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Identity Is Not Property to Be Owned, but Personhood Expressed Through Relations

1. Territory / Focus Summary

Core Insight: Today’s “data ownership” narrative—promising users control through property rights—is a trap. It extends the broken ad-tech model to all facets of digital identity, rebranding surveillance capitalism as empowerment. Property law treats identity as ownable, transferable commodity, inviting the very surveillance capitalism and self-commodification we critique in social media. Property law constitutes foundational error for identity systems because it systematically fails in three ways: Commodification (identity becomes extractable resource for surveillance capitalism), Alienability (selling yourself piece by piece destroys dignity and creates exploitative markets), Systemic Bias (property law encodes historical injustices from slavery’s racial property regimes to exclusionary ownership models cementing inequality). Property frameworks don’t just fail to protect individuals—they actively harm by legitimizing extraction as voluntary exchange. Drawing on work by Elizabeth Renieris, Margaret Radin, Cheryl Harris, Julie Cohen, Nadezhda Purtova, and Helen Nissenbaum, this lens treats “data ownership” not as a fix for surveillance capitalism but as its extension into identity.

Example: “Data ownership” framing appears empowering but fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Property law doesn’t protect individuals from surveillance capitalism—it enables surveillance capitalism by legitimizing identity as tradeable commodity. Facebook doesn’t steal your data; you “agree” to license it through property-framed terms-of-service. Google doesn’t trespass; you grant access via consent-as-property-transfer. Data brokers don’t violate ownership; they purchase from “owners” (users clicking “accept” without comprehension). Property law provides legal infrastructure for systematic surveillance rebranded as voluntary transactions. When SSI advocates frame self-sovereign identity as “users owning their data” or “property rights in credentials,” they inadvertently legitimize extraction. Atomized individuals negotiating with institutional actors in asymmetric markets inevitably lose. Property doesn’t prevent exploitation—it creates legal infrastructure for systematic extraction masquerading as voluntary exchange.

2. Relationship to Other Lenses

This lens explains why property law is the wrong foundation for digital identity. Several other lenses directly address the harms property frameworks create or supply the alternatives that replace property thinking:

  • Principal Authority
    The primary alternative to property frameworks. Instead of treating identity as something to own or transfer, Principal Authority grounds SSI in agency law: revocable delegation, duties of care, and enforceable fiduciary responsibility.

  • Irreducible Person
    Provides the dignity foundation for rejecting commodification. Anti-Property shows how property frameworks turn personhood into an asset; Irreducible Person explains why some aspects of identity must remain non-market and inalienable.

  • Relational Autonomy
    Complements the critique by challenging the individualism property regimes assume. Where Anti-Property addresses commodification, Relational Autonomy reframes identity as emerging through relationships, not possession.

  • Context Boundaries & Anti-Correlation
    Shows how property logic accelerates context collapse. Once identity attributes are treated as property, they can be licensed or aggregated across contexts, enabling brokerage and surveillance capitalism. Context Boundaries provides the governance alternative.

  • Coercion Resistance
    Property law masks coercion by treating “click to agree” as a voluntary exchange. This lens analyzes how manipulation, lock-in, and surveillance create manufactured consent that property frameworks then legitimize.

  • Principles to Compliance
    Ensures “identity is not property” survives implementation. Anti-Property identifies the inalienability principle; Principles to Compliance provides the verification framework that prevents operational backsliding into ownership models.

Together: Anti-Property dismantles the ownership paradigm; Principal Authority supplies the structural replacement; Irreducible Person and Relational Autonomy provide the philosophical grounding; Context Boundaries and Coercion Resistance show how property logic enables aggregation and coercion; Principles to Compliance ensures these principles are preserved in practice.

