Surveillance Capitalism and the Commodification of Personal Data

ABSTRACT
Surveillance Capitalism has converted personal data into an asset that can be freely bought and sold, the paper focuses on how law creates the mechanics to utilize personal data as an item for purchase and sale while neglecting a corresponding acknowledgement of individual ownership or entitlement to a value share. The central research question is the dissonance between a data asset whose worth is estimated at several billions of dollars and a body of law that characterizes data assets as a privacy concern rather than. Drawing on doctrinal legal research and comparative analysis, the study explores the scope of relevant statutes such as the GDPR, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (India) and the CCPA, and the ruling of the CJEU, U.S. federal courts and the ICA on the one hand and the Supreme Court of India on the other hand. The paper finds that consent-based approaches have floundered at the structural level, courts repudiate property claims, and individuals are yet to experiment with a property-based approach. Three such approaches that deserve recognition are a limited property stake in data when used for behavioural analytics, a legislative-enforced duty of trust on data collectors and a private cause of action on exploitation of data labour.