Protect our Data! a Digital Consumer Bill of Rights

PC World — You've been uploading pictures, sharing stories, and entering personal data into your favorite social network for years. Now the network says that all of your data is public and that it's going to share the information with an advertiser.

A hacker breaks into your bank's servers, and someone in Russia uses your username and password to drain your account.

A nondescript Web ad drops a cookie in your browser that logs your keystrokes for months. That data gets sold to marketers who use it to hound you with ads for hair replacement products.

The cloud storage company you've been using to store business files goes out of business, then sells all your data to a hedge fund.

Unless you're really unlucky, you haven't had to endure all of these things. But in today's cloud-based world, they're all possible. Many of us store large amounts of personal information--everything from financial figures and healthcare data to documents to entertainment media and social networking stuff--at various companies' sites around the Web.

It's very convenient for us, and the hosting companies benefit in one way or another from storing and using the data. But we have few real guarantees that our data won't be misused, lost, or stolen (in fact, it's happening more and more). That's not right. We digital consumers need a data security bill of rights that has the force of law behind it to ensure that our data will be protected and to guarantee that, if it's not, we'll be compensated for the losses we suffer. Here is what that bill of rights might look like.

The data I store in the cloud is my valuable property.

The key question is this: Does my personal data constitute property that has value? The answer is yes. In the Internet economy, information is the chief currency. Many of today's biggest and most profitable Internet companies have found a way to turn user information into real money. The usual model is to collect and aggregate as much user data as possible, anonymize it, and then sell it to third-party Web marketing or advertising firms.

Because my information has genuine value, I should have a property owner's rights when I lend that data to some Internet company. If it gets lost or misused, I should be compensated.

In the era of the "cloud," we lend our data--everything from business documents to music to email--to companies that host it on their servers, and they reap some financial reward from doing so, even if they don't charge us for storage. Cloud storage companies are like banks, but for data instead of dollars. We store our money in banks because it's a convenience for us; the banks then use that money to make money for themselves. Even if we don't pay the bank a fee for storing our money, we obviously have a right to insist that the bank safeguard our assets and that it compensate us for any of our assets that it loses through bad investments or theft. Likewise, if my personal files are lost or stolen, the cloud company has caused me to lose something of value, and I am entitled to compensation for my loss.

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