The corporation is a person the law invented so that capital could be pooled and risk could be shared. It is an artificial person under the law, and what it produces is what I want to call artificial data... An artificial person produces artificial data about its artificial life, and takes human data as its own, and the law treats all of it as the corporation's to keep.

Nothing in that chain reaches into a human being. And nothing in that chain works in reverse. The corporation cannot turn human data into artificial data by collecting it... The human data the corporation has taken from you is what it was when you made it. The corporation has it. The corporation processes it. The corporation uses it. None of that makes it the corporation's.

I think data is the fourth fictitious commodity. The market treats it as a product. The consequences fall on the people who produce it by being alive ... I disagree. Data is neither capital, nor a commodity. It is not something a corporation makes. It is something you make, by living ... The law currently divides what comes from a person into categories ... The categories were drawn by people who benefited from drawing them ... I watched part of the categorizing of data happen. Earlier in my career, many talented lawyers I knew flocked to the 'new' field of data privacy. My law partner, Charles, and I were doing something different ... The privacy field was not really about privacy. It was about compliance ... Privacy is what keeps the individual an individual at all ... The compliance industry did not protect that fence because the legislature did not ... A 'data subject' is what a person becomes when the framework gets through with them ... And this is what is legal and what is required. When I do data privacy work, this is what I do. This is what every lawyer does ... It was the orderly negotiation of how much of a person the corporation could take and still call itself compliant ... All of it is data. The immutable part and the lived part together are what a person is ... The fiction is in place. The category has been drawn. The framework has done its work. What it has not done is sever the thing the framework was built to take from the person it was taken from.