Selling Your Data without Selling Your Soul: Privacy, Property, and the Platform Economy

With Sinclair Davidson

Executive summary: Humans have always sought to defend a zone of privacy around themselves—to protect their personal information, their intimate actions and relationships, and their thoughts and ideas from the scrutiny of others. However, it is now common to hear that thanks to digital technologies, we now have little expectation of privacy over our personal information.

Meanwhile, the economic value of personal information is rapidly growing as data becomes a key input to economic activity. A major driver of this change is the rise of a new form of business organization that has come to dominate the economy—platforms that can accumulate and store data and information are likely to make that data and information more valuable.

Given the growing economic importance of data, digital privacy has come to the fore as a major public policy issue. Yet, there is considerable confusion in public debates over the meaning of privacy and why it has become a public policy concern. A poor foundational understanding of privacy is likely to result in poor policy outcomes, including excessive regulatory costs, misallocated resources, and a failure to achieve intended goals.

This paper explores how to build a right to privacy that gives individuals more control over their personal data, and with it a choice about how much of their privacy to protect. It makes the case that privacy is an economic right that has largely not emerged in modern economies.

Regulatory attempts to improve individual control over personal information, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), have unintended consequences and are unlikely to achieve their goals. The GDPR is a quasi-global attempt to institute privacy protections over personal data through regulation. As an attempt to introduce a form of ownership over personal data, it is unwieldy and complex and unlikely to achieve its goals. The GDPR supplants the ongoing social negotiation around the appropriate ownership of personal data and presents a hurdle to future innovation.

In contrast to top-down approaches like the GDPR, the common law provides a framework for the discovery and evolution of rules around privacy. Under a common law approach, problems such as privacy are solved on a case-by-case basis, drawing on and building up a stock of precedent that has more fidelity to real-world dilemmas than do planned regulatory frameworks.

New technologies such as distributed ledger technology—blockchain—and advances in zero-knowledge proofs likewise provide an opportunity for entrepreneurs to improve privacy without top-down regulation and law.

Privacy is key to individual liberty. Individuals require control over their own private information in order to live autonomous and flourishing lives. While free individuals expose information about themselves in the course of social and economic activity, public policy should strive to ensure they do so only with their own implied or explicit consent.

The ideal public policy setting is one in which individuals have property rights over personal information and can control and monetize their own data. The common law, thanks to its case-by-case, evolutionary nature, is more likely to provide a sustainable and adaptive framework by which we can approach data privacy questions.

Published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute