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Abstract
Personal data spaces, or PDSs, are emerging intermediary services that allow users control over the sharing and use of their data. In this article, the surveillance capitalism model, which describes how businesses employ datafication to create value in the digital economy, is used to contextualize PDSs. Focusing on three PDS services, I analyze the social imaginaries they represent, paying attention to the increased agency over data they offer users. This proposed agency reflects the efforts of PDSs to intervene in, but not counter, surveillance capitalism. While their goal is to intensify datafication by increasing the quality and specificity of data that businesses can employ, their interventions also change the structure of data flows, allowing users to more directly benefit from datafication. PDSs envision their users as data-supplying and benefit-demanding market participants, active subjects in value creation instead of passive objects of data extraction. PDSs view themselves as platform providers that facilitate data exchanges and rely on market mechanisms to ensure beneficial services are developed for users to choose from.
1.Introduction
In the digital economy, value creation relies on datafication (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013): the transformation of aspects of people's lives into quantified data. A stream of research has explored the connections between datafication, surveillance, and monetization of data. For example, van Dijck (2014) discusses how businesses employ data to monitor and monetize behavior online. Exploring power asymmetries related to datafication, Andrejevic (2014) points out the differences in capability between those who collect and mine data and those whom the collection targets. Following similar arguments, Andrejevic and Gates (2014) note the systemically opaque nature of data analytic processes, and Crain (2016) stresses the significance of unilateral control of the conditions of commodification of data.
Zuboff (2015) discusses the evolution of computer mediation from the workplace into the online space and argues that datafication has given rise not only to new opportunities to learn about those whom data concerns, but also to new contests over learning. The pertinent questions have become who can learn, how, and what-and particularly, who decides about these things. Zuboff argues that to understand how the answers to these questions about learning are shaped, the underlying model of value accumulation must be understood. Zuboff calls the institutionalized value accumulation model in...