Data Unions: The Need for Informational Democracy

The data that everyday consumers produce is becoming more and more important to the economy. Yet, as this data imbues tech corporations with tremendous wealth and power, we, the data producers, have no say as to how our data is collected or how it is used. The reign of data analytics to pursue profit above all else has led to a conflagration of data harms perpetuated against already marginalized groups. What is needed in this moment is a tool that equalizes the bargaining power between platforms and users, to give consumers meaningful control over the data they produce. In the early 20th century, labor organizers called for industrial democracy: the ability for workers to have substantial say over the conditions of their labor. For today’s datafied information economy, this Note instead calls for the need for informational democracy: the ability of consumers, as data producers, to exert meaningful control over the data that their lives engender. This Note advocates for data unions as one such tool to achieve informational democracy. It conceptualizes data unions as democratically elected organizations that aggregate data to create collective bargaining units to negotiate with platforms as to allowed uses for data. First, the Note gives an overview of how today’s economy creates both value and harm out of data processing. Then, it argues that due to the specific nature of this value and harm creation, data unions are uniquely situated regulatory tools that can enact meaningful consumer control. Copyright © 2023 Eli Freedman.