A Relational Theory of Data Governance
Summary
Argues that data’s value and harms are relational and population-level. Data about one person is used to make inferences about others like them. Dominant legal approaches, whether privacy and consent or data as personal property, treat data as individual, so they cannot address these collective harms. Viljoen proposes democratic data governance: institutions that let the people affected by data collectively decide how it is used.
Why it’s useful here
- The legal and theoretical case for data cooperatives and community data governance, the second of Griziotti’s three directions.
- Explains why individual “consent” and self-hosting alone don’t solve the problem. Data harms are collective, so the governance has to be too.
- Pairs naturally with IAD and GKC: who are the participants in a data relation, and what rules should govern it?
Key ideas
- Vertical (individual ↔ collector) vs. horizontal (person ↔ others like them) data relations
- Critique of propertarian and dignitarian (consent/privacy) data governance
- Data as a democratic medium; collective institutions for data governance
Related
- frischmann-madison-strandburg-2014-governing-knowledge-commons.md
- griziotti-2026-how-to-survive-artificial-intelligence.md