97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know

Chapter 28. Perceptions of Personal Data

Irina Raicu

Director, Internet Ethics Program, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

Do we own our personal data? If we don’t, who does? Or should we ask, rather, whether it’s appropriate to think of personal data as a commodity in the first place?

In an article titled “Selling Your Bulk Online Data Really Means Selling Your Autonomy,” Evgeny Morozov argues that

[w]e shouldn’t unquestionably accept the argument that personal data is just like any other commodity and that most of our digital problems would disappear if only, instead of gigantic data monopolists like Google and Facebook, we had an army of smaller data entrepreneurs. We don’t let people practice their right to autonomy in order to surrender that very right by selling themselves into slavery. Why make an exception for those who want to sell a slice of their intellect and privacy rather than their bodies?¹

Striking a similar note in a presentation titled “On Personal Data, Forgiveness, and the ‘Right to Be Forgotten,’” the philosopher Luciano Floridi reflects that

[t]here are roughly two ways of looking at personal data. One is in terms of the philosophy of economics. Your data are yours as in “My data, my house, my car: I own it...and if you trespass, you are trespassing the boundaries of my property.”...Then there’s another way of looking at personal information, that’s got ...