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Privacy
A community should have real and effective mechanisms to prevent or limit information collection and use, and to safeguard community information against commercial surveillance or public leaks.
A policy framework · 2025–2026
Your data was
never only
yours.
Every disclosure you make is also a disclosure about your household, your community, and everyone who resembles you. A right you exercise alone cannot protect a thing you produce together.
This framework proposes a Right of Digital Association — held by individuals, exercisable only in concert — and the chartered bodies that would carry it: Data Rights Associations.
0disclosed0revealed
- Disclosed — what you handed over
- Inferred — the rest of your record, deduced
- Household — the people you live and move with
- People like you — matched on shared traits
The argument
Data is co-produced.
When someone sends a DNA sample, they reveal their siblings. When they photograph a birthday, they capture everyone at the table. Aggregated, a single person’s record is valuable precisely because it predicts people who never consented to anything.
Part I — Whose Data? Whose Future?So individual rights cannot fix it.
Consent given one click at a time, hundreds of times a day, against interfaces built to extract it, is not leverage. One person’s data commands almost no bargaining power — and signing it away quietly prices the same terms for everyone connected to them.
Part II — A Paradigm Shift in Tech GovernanceNor can regulation alone.
A statute written from ten thousand feet must pick one answer for everybody. What one community considers a fair trade for a free service, another finds a violation of conscience. Top-down rules cannot let them settle it differently.
Part II — Why top-down regimes fall shortCommunities can bargain. Let them.
Give people a right they exercise together, through associations that answer to members — a church, a union, a profession, a neighbourhood — and the terms stop being dictated and start being negotiated.
How a Data Rights Association works
What a DRA is empowered to hold
Three interests, bargained as a bloc
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Control
A community should have a meaningful say over how its information is used downstream, including whether it is used to build systems contrary to the community’s interests and values.
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Fair value
A community must share fairly in the downstream economic value that its data disclosures help create — often an ongoing stake rather than a one-time payment.
Because these rights are associational, a term of service cannot waive them. See what the statute would do →
This has been done before
American law already knows this move
Three times, Congress found a bargaining asymmetry that individual rights could not cure, and answered it by letting people act as one. Each was controversial. Each is now ordinary.
- 1897Performing rightsCongress created performance rights that individual artists could not defend alone. Collective rights organizations became the mechanism.
- 1922Farm cooperativesThe Capper-Volstead Act let farmers bargain with grain buyers as a bloc rather than one harvest at a time.
- 1935Collective bargainingA right held by individuals, exercisable only in concert — and not signable away in any single employment contract.
- nextAssociational data rightsData Rights Associations, chartered and member-governed, bargaining the terms on which the digital economy may collect and use what their members co-produce.
The full framework
Six parts, 15,223 words
The complete argument, the draft statute, and the working technical precedents that make it feasible today.
Start with the introduction