3. Why This Lens Matters for SSI

Property law misframes the identity relationship fundamentally. Property assumes: (1) ownership can be transferred (alienability); (2) owners can sell or lease assets (marketability); (3) property rights are individual (not collective); (4) legal regimes protect ownership claims above other interests. But identity is inalienable (bound up with personhood, not tradeable), relational (expressed through connections, not individual possession), contextual (governed by social norms, not blanket ownership), dignitary (protecting human flourishing, not property accumulation).

Individual property model enables aggregation: When identity is framed as individual property, each person “owns” discrete data points. But property law permits sale, lease, licensing—creating markets where individuals sell identity piecemeal to platforms offering “free” services. Atomized individuals negotiate with institutional actors in asymmetric markets, inevitably losing. Property doesn’t prevent exploitation—it creates legal infrastructure for systematic extraction masquerading as voluntary exchange.

“Consent as sale” destroys inalienability: Terms-of-service become property transactions—”click to agree” means “sell your data for service access.” Privacy policies frame data disclosure as licensing agreements. Users “own” data only to immediately transfer ownership through adhesion contracts they don’t read, can’t negotiate, have no alternative to accepting. This isn’t consent—it’s self-commodification normalized through property language. Radin’s market-inalienability principle warns: some things shouldn’t be for sale because commodification destroys their essential nature.

Property law advantages institutional actors: Corporations already claim quasi-property rights in personal data through database rights, trade secrets, terms-of-service provisions, contractual assignments. Individual “data ownership” doesn’t challenge these claims—it legitimizes the property framework where those with economic power accumulate assets. Purtova demonstrates the illusion: framing data as “no one’s property” conceals existing institutional property claims. Giving users “ownership” without power to enforce it creates theater of control while preserving exploitation.

Surveillance capitalism commodifies experience: Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism framework shows how behavioral data becomes “behavioral surplus” extracted for “prediction products” sold in “behavioral futures markets.” Property law enables each step: (1) experience framed as extractable resource (property); (2) platforms claim rights to extracted data (ownership); (3) data traded in markets (alienability); (4) individuals lack power to refuse extraction (asymmetry). “Data ownership” doesn’t challenge this—it extends commodity logic to individuals expected to manage their own extraction.

Collective identity erased: Property law is inherently individualist—ownership vests in discrete persons or entities. But identity is relational and collective. Indigenous communities’ data sovereignty explicitly rejects individual property models because collective knowledge, cultural practices, community relationships aren’t individual possessions. CARE Principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) provide alternative governance recognizing communities, not just individuals, have rights in data. Property law can’t accommodate collective sovereignty—it reduces everything to individual or corporate ownership.

Contextual collapse through aggregation: Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity requires information flows match social norms—medical data stays in healthcare contexts, financial data in banking relationships, political beliefs private. Property law enables cross-context aggregation: once you “own” data, you can license it across all contexts. Data brokers purchase identity fragments from multiple sources, aggregate into profiles, sell to anyone. Property rights don’t prevent this—they facilitate it by treating all data as fungible commodities regardless of originating context.

4. Key Harms, Risks, or Questions

  • Surveillance capitalism’s extractive markets: Platforms use property law to legitimize extraction. Data brokers purchase from “owners” clicking “accept” without comprehension. Property law provides legal infrastructure for systematic surveillance rebranded as voluntary transactions.

  • Self-commodification normalized: When identity is property, refusing to “sell” appears irrational. Personal data marketplaces promise users compensation. Privacy becomes luxury good—those who can afford to pay keep data “private”; those who can’t must sell identity for service access. Making individuals responsible for managing their own exploitation while framing resistance as market irrationality. The result is a kind of digital poorhouse, where those with the least power must continually sell fragments of themselves just to participate.

