CTO/05
2026
FEATURE ARTICLE I’m not here saying I have an all-encompassing solution. I’m saying each of our voices matters, in the same way each of our votes matters. We’ve seen the case of Cambridge Analytica and the laws that followed. We are now watching the AI and more specifically, neurotech industry mature. Colorado, California, and Montana have already passed neural data laws, and UNESCO issued a 2025 recommendation. But the global picture remains uneven. In that gap, we should be mapping the digital economy ourselves, so we can scope what protections and disclosures we actually need. Information and data are the fuel of this economy. Without user input, most platforms are skeletons. That doesn’t make them less valuable. It means we, as the primary source, need to start asking what each data point says about us.
THE MICRO: YOUR PRESENCE, YOUR DATA, YOUR RIGHTS
Digital presence and participation are not bad things. Digital presence and participation without the protections that preserve your agency are the problem.
QUICK EXERCISE
Question 1: Google yourself, your country, or your neighborhood. Are you satisfied with the little the digital space represents of you? If you had someone else Google you, what would you want them to see if that was where they would make their first impression of you? Question 2: Think about the ads you see on your phone, on the platforms you use the most. Are those ads personal and relevant?
Question 3: Ask AI to do research on you, your country, or your business (applying the same questions from Question 1).
What the digital space knows about you is directly tied to what you put into it deliberately, and what you don’t. Beyond LinkedIn, if you have business, knowledge, or expertise to offer, make it findable. Otherwise, the algorithm decides for you. Social media is a different layer. It knows you deeply, sometimes better than people in your real life do. That isn’t inherently bad; your values get to decide. But for the sake of your agency, you have the right to know what of your data is being distributed and to whom. Cambridge Analytica gave us the awareness, however, the data conversation still needs to go deeper, at the pace that innovation continues to challenge the existing status quo. In data protection law, there is a concept called the ‘data subject’: that’s you, anyone whose personal data is collected, processed, or stored. Frameworks like the EU’s GDPR and South Africa’s POPIA grant data subjects specific rights: to know what’s held, to correct it, to have it deleted, to object to how it’s used. A deeper public conversation has to happen about these too, particularly in smaller jurisdictions, where comprehensive data protection law is still in development.
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