Towards Rawlsian ‘property-owning democracy’ through personal data platform cooperatives

ABSTRACT

This paper supports the personal data platform cooperative as a means of bringing about John Rawls’s favoured institutional realisation of a just society, the property-owning democracy. It describes personal data platform cooperatives and applies Rawls’s political philosophy to analyse the institutional forms of a just society in relation to the economic power deriving from aggregating personal data. It argues that a society involving a significant number of personal data platform cooperatives will be more suitable to realising Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• justice
• cooperatives
• equality of opportunity
• John Rawls

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank John Tasioulas and Francis Cheneval for extended discussions of the idea of Property-Owning Democracy and Ian Grant for language improvements and further comments on the paper

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by Michele Loi.

Ernst Hafen is President of the MIDATA Cooperative. Paul-Olivier Dehaye is director of Geneva-based NGO PersonalData.IO. Both the MIDATA Cooperative and PersonalData.IO are not for profit entities with a stake in the data economy.

Notes

1. Note that one may argue that the current data economy is unjust for other reasons, e.g., because it is discriminatory, opaque, monopolistic, exploitative, and manipulative (Custers et al., 2012; Pasquale, 2015). In this essay we choose to explore a particular Rawlsian, or predistributive, standpoint, as we believe it conceptualizes the existing injustice in a new light. Moreover, we do not argue that the PDPC can remove all forms of injustice in the data economy; the broader issues of injustice in the data economy deserve an analysis that would exceed the size of a journal article.

2. One important difference between the Rawlsian argument and the predistribution argument is that the former appeals to principles, while the latter is couched in pragmatic language. Predistribution theorists emphasise that, while it may be theoretically possible to achieve a synthesis of equality and efficiency through fair taxation and redistribution, such policies encounter strong resistance in practice. These theorists argue that an alternative approach – an initial redistribution of assets that otherwise contribute to generate highly unequal income over time – is at least worth exploring, as it may face less resistance.

3. The role of political philosophy in the debate has been developing while this paper was under review. See, for instance, Ferretti (2020), who considers the virtues of the platform cooperative model more generally and briefly touches on redistributing the benefits deriving from the cooperative’s access to aggregate data. Our proposal falls fully within the ‘organizational strategy’ that Ferretti describes. In his defense of this strategy, Feretti also draws on the work of Martin O’Neill (2009) concerning the idea of a Rawlsian POD. See also Carballa Smichowski (2016) for an alternative policy proposal to create a data commons controlled by multi-stakeholder councils.

4. Recital 26 of the GDPR holds that ‘To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used […], account should be taken of all objective factors, such as the costs of and the amount of time required for identification, taking into consideration the available technology at the time of the processing and technological developments.’

5. In the current data economy, collecting data in order to predict and influence the (for now, mainly commercial) behaviour of internet users is for most companies the main business model, but it hides behind the appearance of being merely incidental.

6. It might be objected that Google may soon face serious competition by Bing, the Microsoft-powered search engine. This is the kind of exception that proves the rule: few companies are able to sustain the huge losses that Microsoft suffered for several years in order to get a chance to compete with Google, and even in this case, the possibility of competition only exists because Microsoft can exploit its dominance in the operating systems market (Cyran, n.d.).

7. This asymmetric relationship between those who collect, store and mine data and their targets is sometimes referred to as the ‘big data divide’ (Andrejevic, 2014).

8. Given the inability, for the individual user, to exploit the economies of scale (‘super-additive insights’) of the data economy, described towards the end of section 3. The data from a single individual is just a drop in the ocean and that converts into a relatively weak economic position.

9. This is the principle requiring that individuals with similar talents and abilities should have the same chances of obtaining positions of authority and responsibility in society (Rawls, 1999, p. 72).

10. This is the principle that inequality should be justified insofar as it is necessary to improve the conditions of the least advantaged citizens. If a more equal distribution is possible that does not worsen conditions for the least advantaged citizens, the existing level of inequality is unjust (Rawls, 1999, p. 72).

