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Every time you scroll through a feed, tap “accept” on a cookie banner, or type a search query, you are producing something. You are generating data. Clicks, locations, preferences, habits, relationships, fears, desires. All of it captured, stored, processed, and sold. The question nobody seems to settle is whether any of that belongs to you.
Lawyers argue about it. Regulators draft frameworks around it. Tech companies spend billions lobbying to keep it ambiguous. But a philosopher who died in 1704, long before anyone imagined a smartphone, may have already answered the question. His name was John Locke, and his theory of property is so embedded in Western legal thought that you have probably absorbed it without knowing where it came from.
The argument is elegant and, once you see it applied to data, almost uncomfortably clear.
Locke’s Big Idea in Plain Language
In 1689, Locke published his Second Treatise of Government. Among many ideas in that book, one stands out for its lasting influence: the labor theory of property.
The logic runs like this. The natural world belongs to everyone in common. Nobody owns the ocean or the forest or the minerals underground, at least not initially. But the moment you mix your labor with something from that common stock, you make it yours. You pick an apple from a tree in the commons, and the act of picking it, of applying your effort, transforms it from shared resource to private property. You do not need anyone’s permission. You do not need a contract. The labor itself creates the ownership.
This was radical in the 17th century because it grounded ownership not in royal decree or divine right, but in individual effort. You own things because you worked for them. That was the core insight, and it reshaped everything from constitutional law to the American Revolution.
Now apply that same logic to data.
You Are the One Doing the Labor
When you browse the internet, you are not passive. You are making choices. You are clicking one link instead of another. You are writing search queries that reflect what you are curious about, worried about, interested in. You are composing emails, uploading photos, sharing your location, leaving reviews, reacting to posts. Every one of those actions requires effort. Small effort, sure. But effort nonetheless.
Locke did not say the labor had to be backbreaking. He said it had to be yours.
And the data that results from your digital activity is not raw material sitting in nature waiting to be claimed. It is produced by your actions, your decisions, your attention. By Locke’s reasoning, it should be your property.
This is where things get interesting, because the companies collecting your data have a very different story to tell.
The Platform’s Counterargument
Tech companies would say, and do say, something like this: “We built the infrastructure. We created the platform. We wrote the code. Without our servers, our apps, our networks, none of that data would exist. The data is a product of our system, not just your actions.”
This is not a frivolous argument. Locke himself acknowledged that property has limits. You cannot claim more than you can use. You cannot let things spoil. And arguably, you cannot claim ownership of something that required someone else’s tools, land, and labor to produce.
Think of it like farming on someone else’s field. If you plant seeds and tend crops on land that belongs to another person, who owns the harvest? The answer has never been simple, even in Locke’s time. There is a reason sharecropping arrangements existed for centuries. The relationship between the laborer and the owner of the means of production is always contested.
But here is the problem with the tech industry’s version of this argument. The platforms did not invite you onto their land out of generosity. They built their fields specifically to attract your labor. The entire business model depends on you showing up and doing the work of producing data. Without users generating content, clicks, attention, and behavioral signals, the platform is an empty field. Worth nothing.
So the relationship is not really like a generous landowner letting you farm. It is more like a landowner who builds a farm, recruits thousands of workers, pays them nothing, claims everything they grow, and then sells it at enormous profit.
Locke would have had some thoughts about that arrangement.
The Enclosure Problem
There is a historical parallel here that makes the data economy feel less novel and more like a very old pattern repeating itself.
In England, from roughly the 15th to the 19th century, common lands were gradually fenced off and privatized through a process called enclosure. Land that had been used collectively by villagers for grazing, farming, and gathering was claimed by wealthy landowners, often with the backing of Parliament. The people who had depended on those commons were displaced. Many became wage laborers in the new industrial economy, working in factories owned by the same class of people who had taken the land.
The digital economy has followed a strikingly similar arc. The early internet was something like a commons. Open protocols, shared information, collaborative spaces. Then platforms arrived and enclosed that commons. They built walls around the digital spaces where people gathered, monetized the activity inside those walls, and turned users into a source of raw material.
Your data is the new crop. The platform is the new enclosure. And just like the English peasants who lost access to common land, you have been cut off from the value your own labor produces.
Locke was writing partly in response to enclosure. His labor theory was, among other things, an attempt to establish that ordinary people had natural rights to property that could not be overridden by the powerful. The irony of using his framework to analyze the data economy is that the problem he was trying to solve has simply changed its form.
What “Ownership” Actually Means for Data
Even if you accept the Lockean argument that your data is your property, a practical problem remains. What does ownership of data actually look like?
Physical property is easy to understand. You own a house. You can lock the door. You can sell it. You can refuse to let people inside. The boundaries are clear.
Data is different. It can be copied infinitely at zero cost. It can be combined with other data to create new information that did not exist before. Your location data alone might not be very valuable, but combined with the location data of millions of other people, it becomes a gold mine for advertisers, urban planners, and intelligence agencies.
