Data as a Good

PhD project by Niklas Kirchner

In public discourse and academic literature, data has been widely differently conceptualized and valorized. For example, data is talked of as traces or evidence, as asset, resource, and commodity, and as personal, and sensitive. Indigenous activists have also recently claimed some data as indigenous. My dissertation project investigates how data is conceptualized as different types of goods and which implications this has for understanding claims to distributive (in-)justice in the digital domain. What does it mean that data is personal or a commodity and how do these conceptualizations relate to each other? Is it permissible, for example, for companies to use personal data for economic profit, or would this lead to exploitation or illegitimate appropriation? The philosophical interest is to open the debate to the ambiguities of the labels themselves but also to the limitation of formulating problems by qualifying data as goods. What are we overlooking but also promoting if we pick this level of analysis instead of another one?