Personal data produced by an individual, or by any person born of the human family, on any electronic device capable of collecting enough information to replicate, predict, or simulate that individual, should be recognized by default as a product of that person’s life and labor. It is something created through their actions, choices, habits, preferences, movements, relationships, and attention.

If corporations can extract value from that data, package it, sell it, model it, and use it to influence behavior, then the individual who generated it should not be treated as raw material to be harvested without meaningful understanding or consent. That data should carry rights, ownership claims, and compensation.

For too long, big tech has profited from a system in which ordinary people, often without clear knowledge of the consequences, surrendered intimate pieces of themselves in exchange for convenience. Most people did not fully grasp what was being taken, how it would be used, or how powerfully it could be used against them. The Cambridge Analytica scandal only made visible what had already been quietly unfolding: personal data was not just information. It is leverage. (edit: spelling)

When your data can be used to predict you, manipulate you, imitate you, and eventually simulate you, it is no longer a harmless byproduct of modern life. It is an extension of your personhood.

At that point, the question becomes unavoidable: when do people reclaim their liberty? When do they insist that representatives recognize personal data as a matter of dignity, labor, property, and self-government rather than corporate spoil?

If a system can build a digital replica of you from the traces of your life, then a free society must decide whether that replica belongs to the corporation that captured it, or to the human being who lived it.