Brittany Kaiser & JFK on Data as Property

Brittany Nicole Kaiser is the former business development director for Cambridge Analytica, which collapsed after details of its misuse of Facebook data became public. Cambridge Analytica potentially influenced voting in the UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

She joins James Felton Keith for a fireside chat at the law offices of Sullivan & Worcester to talk about data rights and the future of capital.

Get James Felton Keith’s latest book, Data Is Labor at dataislabor.com

Own Your Data: From Scandal to Structure A fireside conversation between James Felton Keith and Brittany Kaiser

When Joel Telpner opened the evening by jokingly asking the audience to hand over their driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, the room laughed. It was a sharp reminder of how casually we’ve surrendered personal information for years.

But beneath the humor was a serious premise: data has moved from the margins of business and politics to the center of both. And the question is no longer whether it is valuable. The question is who owns it—and who gets paid.

This conversation was not about personalities or partisan politics. It was about structure. The goal was to go deeper than headlines and public relations and push into the mechanics of ownership itself.

From Ad Tech to Political Shock When Brittany and I first met in November 2016 at the Cambridge Analytica office, the conversation was about business models and the ad-tech ecosystem. At the time, data targeting was standard practice. Advertising had long operated on behavioral insights. Politics was simply catching up.

Outrage only surfaced when data use became visibly political—even though corporations had been exploiting personal data for years. That asymmetry revealed something deeper: the public didn’t object to data extraction itself. They objected when they saw its power.

Her departure from Cambridge Analytica wasn’t rooted in naïveté about data. She had worked in political campaigns since 2007–2008, including the Obama campaign, where social media data first became a serious political tool. Data wasn’t new. What was new was the scale, opacity, and consolidation of control.

The “walled garden” model—where platforms closed APIs not to protect users but to centralize monetization—made that consolidation explicit.

The model is simple: Users generate the value. Platforms capture the revenue. Institutions sell access to audiences.

And individuals receive “free” services in exchange.

Data as Property, Not Just a Byproduct The response was the hashtag #OwnYourData . But slogans aren’t solutions. The real shift comes when the idea is grounded in property rights.

The argument is pragmatic: in American law, nothing is more protected than property. If personal data is treated as property, then established legal frameworks—transparency, consent, licensing, compensation—can apply.

A simple analogy makes it clear: Airbnb. Before someone uses your house, they disclose who they are, what they’ll do, how long they’ll stay, and how much they’ll pay. You consent, and you’re compensated.

Why shouldn’t data operate the same way?

Who wants it?

What will they do with it?

For how long?

What is the compensation?

This reframes data from a passive byproduct into an asset.

Data as Labor and Economic Participation My position intersects with—but also extends beyond—property rights. I treat data not only as property, but as productive input.

I approach problems as an engineer. Most problems are distribution problems. And the current economy has a distribution issue: productivity has increased dramatically, but wages have not scaled with it.