So when we say you should own your data, do we mean you should be able to delete it? Sell it? License it? Prevent it from being combined with other datasets? All of these? The concept of ownership gets slippery when the thing being owned does not behave like a physical object.
This is a real challenge, but it is not a reason to abandon the ownership framework. It is a reason to develop it further. After all, intellectual property already handles some of these problems. Copyright, patents, and trade secrets are all forms of ownership applied to intangible things. They are imperfect, messy, and constantly debated. But they exist because society decided that people who create intangible value deserve some control over it.
The same principle should apply to data. The fact that it is complicated does not mean it is wrong.
The Consent Problem Locke Would Have Recognized
Locke was also deeply concerned with consent. His political philosophy rested on the idea that legitimate government requires the consent of the governed. You cannot be subject to authority you did not agree to.
Now think about those terms of service agreements you click through without reading. They are often thousands of words long, written in legal language designed to be comprehensive rather than comprehensible, and presented on a take it or leave it basis. You either agree to everything or you do not get to use the service. There is no negotiation. There is no middle ground.
Locke would not have recognized this as meaningful consent. For consent to be real, it has to be informed, voluntary, and specific. Clicking “I agree” on a document you have not read, cannot realistically understand, and have no power to change does not meet any of those criteria.
This is not just a philosophical point. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was built partly on the idea that consent must be genuine. It requires that consent be freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous. That framework owes more to Locke’s thinking than most people realize.
But even GDPR does not go as far as Locke’s logic would suggest. It treats data protection as a matter of privacy rights, not property rights. There is a difference. Privacy says you have the right to control who sees your information. Property says you own it and can profit from it. The distinction matters enormously.
The Counterintuitive Angle: Maybe You Should Not Own Your Data
Here is where it gets genuinely complicated. Some might argue that treating data as property could actually make things worse.
The reasoning goes like this. If your data is your property, then you should be able to sell it. And if you can sell it, then companies will simply buy it. Since most individuals would sell their data cheaply (because each person’s data is not worth much on its own), the end result might be the same as today, except now the extraction is legitimized. Companies would point to the transaction and say, “We bought it fair and square.”
This is the problem with applying property rights in a context of massive power imbalance. When one side of a negotiation is a trillion dollar corporation with teams of lawyers and data scientists, and the other side is a single person who just wants to check their email, the “voluntary exchange” is not really voluntary in any meaningful sense.
Locke himself acknowledged something like this. His theory included a proviso: you can take from the commons, but only if there is “enough and as good” left for others. This was supposed to prevent anyone from monopolizing shared resources. The tech giants have arguably violated this proviso on a grand scale. They have not left enough and as good for others. They have taken nearly everything.
So perhaps the answer is not individual property rights over data, but collective governance. Something closer to the original commons that Locke was writing about, where resources are managed collectively for mutual benefit rather than privatized for individual gain.
What Game Theory Adds to the Picture
There is another lens worth applying here, one that Locke did not have but that reinforces his concerns. Game theory, the study of strategic decision making, reveals why individual data ownership is so hard to make work in practice.
The data economy is essentially a prisoners dilemma at massive scale. If everyone collectively refused to share data without fair compensation, platforms would have to pay. But each individual has an incentive to defect from that collective action, because giving up your data costs you almost nothing in the moment and gives you access to a service you want. The cost is distributed and invisible. The benefit is immediate and tangible.
This is why “just stop using the platform” is not a real solution. It is the equivalent of telling one farmer to stop selling grain to the monopoly buyer. Individual refusal changes nothing. Only collective action or structural regulation can alter the dynamic.
Locke lived before game theory was formalized, but he understood the underlying problem. That is why he did not rely solely on individual rights. He also argued for a social contract, a collective agreement to establish rules that protect everyone. The data economy desperately needs that kind of structural solution.
Where Does This Leave Us?
Locke’s labor theory of property, applied to data, generates a clear intuition: if you produced it, you should own it. That intuition is powerful. It is also insufficient on its own. Data is not an apple picked from a tree. It exists in a web of relationships, infrastructure, and collective action problems that Locke could not have anticipated.
But the philosophical foundation he laid remains relevant. The idea that labor creates entitlement. The insistence on genuine consent. The warning against unlimited accumulation. The call for a social contract that protects the many from the few. All of these ideas speak directly to the data economy’s deepest problems.
The tech industry has spent two decades treating your data as a free resource, something to be extracted, refined, and sold without owing you anything in return. Locke’s framework suggests that this was never legitimate. Your labor, however small, created something of value. And a system that takes that value without your informed consent and without fair compensation is not an innovation. It is an old injustice dressed in new clothing.
Three hundred years ago, a philosopher argued that you own what you produce. We have not yet built an economy that respects that principle. But the argument has not weakened with time. If anything, it has gotten stronger. The question is whether we will act on it, or continue clicking “I agree” on terms we never read, surrendering what is ours to systems that were designed, from the very beginning, to make sure we never asked.
