This project, a collaboration between Demos, the law firm Schillings and the independent consumer data action service Rightly, seeks to investigate how our data footprints are being created and exploited online.

Data is the bedrock of the digital economy. Companies are increasingly competing to generate and have access to as much data about us as possible, crafting the digital environment and their products around the insights large datasets give. Other companies facilitate and profit from this, building entire business models from the collection and sale of this precious data. User privacy, protecting people’s personal data and information from abuse or exploitation, comes secondary to enabling more effective advertising and targeting. Existing data regulation gives more powers to users, but too often this is not translating into actual insight or control over their personal data.

For its advocates, the data economy offers unparalleled opportunities for tailoring and designing services and products around the needs and desires of their users. For its detractors, ‘surveillance capitalism’ - as it was famously termed by Shoshana Zuboff - has come to embody a system in which users have significantly less power, treated as data points from which information can be extracted and exploited for profit.1 Multiple actors swirl around our data. Social media platforms are notorious for being advertising platforms that collect information about every click and scroll to precisely target us. Online shops become reliant on that social media data, tracking customers through their stores then using platforms to target those same customers with items they had recently viewed. Meanwhile, insurance companies collect personal data to make estimates about who we are and the lives we live to price policies. Data brokers scrape information about all of us from publicly available data on the internet, that other companies are then able to buy, in a practice widely critiqued due to lack of fairness, transparency and knowledge amongst the public that this practice even occurs.2 As knowledge and outcry about these practices has grown, so too have regulatory responses. Governments, international bodies (like the EU) and regulatory bodies (like the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)) are now important players in the data economy.

Then there are the individual internet users - you and I. We each leave trails of data as we navigate webpages, clicking cookie banners and logging into different services via social media accounts. Increasingly, members of the British public are unconcerned about where their data goes3: perhaps due to the convenience of free services their data enables, or the invisibility of how their data is actually being used.