HarryShearer.com

When Google started being evil—when it bought an advertising outfit and started collecting and peddling our personal info—I floated a nutty idea to people I knew, including some lawyers who were, fortunately, off the clock. In the years since, data brokers have become a ubiquitous if hidden part of online life. Now we’re being offered the services of companies who promise to hide our data from the data brokers, and, somehow, we’re supposed to trust them.

So I’ve decided to revive my nutty idea. It’s simple, just three words. Copyright your life. Copyright is well-established law that, even now with AI claiming the right to absorb and spit back anything fed in, does a better protective job than the salad of privacy laws in the various states.

Half the attorneys I bothered with this notion laughed it off. The other half gave a more considered answer. To be copyrighted, a work has to be the product of some creative effort. Creative efforts are the result of a series of choices. And what does our oft-peddled data consist of but…a series of choices: What we buy, where we go, what we value. Instead of having Google or its many friends keep track of our choices, our devices could do so, updating daily the data covered by copyright. If someone wants to use our data to sell us stuff or otherwise bother us, they would have to pay us for the privilege, and we’d have the right to say no.

Copyright your life. Maybe the time has come.