This could be a special way of uploading files "on behalf of."

From task where this was brought up on (SEAD-1107):

"The scenario I explained to Indira yesterday on why this matters is the following: a graduate student is responsible for putting her lab profs/teams data into SEAD. While Clowder may designate this person an "owner" because they uploaded it to the system, the reality is that the graduate student is not the owner and should not be the one deciding whether it's public or not etc. (assuming the project space admin put the grad student in a contributor role). If they want them to have delete/make public capabilities they could make them an editor."