  • Algorithmic redlining replicates racial property hierarchies: Cheryl Harris’s foundational work “Whiteness as Property” demonstrates how property law encoded racial hierarchies—whiteness functioned as legal property granting access, opportunity, protection while blackness was defined as absence of property rights. Algorithmic systems replicate this: identity data becomes input for automated discrimination using the same property logic. Zip codes (proxies for race) determine loan access, insurance rates, employment opportunities. Algorithmic credit scoring treats demographic patterns as property (data assets) to be exploited for profit. Just as property law historically excluded Black communities from homeownership (redlining), algorithmic redlining excludes based on “data properties” correlated with race. Property frameworks legitimate this: if data is property, “owners” (platforms, data brokers) can use it as they see fit, including for discriminatory algorithms. The same logic that justified racial exclusion through property now operates through data extraction and algorithmic classification. ProPublica’s COMPAS analysis, Benjamin’s “New Jim Code,” and Noble’s algorithmic bias research document how property-framed data systems perpetuate systemic racism under technical neutrality’s guise.

  • Consent theater conceals coercion: Property law’s “voluntary exchange” framing obscures structural coercion. You don’t negotiate terms—platforms set them unilaterally. You can’t refuse without exclusion—essential services demand data disclosure. You can’t comprehend implications—policies incomprehensible, consequences uncertain. Yet property language frames this as “consensual” because you “chose” to transact.

  • Collective sovereignty denied: Indigenous communities hold knowledge collectively—medicinal plants, cultural practices, genealogies. Property law forces individualization: who “owns” this story? Communities resist: knowledge belongs to people collectively, governed by customary protocols, not individual ownership. OCAP principles (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession) recognize collective authority. But legal systems demand property claims, forcing communities into individualist frameworks incompatible with collective governance.

  • Loss of inalienability: Biometric data is biological—fingerprints, facial geometry, iris patterns, DNA. Once disclosed, irreversible. Property frameworks permit biometric “sale”—scan face for phone unlock, provide fingerprints for app access. But you can’t revoke biological data, can’t delete yourself from databases, can’t change your face if compromised. Radin: some things are constitutive of personhood and shouldn’t be alienable.

  • Platform power asymmetries: Data ownership frameworks assume equal bargaining between “owners” (users) and “purchasers” (platforms). Reality: platforms set terms, users accept or are excluded. Network effects create monopolies. Switching costs make exit impossible. Information asymmetry means users don’t understand what they’re selling. Property law assumes market transactions inherently voluntary between “equal” contracting parties—fiction enabling exploitation.

5. Constructive Directions

These aren’t comprehensive solutions—they’re provocations for exploration:

  • Market-Inalienability Protections: Establish legal and technical mechanisms preventing identity commodification. Core identity attributes (biometrics, health status, sexual orientation, political beliefs, genetic data, family relationships) should be categorically non-transferable—not property that can be sold, leased, or licensed. SSI architectures should make credential sales technically impossible (non-transferable cryptographic binding), legally prohibited (inalienability statutes), socially illegitimate (norms against self-commodification).

  • Agency Framework Over Property Framework: Replace ownership language with delegation language. You don’t “own” credentials—you delegate limited authority to agents (wallet providers, issuers, verifiers) who owe you enforceable duties. Property says “I own this, I can sell it.” Agency says “I delegate this, you owe me duties, I can revoke.” Fundamentally different power relationships.

  • Collective Data Governance Models: Recognize communities, not just individuals, hold rights in identity data. Indigenous data sovereignty models (CARE Principles, OCAP) provide frameworks where communities govern collectively. Data trusts and cooperatives enable group decision-making. Property law’s individualism can’t accommodate collective sovereignty—SSI needs alternative legal frameworks.

  • Prohibition on Identity Markets: SSI infrastructures should not enable marketplaces for trading credentials or behavioral data. Treating identity as an asset class simply recreates surveillance capitalism under a decentralized brand.

6. How This Lens Might Inform the 2026 SSI Principles

Core Principle Proposal (Inalienability):

Core identity attributes are inalienable—not property that can be sold, leased, or transferred. Biometric data, medical histories, sexual orientation, political beliefs, religious convictions, and family relationships are constitutive of personhood and must not be commodified. SSI systems shall prohibit credential marketplaces, ban identity token trading, and make credential sales technically impossible through non-transferable cryptographic binding. “Data ownership” language that enables self-commodification must be replaced with agency delegation frameworks where revocable authority creates enforceable duties, not alienable property creating exploitative markets. Identity is personhood expressed through relations, not capital to be accumulated.

