Andrew Yang Proposes Digital Data Should Be Treated Like A Property Right

U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang is the latest Democratic contestant with a plan for changing the nation’s data privacy laws, suggesting that online data should be considered as a property right.

Today, Yang’s 2020 campaign published a new policy proposal for how personal data should be collected and used by companies for advertising and other purposes. The website outlines a variety of rights including letting consumers know what data is collected about them, how it will be used, and when the data “changes hands.” Other proposals include letting consumers opt out of having their data collected, requiring companies to delete data if a consumer wants it removed, creating a standardized way to download data in a transferable format, and informing people of data breaches in a “timely manner.”

“Our data is ours - or it should be,” Yang, a former lawyer and entrepreneur, wrote on Twitter this morning while announcing the proposal. “At this point our data is more valuable than oil. If anyone benefits from our data it should be us. I would make data a property right that each of us shares.”

Yang isn’t the first Democratic candidate to suggest comprehensive changes to U.S. data privacy laws. Last year and again this year, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, introduced the Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act, which would provide added transparency and controls for how data is collected and used by companies and how consumers would be informed of any data breaches. And in March, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, rolled out her own plan to regulate tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple.

So far, no federal legislation has gained traction. However, at the state level, the California Consumer Privacy Act—which will implement many of the same types of requirements as Yang proposes—is set to go into effect in January 2020. Industry trade groups have said they want data privacy legislation passed at the federal level to avoid forcing companies to have to comply with data laws at the state level.

Tech companies including Google and Facebook have also publicly expressed a preference for federal legislation. However, leaked audio recordings of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg–acquired and published today by The Verge–revealed that Facebook would be willing to pick a legal battle with Warren.

“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies,” Zuckerberg said in a meeting with Facebook employees in July, according to The Verge. “... if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. ... But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight."

Responding today on Twitter, Warren linked to her own policy, adding that she’s “not afraid to hold Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon accountable.”

“We have to fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy,” she wrote in a separate tweet a few hours later.