Making markets from the data of everyday life

Abstract

This paper shows how the capture and circulation of data about social lives are enabled through digitalisation and market logics and practices. Drawing on Australia's new Consumer Data Right, a state-led initiative that creates access rights to personal data, we distinguish between market promises and the translation of market models in actually existing markets and regulatory frameworks. ‘Life's work’ is brought to market through promises to fix the problems of essential service markets by harnessing data. We argue that the Consumer Data Right is underpinned by a more ambitious vision to create future markets that transcend individual sectors through aggregation across the economy. These visions are silent on how the data, which cannot be owned and therefore cannot be commoditised, is capitalised. We show the Consumer Data Right's discursive, administrative, regulatory and technical aspects through which the previously hard-to-penetrate spaces of the home and everyday life become enrolled in circuits of value, both present and future. This involves technical standard setting by state agencies for accreditation, consent and approval processes; discourses of trust and calculative devices to promote consumer control; and weak de-identification and deletion requirements that grant data an afterlife beyond the original agreed use. This paper calls for greater attention to the enabling role of the state in digital markets as a counterbalance to the focus on the state's regulatory and constraining role. We argue for a more staged approach to market-making analysis to show how the state lays the market foundations that can then be deepened through practices of intermediation and capitalisation by private firms.