Rationale: Radin’s market-inalienability theory: some things too bound up with personhood for market exchange. Property law enables identity commodification through “voluntary” sales that are structurally coerced (no alternatives, information asymmetry, power imbalance). Renieris warns “data ownership” extends ad-tech’s broken model to all identity. Cohen demonstrates how property frameworks actively construct identity as extractable capital. Inalienability isn’t restricting freedom—it’s protecting against exploitative markets treating persons as resources.

Integration: Works with Principal Authority (delegation not sale), Multi-Scalar Sovereignty (collective governance not individual ownership), Relational Autonomy (identity through connection not possession). Together: dismantle property thinking + replace with agency framework + ground in relational philosophy + recognize collective sovereignty = comprehensive anti-commodification framework.

7. Selected Resources

  • Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse (2023). [book]. Renieris, Elizabeth M. MIT Press. ISBN: 978-0262047821. Author: https://hackylawyer.com/beyond-data-book. Publisher: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047821/beyond-data/.

    SHORT ABSTRACT: Renieris argues that fifty years of data-focused regulation—data protection, privacy, security, ownership—has failed to protect core human values including privacy itself. Data is contextual and dynamic, making it an unstable foundation for rights. As technologies alter shared reality and diminish democratic participation, she proposes shifting focus from data to effects on people, assessing technologies against broader rights including non-discrimination, human dignity, and self-determination.

    WHY THIS MATTERS: Comprehensive critique of “data ownership” frameworks—property models extend surveillance capitalism’s broken logic. Calls for grounding digital identity in human rights law (dignity, autonomy, non-discrimination) rather than property law (ownership, alienability, markets). “Data” discourse distracts from human rights violations by reducing people to information assets.

  • Contested Commodities (1996). [book]. Radin, Margaret Jane. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 978-0674007161. Publisher: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674007161.

    SHORT ABSTRACT: Radin asks why not sell everything—body parts, babies, sex? Her answer: universal commodification impairs human flourishing by compromising contexts needed for personhood. Poor people would sell what the wealthy find abhorrent, reflecting liberal democracy’s tension between choice freedom and personhood protection. As a pragmatist, she proposes “incomplete commodification”—regulated exchange of contested goods under conditions protecting human dignity and flourishing.

    WHY THIS MATTERS: Foundational market-inalienability theory—some things too bound up with personhood to commodify. Application to identity: biometric data, medical histories, political beliefs are constitutive of personhood and shouldn’t be tradeable commodities, even if “voluntarily” sold.

  • Whiteness as Property (1993). [paper]. Harris, Cheryl I. Harvard Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 8, pp. 1707-1791. Retrieved 2025-11-27 from: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/no-volume/whiteness-as-property/.

    SHORT ABSTRACT: Harris examines how whiteness evolved from racial identity into a form of property historically protected in American law. Following slavery and conquest, white racial identity became the basis for allocating societal benefits—a status property ratified by law. Even after legal segregation ended, whiteness as property continues as barrier to change. Harris argues affirmative action distortions can only be addressed by confronting the property interest in whiteness.

    WHY THIS MATTERS: Property law historically encoded racial hierarchies—whiteness functioned as property granting access, opportunity, protection. Warning for digital identity: treating identity as property risks encoding similar exclusions through algorithmic systems using data to reproduce discrimination.

  • Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (2019). [book]. Cohen, Julie E. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0190246693. Author: https://juliecohen.com/between-truth-and-power/. Publisher: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/between-truth-and-power-9780190246693.

