{"id":4274,"date":"2019-06-06T18:38:40","date_gmt":"2019-06-06T18:38:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/?p=4274"},"modified":"2019-06-06T18:38:40","modified_gmt":"2019-06-06T18:38:40","slug":"could-fair-trade-data-bring-us-closer-to-a-universal-basic-income","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/2019\/06\/06\/could-fair-trade-data-bring-us-closer-to-a-universal-basic-income\/","title":{"rendered":"Could Fair Trade Data Bring Us Closer to a Universal Basic Income?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Human rights are murky in the digital age, but a tweak in how we use data could change\u00a0that.<\/a><\/h2>\n

Almost half a decade ago, I spent nearly two years working in marketing for an iconic American brand. We tracked sales and leads, obsessed over Facebook analytics, and planned events around our customers\u2019 interests. Our information was acquired through a fair transaction\u200a\u2014\u200aa customer purchased a product they wanted or needed and we tracked the sale so we could continue to offer relevant products. We also knew when they had opened our e-newsletters and which links they had clicked. We respected our customers\u2019 privacy and never sold their information to third parties. Everything was pretty straightforward.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Then Big Data changed the landscape forever. Consumers became the product seemingly overnight. Huge corporations suddenly owned the playing field like schoolyard bullies who joined the game whether you wanted them to or not. More importantly, customers no longer received much in return for their transactions besides social feeds filled with targeted advertisements, inflammatory fake news, and clickbait-laden posts.<\/p>\n

But data is not being treated like property, nor is it being regarded in terms of human\u00a0rights.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Musician and entrepreneur\u00a0will.i.am has written<\/a>, \u201cData should be treated like property and people should be fairly compensated for it.\u201d But data is not being treated like property, nor is it being regarded in terms of human rights.<\/p>\n

Investopedia estimates<\/a>\u00a0that Facebook has the potential to generate between $46 million to $92 million from the sales of data\u200a\u2014\u200aa staggering amount considering how little its users receive in return. Some of those sales have notoriously resulted in the undermining of democracy and equality while stripping citizens of privacy and autonomy without any real choice or transparency. In the last half-decade, scandals have ranged from\u00a0Cambridge Analytica<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0digital redlining<\/a>,\u00a0lawsuits alleging circumventions of the Fair Housing Act<\/a>, and\u00a0human experiments on emotional control and contagion through social media manipulation<\/a>. Data brokers have also profited from users\u2019 personal misfortunes. According to the\u00a0Financial Times\u2019 personal data calculator<\/a>, life events like going through a divorce increase the value of a user\u2019s data.<\/p>\n

Big Data\u2019s reach has proved longer than some expected, extending even into America\u2019s more vulnerable communities. Enterprises like Monsanto have begun taking advantage of the unregulated market,\u00a0targeting farmers with controversial experimental data collection programs<\/a>. Because the rules for data collection haven\u2019t been fully established yet in the United States, such programs could have unpredictable consequences for farmers while stripping them of ownership of valuable information about their own farms and crops.<\/p>\n

In terms of digital human rights, the United States has fallen behind in the race.\u00a0The European Union\u2019s GDPR was recently passed<\/a>\u00a0requiring transparency from companies about privacy and data collection across all of the EU nations, while\u00a0smaller countries like Estonia have ensured that sensitive private health data is owned by citizens\u200a\u2014\u200anot corporations<\/a>. Individual states like\u00a0California have attempted to take the lead in digital privacy<\/a>, but other states\u200a\u2014\u200aand the federal government\u200a\u2014\u200ahave yet to catch up, and the question of data ownership has remained largely ignored.<\/p>\n

Experts have argued that a balance needs to be maintained between consumer privacy and market competition in order to keep the tech industry afloat. So what would the world\u200a\u2014\u200aand the market\u200a\u2014\u200alook like if data ownership changed hands? The answer may lie in\u00a0a recent study from Stanford University<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Economics professors Christopher Tonetti and Charles I. Jones considered questions of privacy, efficiency, and competition when creating three simulations to examine how different versions of data ownership might play out in the real world. When they looked at how data is used today, they found a less-than-ideal scenario where privacy concerns were often ignored and data sharing was inefficient. In another simulation banning data sharing entirely, they found a stifled economy. An ideal situation, however, did pan out when they looked at individual data ownership where consumers were given the option to keep some of their data private while selling other data to multiple firms, diversifying the market and allowing citizens to profit from their own data production.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Human rights are murky in the digital age, but a tweak in how we use data could change\u00a0that. Almost half a decade ago, I spent nearly two years working in marketing for an iconic American brand. We tracked sales and leads, obsessed over Facebook analytics, and planned events around our customers\u2019 interests. Our information was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4276,"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4274\/revisions\/4276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dpunion.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}