Democratizing Platform Privacy

Abstract

The online platform political economy — that is, the interrelationship of economic and political power in the exchange of online services for personal information — has endowed platforms with overwhelming power to determine consumers’ information privacy. Scholarship on information privacy has focused largely on the economic problem: individual consumers do not obtain their “optimal” level of privacy due to a bevy of market failures. This manuscript presents the political problem: platforms’ hegemonic control over consumers’ information privacy renders the rules they impose illegitimate from a democratic perspective. It argues platform hegemony over consumers’ information privacy is a political problem, in the first instance, due to the social foundations of normative information privacy and the social character of personal information. Though problems affecting society in this manner are typically met with government intervention, through the promulgation of law, or class-action litigation, neither of these safeguards have effectively protected consumers’ information privacy. Rather than empower consumers to determine their information privacy norms and how to protect them, their reliance on self-regulation through notice and consent have empowered platforms to make these determinations unilaterally. In light of these failures, this manuscript explores the remaining alternative: the democratic legitimization of information privacy within the existing private governance system. To this end, it proposes that industrial democracy, as a method of legitimating employer hegemony in the labor political economy, can frame a preliminary understanding of platform democracy with respect to information privacy. The manuscript describes the late nineteenth and early twentieth century labor political economy and highlights its congruencies with and differences from the platform political economy. It then presents foundational elements of industrial democracy, which introduced democratic structures to the labor political economy, and analyzes their application to the platform political economy. Ultimately, this manuscript concludes that, with certain alterations and adaptations, the structures that formerly aimed to democratize labor can likewise democratize the private governance of information privacy.