From My Data to Our Data: A Proposal to Equitably Distribute Wealth in a Digital Economy

In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capital created by corporations observing willing individuals. This neglects users' roles in creating data, reducing incentives for users, distributing the gains from the data economy unequally, and stoking fears of automation. Instead, treating data (at least partially) as labor could help ... See more

We need platforms that monitor our world for the sake of collective management of a shared commons—not platforms that measure our world for the sake of profiting from the data created from it, extracting value from the digital layer the same way that value is extracted from the mines, forests, and soils of our physical world.

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.”