How we view data is critical to how to regulate its use. In Privacyland right now, the “data as property” argument is bubbling up frequently. In a comprehensive piece for CNET, David Priest argues that “treating your data like property would be terrible .” (Opinion contributor Sarah Jeong argued similarly here in July.) He also offers a potential explanation for Yang’s not answering my question:

Yang’s actual policy suggestions don’t treat data like property. He proposes the rights for you to be informed of data collection and use, to opt out, to be told if a website has data on you, to be “forgotten,” to be informed if your data changes hands, to be informed of data breaches and to download all your data to transfer it elsewhere.

Priest suggests maybe Yang is just using the wrong language. “Yang is correct that we have a claim” to our data, he writes. “The question we should all keep asking and attempting to answer is, ‘How can we make that claim?’”

At One Zero, Will Oremus examines the idea of how much our privacy is really worth and concludes that “it’s probably fruitless to try to pinpoint with a single number the value of privacy.” He suggests that a better frame may be to look at privacy like a human right, which he defines as “something everyone deserves, whether they fully grasp its value or not.”

Or how about another metaphor? A number of data dividend advocates argue that “data is the new oil,” meaning that tech companies extract our personal information, much like oil companies extract the natural resource from the ground. Their data dividend idea is somewhat based on Alaska’s Permanent Fund, which pays out a yearly sum ($1,606 in 2019) to eligible state residents based on oil revenues. In our interview, Yang used this phrase, too.

I think “data is the new oil” misses the point slightly. But the environmental metaphor — especially pollution — is a helpful model. In an interview, a former Federal Trade Commission chief technology officer, Ashkan Soltani, suggested a solution for data similar to a carbon tax for clean air. His analogy of choice was logging:

A long time ago logging entities discovered and harvested a resource at scale before anyone else and one of their advantages was the ability to pollute. But it was only after some time that people said, “wait, that’s my land, too” and mandated that they either needed to be able to restrict the ability to use it or have some sort of retribution in the form of a tax or carbon credit.

Pollution is also a handy way to think about why our data ought to be kept safe by default. As Oremus put it, “It’s a bit like being asked how much you’d be willing to pay for your drinking water to be kept poison-free.”

No wonder we’re all fed up.

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Equifax’s Latest 🤦

I’ve devoted two of these columns to the Equifax data breach settlement — why it’s a raw deal and what you could do in protest. But I hadn’t really understood just how egregious the company’s data security practices were until last Friday, when Jane Lytvynenko at BuzzFeed News first shared some snippets from the class-action suit from last January.

I went through the whole document, which alleges that Equifax “failed to take some of the most basic precautions to protect its computer systems from hackers.”