Individual vs. Collective Conceptions of Urban Platform Data and the Case for Managing City Data as a Commons As legal scholar Salome Viljoen has noted114, our current model of data governance, as well as the leading critiques of that model, all conceive of platform data as an individual, rather collective good: either as “thing-like”—treating data as an individual’s property or labor that can be sold or exchanged through contractual relationships and market logics) or as “person-like” (treating data as an expression or extension of the individual self, and therefore protected by fundamental, inalienable rights to privacy and autonomy) (See Table 8).
114
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Salomé Viljoen, “A Relational Theory of Data Governance,” accessed April 28, 2022, https://www. yalelawjournal.org/feature/a-relational-theory-of-data-governance.
Towards Urban Data Commons? On the Origins and Significance of Platform Data Sharing Mandates
