Reorienting Datafication? New Roles For Users In Online Platform Markets

Personal data storage and management services aim to provide people with control to the collection, storage and use of their data. This paper investigates the new roles such initiatives propose for people in the online economy, and their effects on the markets where decisions on the uses of personal data are made. To investigate these new user roles against the existing ones, I employ Shoshana Zuboff’s ‘surveillance capitalism’ as the value creation model of mainstream online platform markets. The identified new roles for users are data collector, intermediary of data between services, controller of data analysis, and source of subjective data. These roles work to restructure value creation from personal data, and through them the personal data storage and management services seek to shape new markets in which users are positioned as active participants seeking to benefit from their data.