Data: a collective resource subject to democratic ordering?

I really enjoyed reading this short essay by Salome Viljoen about moving beyond property or dignity claims about data production and towards democratising data governance. This is an excellent primer for anyone interested in understanding discussions about the governance of (personal) data that does a pretty good job at describing the two prevalent schools of thought. On the one side the data as property approach:

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

And on the other side a an individual rights based approach that she calls “dignitarian”:

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 data collection they disagree with, to determine the fate of data collected about them, and to grant them rights against data about them being used in ways that violate their interests.

I am definitely more in the “dignitarian” camp here but i also share her analysis of the shortcomings of the this approach and her proposal to transcend these opposing approaches in favor of an approach that rooted in collective rights:

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.

[…] What these shortcomings suggest is that alternative conceptions of the data political economy are needed. Such alternatives must be resistant to private market governance of the data political economy, attentive to the structural incentives at the root of data extraction, and responsive to the wealth accumulation, privacy erosion, and reproduction of social oppression it facilitates.

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.

The framework that she proposes here (data as a collective ressource subject to democratic ordering) makes a lot of sense (maybe even more that the personal data as a commons approach that is fairly popular in my circles at the moment).

In order to understand what this would mean in practice one does not need to look further than the Facebook controversy du jour, where facebook tries to prevent researchers from understadning the impact of political ads in the name of protecting the privacy of its users. This controversy perfectly illustrates the limitations of an individual rights based approach to data ownership and provides a case study why treating personal data as a collective ressource subject to democratic ordering would make a meaningful difference.