Data as asset? The measurement, governance, and valuation of digital personal data by Big Tech

Abstract

Digital personal data is increasingly framed as the basis of contemporary economies, representing an important new asset class. Control over these data assets seems to explain the emergence and dominance of so-called “Big Tech” firms, consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook. These US-based firms are some of the largest in the world by market capitalization, a position that they retain despite growing policy and public condemnation—or “techlash”—of their market power based on their monopolistic control of personal data. We analyse the transformation of personal data into an asset in order to explore how personal data is accounted for, governed, and valued by Big Tech firms and other political-economic actors (e.g., investors). However, our findings show that Big Tech firms turn “users” and “user engagement” into assets through the performative measurement, governance, and valuation of user metrics (e.g., user numbers, user engagement), rather than extending ownership and control rights over personal data per se. We conceptualize this strategy as a form of “techcraft” to center attention on the means and mechanisms that Big Tech firms deploy to make users and user data measurable and legible as future revenue streams.

Towards a virtual statecraft: Housing targets and the governance of urban housing markets

“…These in turn collide with alternative approaches and market trends and practices that evade simple characterisation and definition. The virtual construct of a thing (the metric) can come to obscure and replace the actual thingsuch as the meeting of competitive performance targets (Birch, Cochrane, & Ward, 2021). For instance, the impacts of the UK's Equality Act 2010 make visible, through published metrics and formal Equality Assessments, the differential nature of employment in the public sector between different social groups and this in turn has triggered a broader debate over recruitment practices and 'fairness' (Payne & Bennett, 2015).…”

Introduction

“…Yet, recent scholarship, like the collection of papers here, argue that something is different today. In particular, monopolistic ‘Big Tech’ firms have been able to extend rentiership into non-traditional spheres through new and reinvigorated mechanisms of rent extraction, such as ‘platform’ business models or knowledge and data monopolies ( Srnicek, 2016 ; Fields, 2019; Sadowski, 2020 ; Birch and Cochrane, 2021 ; Birch et al 2021 ; Komljenovic, 2021 ; Rikap, 2021a ). Previously, it was assumed that techno-economic rents were eroded by the competition mechanism (see Schumpeter, 1950 ; Mandel, 1975 ; Storper, 1997 ), but the combination of platform control over innovation networks and centrality of intellectual property in political-economic restructuring is forcing scholarship to reimagine the crucial question of whether this mechanism still holds (see Wark, 2019 ; Zacares, 2021 ).…”

Data Asset Disclosure and Nonprofessional Investor Judgment: Evidence from Questionnaire Experiments

“…Compared to traditional enterprises, Internet enterprises do not necessarily get involved in the development, production, and sale of physical goods, but they continue to collect and generate massive amounts of data. Data owned or controlled by the enterprise can be used for potential economic bene t through computer algorithmic techniques, passive knowledge production, or digital products [3,4]. Facebook, for example, bought WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion precisely because it had 450 million users and held a lot of data assets.…”