Red Line

My friend M shared this hysterical back and forth she had with ChatGPT in hopes of finding a solution to her life's current most pressing problem. We had a good laugh over this but had to acknowledge it was a worthy effort just that it missed that bright red line of condescension. To be fair she was asking for it. 

Prompt:

My boss at work majored in English in college and is highly nontechnical. He is afraid that by aggregating and transporting data our department will own this data with adverse consequences for us. I spent most of my career working for data management product companies who's business is precisely carrying other organization's data and dealing with data governance. If they owned said data they would not exist as would be sued by other organizations based on such ownership. Please help me explain this to him using analogies and allegories from the world of literature Shakespeare if possible but not necessarily.

Response:

"We are not the owners of the cargo; we are merely the ship."

Imagine, if you will, The Merchant of Venice. When Antonio sends his ships to sea, the ships carry goods belonging to merchants. If the cargo is lost or damaged, it’s the merchants who bear the loss—not the shipbuilder or the crew unless there was negligence. Similarly, our systems transport and transform data, but we do not own the data any more than a stagecoach owns the letters it carries.

In Shakespearean terms:

We are like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a facilitator of action, but not the author of the will behind it. Just as Puck carries out Oberon’s bidding without owning the consequences of the king’s orders, our team executes technical tasks on behalf of the data’s rightful owners.

The legal and technical principle here is clear:

Just as a librarian does not own the books, nor the postman the letters, we are custodians, not proprietors. Companies like Informatica thrive precisely because they handle others' data without taking ownership—if they did, as you rightly worry, lawsuits would end them. Their survival proves that custody and care are different from possession and control.

One last analogy—drawn from Hamlet:

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be..." is advice about responsibility in relationships. In our case, we are neither borrowing nor lending the data—we are merely the stagehands setting the scene, ensuring that the right props are in the right place, on time, for the real players to act.