Data as Property? | Phenomenal World

The second type of reforms, which I call dignitarian, take a further step beyond asserting rights to data-as-property, and resist data’s commodification altogether, drawing on a framework of civil and human rights to advocate for increased protections. Proposed reforms along these lines grant individuals meaningful capacity to say no to forms of da... See more

One path forward reconceives data about people as a democratic resource. Such proposals view data not as an expression of an inner self subject to private ordering and the individual will, but as a collective resource subject to democratic ordering.

There are several reasons to be skeptical of propertarian data reforms and how they conceptualize the problem of data extraction. The first is a pragmatic one: operationalizing the kind of complex and comprehensive micro-payments system suggested by these proposals at the scale they require may simply not be feasible or cost-effective

Rather than proposing individual rights of payment or exit, data governance should be envisioned as a project of collective democratic obligation that seeks to secure those of representation instead.

Many dignitarian reformers claim that data extraction involves not only individual stakes, but also societal ones. Zuboff says the world’s digital information is a public good; the EU Data Protection Supervisor notes that privacy is not “only an individual right but a social value.”

Payment may also incentivize people to share data about themselves and thus further degrade privacy. Because those least able to forego income face added pressure to sell their data, propertarian approaches risk transforming privacy into an even greater privilege than it is today.

Paying data subjects at the point of collection does nothing to address uses of such data that may violate the civil rights of others and amplify existing social oppression. In fact, by legitimating the marketplace for data, payment may legitimate downstream practices that result

Scholars, activists, technologists and even presidential candidates have all proposed data governance reforms to address the social ills generated by the technology industry.

These reforms generally come in two varieties. Propertarian reforms diagnose the source of datafication’s injustice in the absence of formal property (or alternatively, labor) rights regulating the process of production.