Property-based and data-portability arguments for privacy have limits and alternatives
Evidence
We do not therefore deny that property-based arguments (for example, legal fictions of ownership) can be developed that might support privacy and autonomy; for an interesting US argument along these lines, see Fairfield, Owned. There are also proposals for developing, even within the big-tech industry, some form of personal data portability; see the Data Transfer Project sponsored by Google, Micro soft, and Twitter, at https://datatransferproject.dev and http://dataportability.org. See also Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for a new web infrastructure that would support data portability: https://solid.inrupt.com. But for caution against this type of argument, see Gurumurthy and Vasudevan, “Societal Need.”
— Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 1101
Categorization
QUESTION: The authors flag Gurumurthy and Vasudevan for caution against property/portability arguments but don’t summarize why — worth chasing their critique of data portability as a fix.
XREF: Data portability proposals (Data Transfer Project, Solid) connect to the attention/platform economy and ‘data colonialism’ frame — the rival school the reader is mapping. — connects to: General data-protection frameworks cannot challenge extractive data economies. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 555; State-mandated privacy standards coexist with mass state data access. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 557; Automated data environments override mutual expectations and unsettle liberal privacy — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 560 (+3 more)