Data Reuse and its Impacts on Digital Labour Platforms

Abstract

Data marketising through data reuse is a fast-going contemporary commercial phenomenon. This paper builds on our earlier work exploring the regulation of platform economies, and the nature of data use by platform operators through worker surveillance and transaction harvesting. In enhancing our commitment to digital self-determination, this paper reveals how clandestine data reuse creates power asymmetries, feeding off information deficits, that endanger the integrity of personal data and marginalise the interest of data subjects and their communities. In response to data reuse, we chart several open access initiatives designed to promote public good. In addition, the organisation of gig labour is providing a mechanism whereby vulnerable data subjects can assert their data management priorities and thereby rebalance the market in persona/business data trade. As laudable as these initiatives may be, they are insufficient to redress that balance required through digital self-determination without awareness and information campaigns for reminding data subjects and their communities of the challenges posed through data reuse and the options that will reposition data management considerations back to data subjects, ensuring responsible and accountable reuse regimes.

Keywords: Data reuse, data marketing, platform economies, gig workers, open access, information deficits, power asymmetries, public awareness, digital self-determination