The data tax could be a minor cost, less than 1 percent of the revenue companies earn from selling our personal data, spread out over an entire industry. Individually, no company’s bottom line would substantially suffer; collectively, the tax would pull money back to the public, from an industry profiting from material and labor that is, at its very core, our own.

This idea is not new. It is, essentially, a sales tax, among the oldest taxes that exist, but it hasn’t been done because assigning a fixed monetary value to our data can be very difficult. For a lot of internet businesses, our personal data either primarily flows through the business or remains locked within.

The flow-through type of business is an internet provider, like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon; the latter is a platform provider, like Facebook or Twitter. Google mostly makes platforms, like its search function and Gmail, but it also lays fiber-optic cable, providing the internet to some municipalities. The company also is making self-driving cars.

It’s perhaps easiest to consider your data as something real and physical, like a car, which, in a sense, it is. It moves around a real, physical infrastructure, owned and operated by the internet providers, and the information is also stored — or parked — on millions of hard drives in vast buildings in usually cold climes. These are owned and operated by the platform makers, including Amazon, which has a very lucrative arm that does nothing but rent out its server space.

When you use the internet, your information travels through the providers’ pipes (roads) and into and out of the platform makers’ servers (parking lots). For the most part, the platform makers rely on your data to improve their products. Google uses its immense trove of real human searches to make better artificial intelligence like transcriptions, translations and self-driving cars.