Thread · 5 tweets · 20 Jul 2018

If you’d paid the enslaved for their work but they’d remained owned and branded, you wouldn’t have ended slavery. In the same manner, paying people for their personal data does not bring back privacy.

Promising the end of “digital feudalism” sure sounds neat, but I have read the full original @GLthinktank/@GaspardKoenig report and it is full of elementary errors about privacy, the data economy, or the actual goals and effects of privacy regulation.

Property rights for personal data might make sense if personal data were sold as address books, if there were no externalities from refusing to sell, and if the processing involved in the data economy were as simplistic as the report believes. Not one of these conditions holds.

A general rule for personal data property rights proposals is to check if they even answer questions like: • Does lying about yourself become theft/fraud? • What happens to that one kid in class who refuses to sell his sexual orientation information? No answer? ➡️ 🗑

I almost forgot! The data of affluent people are also more valuable (for obvious reasons). Privacy property rights then make the rich richer overnight without any change in the actual production of value. I could go on… The fact is: it’s about as illiberal an idea as it gets.