It’s Time to Tax Companies for Using Our Personal Data
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.
It’s this data brokerage industry that should be the primary, initial focus of the data tax. This industry exists solely to collect our information and sell it as a commodity to retailers, advertisers, marketers, even other data brokerages and government agencies.
It’s this marketplace that traffics in the actual monetary value of our data, and from it we can begin to map just how much that data might be worth overall.
Microlevies like this one have been issued successfully before. Over the last decade, the governments of 10 countries, including Chile, France and Niger, have successfully raised more than 1 billion euros in funding from a tax on airline tickets of €1 to €40 depending on the class of ticket.
Our data is ours, but it also is not ours. We trade it away for so much of our experience on the internet. Money from a data tax could begin to counter this trade imbalance.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/14/business/dealbook/taxing-companies-for-using-our-personal-data.html?_r=0