It’s telling that, at a time when disunity supposedly defines the American political landscape, there’s at least one issue the vast majority of Americans agree on: the need to bring some balance back to our digital lives.

Google, which recently acquired Fitbit, has created an $850bn business out of our likes, dislikes, photos, tastes, locations, purchases and midnight wonderings. Now, with Fitbit’s data, a powerful tech company will also know our sleep cycles, exercise habits and heartbeats – in real time. For the billions of us who use Google products, the situation is getting unnerving.

Technology’s impact on our economic, political, even personal lives is so conspicuously outsized, so staggeringly unregulated, that even during the current political storm over Iran and impeachment it is clear: It is time for a digital bill of rights.

How do we get there? We already have the hard part – the popular will. A recent poll showed that two-thirds of Americans agree that big technology companies need to be regulated and, if necessary, broken up. Even policymakers agree: 47 out of 50 attorneys general in the United States are currently investigating Facebook, which harvests the data of at least 228 million Americans, for anti-trust violations.

Big tech has been able to extract a $4tn industry from our personal data by designing systems that direct the flow of data and profit away from us and toward the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the history of the world. These companies may brand themselves as politically neutral, but most are in close relationships with the US government, whether via contracts with the military or Ice, in allowing government surveillance programs to access their users’ data, or in serving as one of the biggest lobbyist forces in Washington.

How did these companies become so powerful? By monitoring us, all the while leaving us in the dark about how or when this surveillance takes place, how invasive it really is, and how the data it gathers is used. Yes, Amazon, Google and Facebook have provided services that many of us find to be efficient, useful and enjoyable. But they are watching us even after we choose to close our accounts and stop using their services – and sometimes even if we’ve never created an account with them at all.

Apple, despite branding itself as a pro-privacy company, recently admitted that it systematically recorded and monitored Siri conversations, just like its competitors, Amazon and Google, do with their virtual assistants. The recordings included “accidental” activations of the software, which captured conversations between doctors and their patients, drug deals and sexual encounters. Apple also has the fingerprints and retina scans of millions, data amassed via the “conveniences” offered by iPhones. We’d all like to believe that these biomarkers are used only to secure our phones but, currently, we don’t have a right to know if it this is the whole story or not.

While tech companies like to organize their stories about themselves around inventors, designers and “ideas men” like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, we should remember that their platforms and services are built upon the data we contribute and a resource we all paid for: the internet itself. The internet was originally funded by US taxpayers. We made the internet possible, so why are we the ones bearing all the painful costs? Just as Big Pharma has monetized publicly-funded science research for its own private benefit, big tech rakes in billions of dollars by a tried and true model that we see with multinational corporations: privatize the profits while socializing the costs.

Consider the elections of recent years. Using data brokers, tech companies buy and sell the data they have collected about us to businesses, governments and shady third parties – like Cambridge Analytica or the Russian government – who can then create tailor-made programs of manipulation based on AI-fueled psychological predictions of who you are and how you think. This manipulation can target your political behavior, your consumer behavior or any other kind of behavior – and you may never have a clue what’s happening.

It isn’t the job of private companies to weigh the costs to our democracy of polarizing voters, or of trapping their attention in online labyrinths of misinformation and conspiracy. By definition, they only serve themselves. But this is precisely why the digital bill of rights must start by demanding that tech companies give us reasonable levers of control and oversight. Journalists and public oversight committees need the power to help design these technologies, and the right to continuously audit them.

Right now, we are the product being sold online; corporations fill their coffers based on their ability to monitor and manipulate us, all without paying us a cent. We can do way better with just a little imagination and resolve. Consider how innovations in tech can benefit us all if the Ubers or Airbnbs of tomorrow were at least partially owned by their workers and drivers, as 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has called for in his corporate accountability plans.

Perhaps worst of all, if we don’t intervene now the biases and profound inequalities of our world today will become invisibly “baked in” to the technologies that define the future, skewing the technologization of our world to discriminate against people who are already racially, sexually, geographically and economically marginalized.

For example, courtrooms across the nation already use a system called Compas, which is supposed to determine algorithmically how likely a person is to commit a crime in the future. In one memorable case, reported by ProPublica, the system concluded that an underage black girl who had ridden, and then abandoned, a scooter left on the street was more likely to commit a future crime than a white man convicted of felony armed robbery.

This kind of algorithmic discrimination is unsurprising given the differences between those who build technology (white and Asian males) and those influenced by it (everyone). Imagine, though, if a digital bill of rights gave users, workers and local communities power over this process. What would the world look like if Black Lives Matter had a hand in designing and implementing the software used in policing or courtroom sentencing?

The same applies to data collection. What if, as we navigated around the web, typing into the privately owned search boxes of Amazon and Google, we could opt out of being monitored? Or opt in, and be paid on the spot for the data our search provided? What if we were actually told what these corporations know about us, in full?

“Geniuses” in Silicon Valley have technologized the relationships between us and our transportation, our loved ones, work, news and hobbies. But our data – squeezed out of everything about us that is human, creative and full of life – can’t be created in a lab. It is ours. That’s why it’s time for a digital bill of rights - a ‘new deal for data’ that can restore balance to the tech world and ensure that our data work for us all, based on values we agree on.