Data Dignity: What If the Data About You Were Actually Yours?

Every time you search for something, buy something, or post something, you produce a small record. A query typed at midnight, a route walked across a city, a photo tagged with a face — each one is trivial on its own, and each one is quietly filed away as an asset. Not your asset. Someone else’s. Data dignity is the name for a simple, unsettling question that follows from this: if the data about you has value, why does none of that value come back to you? The phrase is associated with the technologist Jaron Lanier and the economist Glen Weyl, and their proposal reframes something we have been taught to think of as waste. The data you shed is not exhaust. It is labour.

That reframing matters more than it first appears. If your data is exhaust — a byproduct, a fume, something you would have emitted anyway — then whoever captures it is doing you a favour by putting it to use. But if your data is labour — something you produced, that has worth, that trained a system or sharpened a targeting model — then the arrangement starts to look less like a favour and more like an unpaid shift. The whole architecture of the modern internet depends on us accepting the first story. Data dignity asks us to consider the second.

Who owns your data right now?

The short, blunt answer is: whoever collects it. Under the terms of service you agreed to without reading — and almost nobody reads them, which the companies drafting them know perfectly well — the record of your behaviour belongs to the platform that recorded it. You have some rights around access and deletion in certain jurisdictions, and those rights matter. But ownership, in the sense that counts economically, sits with the collector. They can analyse it, combine it with other records, build models on it, and sell the products of that analysis. You cannot.

This is not a bug or an oversight. It is the business model. I have argued before that this is a clear example of how technology gets captured: a tool that could have distributed power ends up concentrating it, because the rules that govern it were written by the parties who benefit from concentration. The default settings of the digital world were chosen. They were chosen by the people who profit from them.

The engine that runs on this arrangement has a name — surveillance capitalism — and its logic is straightforward once you see it. Attention is harvested, behaviour is recorded, predictions are manufactured, and those predictions are sold to whoever wants to influence what you do next. The raw material of that entire economy is you. And the raw material is free, because you have been persuaded that it was worthless to begin with.

Why your data is worth almost nothing — and everything

Here is the paradox at the centre of the whole debate, and it is the reason data dignity is harder to deliver than it sounds.

Your data, considered as a single person’s stream of clicks and locations and purchases, is worth very little. By some estimates, the market value of one individual’s data to an advertiser is measured in a small handful of dollars a year — sometimes far less. If a company mailed you a cheque for your personal share, you might not bother cashing it. Taken alone, one person’s behaviour is noise.

But that same data becomes enormously valuable in aggregate. A million people’s search histories reveal what a society wants before it can articulate it. Ten million driving routes reveal where to build. A hundred million labelled photographs can teach a machine to see. The value does not live in any one record; it emerges from the pattern across all of them. This is why the companies that hold data at scale are among the most valuable enterprises in human history, while the people who generated that data hold nothing.

The value does not live in any one record. It emerges from the pattern across all of them — which is exactly why no individual can bargain for it alone.

Sit with what this implies. The worth of your data is real, but it is not individually realisable. You cannot walk up to a platform and negotiate a fair price for your slice, because your slice, in isolation, is nearly worthless — and both sides know it. The value is collective, so any mechanism for capturing it fairly has to be collective too. The moment you accept that, the naive version of data dignity — a tiny payment landing in your account every time you are tracked — falls apart.

Why micropayments are the wrong answer

The instinctive fix, once you decide people should be paid for their data, is a per-click micropayment. Every ad you see, every query you run, every scrap you generate — ping, a fraction of a cent arrives. It sounds fair. It sounds like the market finally pricing what it takes.

It doesn’t work, for several reasons that reinforce each other.

• The amounts are humiliatingly small. Split the value of aggregate data across the millions of people who produced it, and each person’s honest share is pennies. A system that pays you a few cents a month for your entire digital life does not confer dignity. If anything, it insults it — it puts an official, laughably low price on your existence and calls that respect.
• It hands the platform the accounting. Whoever calculates the micropayment controls how much your data is “worth.” You would be trusting the party with every incentive to lowball you to also be the one holding the ledger. That is not a negotiation; it is a receipt.
• It launders the surveillance. A monthly payment, however small, reframes constant tracking as a fair trade you opted into. It doesn’t reduce the surveillance. It buys your consent to it, cheaply, and makes the whole apparatus feel legitimate.
• It deepens inequality. Pay-per-data rewards those who generate the most trackable behaviour, which tends to mean those with the most devices, the most time, the most to spend. The people whose data is most intensively harvested are often the ones least able to refuse the terms.