    SHORT ABSTRACT: Cohen examines how legal institutions are enlisted to produce the sociotechnical shifts accompanying informational capitalism, transforming fundamentally in the process. Datafication and platform intermediation have reshaped economic activity and information exchange. Platform authority—both practical and normative—has become taken-for-granted, reshaping law in its own image. The book draws on legal theory, STS, information studies, and organization studies to develop a theory of institutional change.

    WHY THIS MATTERS: Demonstrates how code and law co-construct identity as extractable capital. Property frameworks don’t just describe data—they actively create it as commodity. “Code” (technical architecture) and “law” (legal frameworks) have “fractal effects”—shaping what’s possible, who benefits, how reality is understood.

  • The Illusion of Personal Data as No One’s Property (2015). [paper]. Purtova, Nadezhda. Law, Innovation and Technology, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 83-111. Retrieved 2025-11-27 from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17579961.2015.1052646. Also available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2346693.

    SHORT ABSTRACT: Purtova challenges the assumption that data protection regimes need not address property rights in personal data. Building on Umbeck’s work, she demonstrates that without legislative property assignment, personal data will be appropriated in proportion to market participants’ de facto power to exclude others. The paper reconceptualizes personal data as a rivalrous resource within an ecosystem, refuting core anti-propertization arguments and reframing the question as whose property rights should exist.

    WHY THIS MATTERS: “No one owns data” is illusion—corporations already claim quasi-property rights through database rights, trade secrets, contractual assignments. Giving individuals “data ownership” validates property framework where corporations have structural advantages. Warning: property thinking itself is the problem, not who holds property rights.

  • Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (2009). [book]. Nissenbaum, Helen. Stanford Law Books, Stanford University Press. 304 pages. ISBN 978-0-8047-5236-7. Publisher: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=8862.

    SHORT ABSTRACT: Nissenbaum argues privacy violations occur when information flows breach context-specific norms, not when individuals lose control. Contextual integrity framework analyzes flows using five parameters (data subject, sender, recipient, information type, transmission principle) and nine-step decision heuristic. Rejects notice-and-consent paradigm; demonstrates privacy depends on social contexts (healthcare, education, commerce) having distinct purposes and governing norms.

    WHY THIS MATTERS: Alternative to property-based privacy: information flows must match social context norms, not blanket ownership rules. Property thinking enables context collapse: “you own this data, license it anywhere.” Contextual integrity requires information flows match norms, aggregation across contexts is limited, social roles carry specific obligations.

8. Open Questions & Questions for the Broader Community

Open Questions

  1. Scope of Inalienability: Which identity attributes should be categorically inalienable (never tradeable) versus contextually inalienable (tradeable only in specific domains)? Are biometrics always inalienable? What about creative works about oneself (memoirs, artistic self-expression)?

  2. Transitional Strategies: Current SSI implementations already use property language (credentials as “tokens,” wallets as “ownership tools”). Can these systems be reframed without starting over, or does property thinking so deeply shape the architecture that migration is necessary?

  3. Global Property Traditions: This lens draws primarily on Anglo-American property law critiques. How do property frameworks function differently in Civil Law systems, Indigenous customary law, Islamic law, or East Asian legal traditions? Can we develop universally applicable anti-property principles?

  4. Economic Models Without Commodification: If identity cannot be property, what economic models sustain SSI infrastructure? How do we fund wallet development, credential issuance, and verification services without markets in identity data?

Questions for the Broader Community

  1. Intellectual Property in Autobiographical Work: This lens critiques identity-as-property. But what about intellectual property rights in creative works about identity (memoirs, life stories, artistic self-expression)? Does copyright in autobiographical work create problematic commodification or protect legitimate creative expression?

  2. Power Asymmetry Beyond Anti-Property: If individual rights (property or otherwise) cannot solve structural problems like platform monopolies and algorithmic discrimination, what systemic interventions are needed? Does preventing anti-commodification require antitrust action, regulatory prohibition, or collective organizing beyond what SSI architecture can provide?