11. See also Analyse and Kritik, 35(1), special issue on property-owning democracy, with essays from Samuel Freeman, Albert Waele, John E. Roemer, Martin Beckstein, Gavin Kerr, Ivo Walliman-Heimer, Tilo Wesche, Jan Narveson, Jahel Queralt, Michael G. Festl, Andrew Watson, Carina Fourie, Michael Schefczyk, Fabian Schuppert, Emilio Marti, Thad Williamson, Francis Cheneval, edited by Christoph Laszlo and Francis Cheneval (Cheneval & Laszlo, 2013).

12. The gap in question here is the gap between the children of the wealthy, socially networked, and cultured, and the children of the economically, socially, and culturally disadvantaged.

13. In the Rawlsian tradition, health has been identified as such a basic good (Daniels, 1981).

14. The relevance of opportunities provided by control over data assets in the context of political competition relates to the first principle of justice: the ‘equal liberty’ principle. Rawls requires the basic structure of society to satisfy the fair value of political liberties, which is formally analogous to fair equality of opportunity, requiring fair opportunities to influence the political process (Rawls, 1999, p. 197).

15. A rival good is a type of good that may only be possessed or consumed by a single user.

16. However, Art. 20 fails to ensure user-centricity, as it is not clear that the user will be able to decide, for example, to transfer only a specified portion of his or her personal data.

17. An economic regime in which PDPCs play a significant role thus may arise by virtue of combining two social processes. On the one hand, data subjects should exercise their rights to obtain a copy of their data. On the other hand, individuals with a socially-oriented entrepreneurial mindset should be willing to initiate PDPCs as founders and initial managers, building the infrastructure that enables the collection of personal data by large groups of citizens. University-funded scholars could also play a role by lending their skills to the execution of such projects. We believe that incentives for highly skilled individuals to take this role should be not only economic but also moral. Economic incentives are not excluded a priori, since, just like a company, a PDPC may assign to its managers a wage commensurate to their skills once it becomes profitable. However, thanks to the moral and idealistic appeal of the project, one may hope that the economic benefit necessary to motivate highly skilled individuals would be less than what large internet corporations need to spend to attract comparable talent.

18. Notice that control by democratic general assembly is not meant to suggest that members should make difficult decisions about technology and ethics without external aid. A cooperative may, for example, hire ethical and technology experts and take their suggestions into account before voting on specific proposals. Full-time executives are needed to both implement assembly’s decisions in practice and submit concrete, feasible proposals to the general assembly’s vote. However, the final authority for morally important and self-defining choices rests in the hands of the general assembly, where every member has one vote.

19. Still, unequal chances between persons with different levels of personal interest in the data economy are unavoidable. However, this irrelevant from the standpoint of FEO, since inequalities between persons with different motivations do not count as FEO violations.

20. This claim appeals to Rawls’s FEO principle for the economic aspect and to the principle of the fair value of the political liberties (see footnote 14) for the political aspect.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michele Loi

Michele Loi is a political philosopher by training, Senior Researcher at the Digital Society Initiative of the University of Zurich. His research interest is the ethics of big data, in particular medical data, and algorithms. Michele Loi is the author of ‘Giustizia e Genetica’ and has published widely, mostly in applied ethics journals (e.g., Journal Of Applied Philosophy, Bioethics, Ethics And Information Technology, Philosophy And Technology). He wrote the first draft of the paper and all revisions.

Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Paul-Olivier Dehaye is a mathematician, director of Geneva-based NGO PersonalData.IO, focused on personal data rights. He provided feedback and helped revising the paper. podehaye

Ernst Hafen

Ernst Hafen is Deputy head of Institute for Molecular Systems Biology and President of the MIDATA Cooperative. Ernst Hafen is the author of more than two hundreds contributions in the field of genetics and systems biology. He is among the pioneers of the data cooperative movement and contributed ideas and text to different sections of this paper. ehafef