Thread by @doctorow

When all you have is market orthodoxy, everything looks like a market failure. Take privacy: giant, rapacious corporations have instrumented the digital and physical worlds to spy on us all the time, so some people think they should pay us for our data.

1/

There's a pretty rich theoretical history explaining why this "data dividend" is a stupid idea. First of all, private information isn't very property-like. And not just because it shares all the problems of digital works (infinitely, instantaneously copyable at zero cost).

2/

Private information makes for bad "property" because it is "owned" by multiple, overlapping parties who generally disagree about when and who to share it with. When you and I have a conversation, we both own the fact that the conversation took place.

3/

What happens if I won't sell, but you will? Tech companies are REALLY good at finding the cheapest seller of an information good, after all. For example, whenever you visit a "quality newspaper's" site, there's a real-time auction to bid on the right to show you ads.

4/

Say there are 13 bidders for that right. One gets to show you an ad, but the other 12 get something too: your unique identifier and the fact that you read, say, the New York Times.

5/

That fact is then sold on to garbage chumbox sites like Tabouleh, whose pitch to advertisers is "I can show your ads to NYT readers at 15% of the price that the Times charges." If the same fact is "owned" by lots of people, it's a commodity.

6/

Buyers will find the lowest, least-discerning seller. What's more, you can't solve this by requiring consensus of all "owners" of a fact before it is disclosed - who owns the fact that your boss sexually harassed you: you or him? Does he get a veto over your disclosures?

7/

Even if we could get property rights to work in privacy (which, for the record, we cannot), all we'd manage to do is transform privacy into a luxury good wherein poor people are coerced into selling their data for pennies, as @MalJayaram reminds us:

https://twitter.com/MalJayaram/status/1231373834458025984

8/

Data dividends also require someone to set prices on data, and chances are that price will be set by a privacy-invading tech company or a regulator in thrall to them:

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

9/

And whatever the price, it won't capture the true cost, as @htsuka reminds us: "Low-income Americans and often communities of color should not be incentivized to pour more data into a system that already exploits them and uses data to discriminate against them."

10/

"Privacy is a human right, not a commodity."

It's not too late to end "pay for privacy," because, as @ghoshd7 says, behavioral data is "temporally sensitive" - companies need more of it all the time, meaning we can still push back.

slate.com/technology/202…

11/

To get this right, we have to stop pretending that data makes good property and that therefore markets will solve data problems. And just because data isn't property, it doesn't follow that it isn't valuable.

12/

Far from it: the most valuable things we know of (human beings) are not property precisely BECAUSE treating them as property would cheapen them. We humans are so valuable that we have a complex set of rules just for us.

theguardian.com/technology/200…

13/

My daughter isn't my property, but I have an interest in her. So does my wife, and her grandparents, and her teachers and school district, and Child Protective Services...and so does she. This "interest"-based system acknowledged the complex web of overlapping claims.

14/

We have a whole discipline - one that doesn't intersect with markets at all - that describes these relations, with specialized concepts like "nurturance rights" and "self-determination rights" (thanks to Rory Pickens for introducing me to these concepts).

15/

All of these points and more are made in "Why data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting privacy," a 2019 @BrookingsInst paper by @cam_kerry and @jmorrisjr, who relate them to pending legislation and relevant case-law.

brookings.edu/blog/techtank/…

16/

"By licensing the use of their information in exchange for monetary consideration, we may be worse off than under the current notice-and-choice regime...A property-based system also disregards interests besides property that individuals have in personal information."

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/02/26/mea…