Privatising Personal Identity – Part Three – Power Through Dispersed Knowledge

In the third of a series of articles, political economist Eben Wilson (St Andrews) explores how law can support economic principle in the world of big data to help protect consumers. The importance of seeing our identity as a property leads to a proposal for a new statutory institutional form.

Power Through Dispersed Knowledge

In my previous articles I showed that data has value but that its value as a property is not well defined or controlled. Present data regulation does not meld well with economic principles that promote the productive use of assets in a way that satisfies or protects consumers. There is also a market power imbalance between consumers and digital platform owners.