Imagine the mass of all the water from all the oceans. That's a lot water. Now, think of how many droplets it does represent. A whole lot of droplets, way too many to count. Maybe you could come up with a rough estimate, but chances are you'll be way off. Perhaps you could start by figuring out the exact volume of a single droplet, then make your way up. I'm absolutely certain someone already tried to do that, but that's not the point. My point is, it's impossible to know the story of any individual droplet out there. A water droplet could have been anything wet prior to being part of the ocean. It could have fallen from the Niagara Falls at some point, been a tear in someone's eye at some other, before transiting to a beer then some piss down the alley, before evaporating and joining some snowfall in a remote place. Anything's possible.
Now think about data droplets, bits and bytes. Then, how many bits are actually residing on all working computer memory supports from around the globe? A whole lot of bits of data, way too many to count. Maybe you could come up with a rough estimate, but chances are you'll be way off. While bits and droplets seem to share multiplicity, one key difference emerges: every bit of data stored in all places comes with credentials. Someone knows where and why they are stored, for how long, and what they are part of, through files, metadata and databases. No useful bit of data is unaccounted for.
It's just like we could label any and all bits of data, store it forever, while potentially knowing its full history and purpose. Crazy stuff, isn't it? Now, just think about the fact that all the bits your online presence ever generated are simultaneously stored in many different data hoarding facilities around the world. Now try to think about what it's actually used for, what it could enable, and who's in control of it. Chances are, you can't know all that. But some people can. And the fact that you can't while others can makes for a potentially huge set of never faced before circumstances.
While you don't recall all you ever did online, some people may. While you don't have much use for it now, some organizations do. While you can forget all about it and suddenly expire in the night, it still lives, potentially forever. A bit like an old picture you never knew about, on which you were standing in the background beside some tourist from Tokyo or Oslo, still glued to some family album far away, or used in some promotional event to sell something abroad, like insurance or gazoline. Would all that mean anything to you? Would you consider yourself being entitled to such information about your likeness?
Especially while knowing that your data trail could be moneytized, transferred and sold to anyone at anytime in the present or the future, to your life insurance company, or even a dictatorial regime potentially hostile to you or your family's future, data about yourself you would never know about, for which you would never hold any rights. Would that be a problem to you? I'm asking because this is already happening, as you read.
If that's all water falling behind you as you live your life, then it's all good and you can stop reading already. Otherwise, all that data should probably end up in your family's hard drive, and nowhere else. But it's not, and more likely than anything, it will never be. Which begs another question: should anyone (people, groups, corporations or governments) own anything about anyone else? Should possessing anything created by some individual, in the sense of owning and profiting from it, be a thing of the past?
Because many threads are colliding here. Your personal data could be many things: your online history, your creations, your art, your emails, your texts, your books, your inventions, your poetry, your images, your paintings, your messages, your songs, your diaries, your pictures, etc. We're talking about things from three different sources here: things you created without knowing about it, everything you ever created yourself consciously, and any creation made by others for which you own a copy or an original. All that can be called intellectual property, or IP.
Right now, definition of IP is very restrictive and only includes some more public works of art (originals, copies and reproductions), which are mostly available on the open market. Everything personal related to yourself only, which was knowingly or unknowingly acquired by others, or things which are not on the open market (but still actively sold and acquired, like your data trail), are not yet legally acknowledged as intellectual property. Or things you do at home, on your phone, and while using your computers (involving AI, PCs, TVs, cars, etc.). Call them private things, or so you once thought.
It might go one of two ways from here: personal IP given a value and you being compensated for it (or not, depending on choices being forced onto you), or no more IP for anyone forever. First scenario, anything goes as it does now, and corporations grow bigger morphing into full fledged cross border monopolies, because they already are. Or starting from now, anyone anywhere anyhow can use anything made by themselves or others, even for profit, and for any reason, without any restriction. Which means every intellectual creation past present or future is now part of the public domain. Your choice.