The data that everyday consumers produce is becoming more andmore important to the economy. Yet, as this data imbues techcorporations with tremendous wealth and power, we, the dataproducers, have no say as to how our data is collected or how it isused. The reign of data analytics to pursue profit above all else has ledto a conflagration of data harms perpetuated against alreadymarginalized groups. What is needed in this moment is a tool thatequalizes the bargaining power between platforms and users, to giveconsumers meaningful control over the data they produce. In the early20th century, labor organizers called for industrial democracy: theability for workers to have substantial say over the conditions of theirlabor. For today’s datafied information economy, this Note insteadcalls for the need for informational democracy: the ability ofconsumers, as data producers, to exert meaningful control over thedata that their lives engender.
This Note advocates for data unions as one such tool to achieveinformational democracy. It conceptualizes data unions asdemocratically elected organizations that aggregate data to createcollective bargaining units to negotiate with platforms as to alloweduses for data. First, the Note gives an overview of how today’seconomy creates both value and harm out of data processing. Then, itargues that due to the specific nature of this value and harm creation,data unions are uniquely situated regulatory tools that can enactmeaningful consumer control.