Data Material

16.12.2025

Why do people smile when we tell them that data protection is an important concern for the EU? Why do colleagues turn away when we touch on this topic in conversation?

Perhaps there is now a lack of evidence to underpin this claim, and the EU’s credibility may have been reduced.

However, you see the body of a human being—as far as we and the US have come in recent centuries—you cannot appropriate a human body. Not even the owner of that body would be allowed to sell their own body, even if they wanted to.

Slavery—that is what this is about—is prohibited in the EU. This is stated in Article 5 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (and Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights).

So much for the human body.

Human beings are not just their bodies. Their mental existence, their consciousness, their personality, their psychological characteristics, imprints, tics and tricks, their bad and sometimes good habits, everything that we describe as fleeting and non-physical, are also important.

This spiritual part of the human being is particularly susceptible to external control, perhaps because such control is more likely to take place in secret. The instruments used for this purpose are manifold, above all because their effect is regularly underestimated, if not negated, by the individual concerned.

I will mention just two gateways through which people can be controlled: advertising and propaganda.

Be that as it may, the manipulation of individuals, especially when it is carried out in a manipulative manner, is probably undesirable for those individuals.

In a free society, this should be undesirable because it can be carried out in such a way that it cannot be recognized by those affected.

One senses that all of this is somehow related to the fundamental concern of data protection.

Data that can be linked to individuals has been identified and placed under the protection of a certain non-usability. However, this is restricted with regard to those data users who can demonstrate a need for its use. First and foremost, this includes the state and its institutions.

But industry is also skirting around the issue of the personal nature of individual data and, citing international competitive pressure, arguing that the non-usability of data in a digital society proclaimed for Europe inevitably represents an industrial obstacle and must therefore lead to economic disadvantages.

That may be the case.

This is not the place to question the goals of the social transformation that is underway, especially since we have to take technological developments into account anyway.

Which brings us to AI. Whereas it was previously possible to describe a person based on just three characteristics, AI is now able to derive the psychological characteristics of an individual from a large number of collected trivialities. What you buy, how you pay, where you live—don’t be surprised at what you may be exposed to in the future based on your online activities.

You have lost control over the description of your psychological and neurological constitution, as well as your opinions.

The prohibition of slavery is more or less meaningless because your body follows influences that are individually assigned to the will that controls it.

How you tick is better known than you yourself know.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the European Convention on Human Rights have protected the body from external use. However, your control center, your psychological state, is without ownership. You have no ownership of your very own operating system. You have no ownership of the data that describes you.

This is not only sad.

It is also highly detrimental to resist the advancing analysis technology. One can always tighten regulations after the fact, but it will be of no use because progress continues. That is why it is called progress.

What is particularly strange, however, is that all of this is completely unnecessary if one takes physics and the actual facts into account.

Contrary to all claims, data is always, without exception, material.

Why would it be helpful for legislation and courts to take physical circumstances into account?

Because material data can be owned.

Recognizing the ownership of data would simplify many things and change everything.

So why does data always have to be material?

Because the computer is a machine.

There is no machine that can work and process without matter.

A machine always needs some form of matter to act on and work with. Under the current laws of natural physics, there can be no proof of a machine that can work without matter.

Data is matter. It is therefore potentially capable of being owned.

Unfortunately, the explanation of what constitutes the matter of data is not straightforward. This may explain why we have gone down the wrong path.

A computer works in the natural physical realm of electromagnetism. This includes light, radio waves, and magnetism. All these phenomena are based on the photon, physically referred to as an exchange particle, the mediator of electromagnetic interaction. This was described by Albert Einstein, for which he received the Nobel Prize.

The photon is therefore an essential component of electromagnetism, to which it also lends its materiality. However, the photon has a rest mass of 0 (zero). So where does its materiality come from? Explanation: the photon does not exist at rest; this is merely the mathematical-theoretical view of the photon. In reality, the photon moves at the speed of light, thereby acquiring momentum comparable to that of matter and following gravity.

Computers, cell phones, etc. work with photons in the form of light, radio waves, and magnetism. Without photons as representatives of matter, no computer would work.

To make it a little more complicated: this substance generates zeros and ones, which can be imagined as: electricity off. Or power on. These, assembled in chains as signals and transported via radio waves or cables as light and converted into magnetic fields, form the basis for transport, processing, and storage by computers.

Nothing works without matter, even if the derivation of the necessary existence of matter seems excessive. Data is not immaterial. At most, what we record on data carriers can only exist mentally.

From this perspective, data would potentially be capable of ownership.

If this were the case, a data aura could be created around each person, i.e., personally identifiable data that could then be excluded from use by third parties, for example.

Such data would nevertheless inevitably be generated during processing. AI technology, at the latest, makes this unavoidable.

However, this data may not be used. And the person described in this way may not release the core data describing them for use.

This is analogous to the prohibition of slavery.

We can see a body, but its unrestricted use is prohibited.

We cannot prevent data from being generated. But data that enables undesirable use for the subliminal, external control of human beings, who are, after all, endowed with dignity, must be excluded from any use.

For five years now, we have been trying to bring this idea to the attention of the courts and the European Court of Justice.

Perhaps some other authority will come to the realization that the existing materiality of data would allow for the introduction of individual data sovereignty, which would eliminate many data protection problems, not least of which is the problem of dwindling credibility in society.

Data protection is important.