Data is one of the most valuable commodities on the planet, and the people sitting on the biggest piles of it are a shrinking club of media and tech conglomerates horse-trading billions of dollars and data harvested through surveillance tech. There are obvious exceptions, but streaming services, podcast apps, news sites, and social feeds are increasingly a part of the same boardroom, data warehouse, and labor-gutting bottom line. As companies collapse into each other, and bigger equity backed operations vacuum up the mess, the pile of data gets richer, more detailed, and more useful, but only to them.
Your data is largely worthless to you as an individual. You can't spend it. You can't leverage it (so far). It only becomes valuable at scale, aggregated with millions of others and traded between corporations like a commodity on an exchange you've never heard of and weren't invited to. The whole system is a closed loop of institutional benefit, sucked from users who have no idea what they're worth. You generate the value. You see none of it. Regulators are decades behind, and the companies writing the terms of your digital life are funding influence to shape or kill what little oversight exists.
The only real defense is re-evaluating how you operate online. What you click, what tools your use, when, and why. Data literacy isn't a technical skill, but you can't opt out of a system you don't understand you're inside.
We don't collect this data and we don't want to.
At the risk of consistently repeating myself, Tape Trade believes in providing a service to users, not in hoarding data to rapidly increase our assets for a potential sale. As a worker-owned operation, this will never change.
We provide a fairly limited set of tools (in the scheme of the entire internet) but I encourage everyone to seek out spaces and apps and projects that align with what you believe in.
Here's a few that might interest you:
Mirlo | Federated music storefront
Ampwall | Public benefit company for music storefront
