Data as Property?

tags

Value of Data

Notes

data—and in particular data about people—as central to what they have termed informational capitalism

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datafication—the transformation of information into commodity—a particular economic process of value creation

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both a process of production and a form of injustice.

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Zuboff likens our inner lives to a pre-Colonial continent, invaded and strip-mined of data

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data as a distinct form of capital, and accordingly links the imperative to collect data to the perpetual cycle of capital accumulation.

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Cohen, in the Polanyian tradition, traces the “quasi-ownership through enclosure” of data

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data governance emerges as key terrain on which to discipline firms engaged in datafication and to respond to the injustices of informational capitalism

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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

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out of step with how data production, as a population-wide practice, results in both benefits and risks for individuals, and their approach—grounded in legal rights to individual freedom—consequently fails

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Rather than proposing individual rights of payment or exit, data governance should be envisioned as a project of collective democratic obligation

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property right over data about the subject, in which the data subject may sell usage or full ownership rights. Alternatively, data may be conceived of as a form of the subject’s labor

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transforms data about the subject into an asset that generates wealth for the subject

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The governance of data then becomes the governance (via contract law, property law, and/or employment law and labor law) of property relations or labor relations

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formalizing the current informal propertarian status of data

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a claim of enhanced individual control or self-determination in the data economy, as well as a redistributive claim: that data subjects are owed some share of the wealth that data about them helps to create.

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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

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conditions of the current data market are not conducive to small producers or laborers securing good bargains

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datafication does not result in the kinds of visceral oppression that spurs organizing and builds counter-power.

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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

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data exchanges generate considerable privacy externalities: information about one person may well be used to make inferences applied to another.

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Propertarian reforms concede existing processes of data commodification and mass data extraction

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dignitarian data governance conceives of data as an expression (or extension) of individual selfhood

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universal and inalienable rights over personal information

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legal solutions advanced under dignitarian conceptions of data governance still primarily subject data to individual ordering

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secure personal data’s quasi-personhood status in law governed by civil, not contractual, rights

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“legibility harm”—a degree of representation that violates the sanctity of our inner lives.

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redistributive agenda of propertarian reforms respond to claims of injustice based on the inegalitarian social effects of data extraction, not only the personal violation

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dignitarian critiques may chafe against positive accounts of data infrastructures that require large-scale mandatory data collection

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require rendering individuals legible, in some instances against their will. But they would do so in service of vital democratic welfare state endeavors

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reconceives data about people as a democratic resource

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collective resource subject to democratic ordering

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consider the relational nature of data: information about one individual is useful (or harmful) precisely because it can be used to infer features about—and thus make decisions affecting—others

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transforms the project of achieving freedom in the data economy from one of reclaiming individual liberty, to one of achieving positive conditions of freedom through collective obligation.

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Regardless of what data is, the democratic shortcomings of the law governing labor and the law governing capital should leave one skeptical about slotting data neatly into these regulatory regimes

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