with, that made you furious, that you lingered over idly before scrolling on. Apple and Google know better than you do what you watch, read, buy, whom you meet, when and where. Spotify owns a record of your musical preferences more complete than the one stored in your conscious memory. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 299

And yet, astoundingly, our digital identity belongs neither to us nor to the state. Strewn across countless privately owned digital realms, it has many owners, none of whom is us: a private bank owns your ID codes and your entire purchasing record. Facebook is intimately familiar with whom – and what – you like. Twitter remembers every little thought that caught your attention, every opinion that you agreed with, that made you furious, that you lingered over idly before scrolling on. Apple and Google know better than you do what you watch, read, buy, whom you meet, when and where. Spotify owns a record of your musical preferences more complete than the one stored in your conscious memory. And behind them all are countless others, invisibly gathering, monitoring, sifting and trading your activity for information about you. With every day that passes, some cloud-based corporation, whose owners you will never care to know, owns another aspect of your identity. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 299

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Apple/Google know better than the user what they watch and buy is worth pressing — is this empirically established or rhetorical hyperbole?
• SHARE: Send to anyone working in data rights or identity — the Spotify-owns-your-musical-preferences line is a vivid, quotable example of identity alienation.
• XREF: Amplifies the reader’s chapter 20 platform-surveillance thread; also connects to David Lyon and surveillance-studies material on dataveillance. — connects to: Corporations will use personal data against individual interests unless checked — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 497; US political choices made identity ownership private while keeping GPS common; Repeated corporate privacy violations indicate an intentional design rather than oversight — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 153 (+3 more)
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 299

Broader Connections

• Personal identity theory parallels the language of property and ownership #epitomizes (0.95) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 444
• Repeated corporate privacy violations indicate an intentional design rather than oversight #complicates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 153