Micropayments take a collective problem and pretend it is an individual transaction. That is precisely the trick that keeps power where it already sits. The unit is wrong. You are not a lone contractor selling widgets of attention. You are one voice in a chorus whose value only exists because it is a chorus.

Toward collective mechanisms

If the value of data is collective, the response has to be collective. This is where the more serious versions of data dignity point — not to a payment button, but to institutions that can bargain and govern on behalf of many people at once.

A few models are already being explored:

• Data trusts. A trust is a legal structure in which a trustee holds and manages an asset on behalf of beneficiaries, bound by a duty to act in their interest. A data trust would hold the rights to a group’s data and license access to it under strict terms, returning value — money, services, or public benefit — to the members. Crucially, the trustee has a legal obligation to the people, not to the buyer.
• Data unions. If contributing data is a kind of labour, then the tool that fits is the one labour has always used: collective bargaining. A data union pools its members’ data and negotiates as a bloc, the way a trade union negotiates wages. One worker cannot move a factory owner. A hundred thousand, acting together, can. The same asymmetry that makes individual data bargaining hopeless makes collective bargaining potent.
• Public data institutions. Some data is so foundational — maps, health records, mobility patterns, the corpora used to build large models — that it may belong in public hands, governed democratically, like a library or a utility. Rather than being privately enclosed, it would be held as common infrastructure, with access rules set through accountable processes rather than by a licensing department.

None of these is a finished blueprint, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But they share the right instinct. They treat the problem at the scale it actually operates. They put a body with real leverage between the individual and the platform — something a lone person clicking “accept” can never be.

This becomes urgent, not academic, the moment you look at artificial intelligence. The most powerful systems of our era were built on data scraped, bought, and aggregated at civilisational scale, and the question of who owns AI is inseparable from the question of who owned the inputs. When you examine the data AI is trained on, you find the collective output of millions of writers, photographers, coders, and ordinary people who posted, tagged, and typed — none of whom were asked, credited, or compensated. Data dignity, applied here, would say that the people whose lives were used to build these systems have a legitimate claim on what those systems become and who they serve.

The people whose lives were used to build these systems have a legitimate claim on what those systems become — and that claim can only be exercised together.

The objections are real

I don’t want to sell this as tidy, because it isn’t. There are serious objections to data dignity, and the honest version of the argument has to hold them in view.

The first is that treating data as property might entrench the very thing it aims to fix. Once data is a tradeable asset, markets will find a way to make the powerful the biggest owners. Property rights protect whoever already has the most to sell. A regime that turns your data into something you can alienate might just give the platforms a cleaner legal title to what they already take.

The second is that some data should not be for sale at any price. Framing everything as an asset to be licensed can crowd out a stronger claim — that certain kinds of surveillance are simply wrong, and no payment makes them right. Privacy as a human right is a different argument from data as a revenue stream, and the second can quietly undermine the first.

The third is practical and stubborn. Data is not like a barrel of oil. It can be copied infinitely at no cost, its value depends entirely on context, and one person’s data is hopelessly entangled with everyone they know — your contacts, your photos, your messages implicate people who never agreed to anything. Assigning clean ownership to something so leaky and relational may be impossible in practice, however appealing in theory.

And there is a fourth worry, subtler than the rest: that the language of dignity gets captured too. A company can announce a “data dividend,” pay out a few dollars, run the press release, and change nothing structural. The vocabulary of empowerment is easily bolted onto the machinery of extraction. We should watch for that, because it is already happening.

What the idea is really for

So why hold onto data dignity at all, if it is this contested?

Because its deepest contribution is not a payment scheme. It is a shift in how we see. For two decades we have been told that our data is exhaust — worthless, incidental, yours to give away without a second thought. That story is not neutral. It is the story that makes the current arrangement feel natural, even generous, when it is neither. Naming your data as labour, and its value as something collectively produced and therefore collectively owed, cracks that story open.

What follows from the crack is a genuinely open question. It might be trusts. It might be unions. It might be public institutions, or new law, or forms of governance we haven’t invented yet. I don’t think anyone honestly knows which. But the direction is clear enough: away from tiny individual payments that dignify nothing, and toward collective structures with the leverage to change the terms. The value of your data was always going to be realised together, because it was only ever created together.

The data about you is being turned into someone else’s asset as you read this. The question data dignity puts to us is not really whether you should get a cheque. It is whether the people who make the digital economy possible — which is to say, all of us — get any say in what it does, and any share in what it produces. Framed that way, this stops being a question about money and becomes a question about power. Which is, I suspect, exactly why it has been kept so quiet.