New York, Your Data Has a Landlord. And It Isn’t You.

Senator Leroy Comrie’s It’s Your Data Act could give New Yorkers something the technology industry has spent decades avoiding: enforceable rights over the information that makes other people rich.

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Somewhere in America, a technology company knows what you had for breakfast, how long you stared at your ex’s Instagram profile, whether you are thinking about changing jobs, and how many times you have searched for symptoms that turned out to be gas. It has probably sold some of those insights, used others to train an algorithm, and combined the rest with information from a few million strangers to build something investors call innovation. You, meanwhile, are trying to remember which email address you used to sign up for the app.

Welcome to the information economy, where everybody is working and almost nobody knows they’re on the payroll.

New York State Senator Leroy Comrie has introduced a bill that could begin changing that arrangement. His It’s Your Data Act , S5156, would expand protections for personal information and address its collection and use for commercial or economic value without the required consent. The proposal also recognizes a property interest in certain consumer information. It is not law yet, but if enacted, it could help New Yorkers do something that sounds remarkably ordinary: assert legal rights over information about themselves that other people are using to make money.

This should not be a revolutionary concept in a state where you can own a parking space, license a song, inherit an apartment, and sue somebody for using your photograph in an advertisement without permission. But apparently the moment your personal information becomes useful to a computer, the rules of ownership begin behaving like a New York landlord explaining why your security deposit is nonrefundable.