Today is apparently #DataPrivacyDay, so here goes: There is no such thing as “data privacy”, there is privacy. Data doesn’t have rights, people have a human right to privacy. Your data belongs to you & is a part of you. Data about people is people.
Same goes for “digital rights”. There are no digital rights, only human rights in the digital age. Speaking of “digital rights” and “data privacy” implies that those are separate to our human rights and to our privacy, paving the way for a different set of (lesser) protections.
To separate a person from their data is to strip the latter of its human rights, making it into an object to be commodified. Any rights thereupon conferred on the object will thus be lesser than those protecting the subject.
By treating people and their data as separate constructs – one a subject, the other an object – what you end up doing is commodifying people by slicing them into their constituent bits and bytes; ready to be sold off to the highest bidder.
And that, in a nutshell, is the business model of Silicon Valley: to digitise people and to own those digital copies.