This proposal, like many others, tries to make the "information wants to be free" meme a reality by making data "about us" a commodity that can be purchased and sold in the market.

But it misses the important question of why we, in the first place, are allowing personal and behavioural data to be a commodity. It's not, and should not be: not everything needs to be a good to be traded, in the same sense that we have decided that you can't trade ownership of a person in the free market.

> [personal data is] not, and should not be [a commodity]

I'm dubious that banning the sale of personal information is going to have a huge impact. Google and Facebook already violate laws as they please with the knowledge that they'll have to pay the fine. They seem to be ok with that arrangement.

From a technical perspective, I don't think it's even possible to prevent the collection and use of personal data. I like the idea behind Tim Berners-Lee's Solid[0], but it suffers from the same flaw as video game copy protection and movie DRM. At some point, you have to decrypt the data and let a webapp have access to it. The only way to avoid that would be to go all the way back to using native apps for everything and ditch the web altogether.

[0]: https://solid.inrupt.com/how-it-works

Rather than pave the way for the data economy, we could ask who's benefitting, and if we indeed want to buy into a naive/dystopic future that just creates data monopolies and wealth for very few, to the detriment of eg established retail, ad, media, finance, telco industries.

Disclaimer: I am neither for nor against anything which might be explicitly stated or implicitly implied by this article, I merely thought it had an intereesting intellectual character, and thus it was worthy of a HN Post...

I'm guessing that points made by this article may be hotly debated by the HN Community... which is healthy...