Vol , Issue Date of Publication: March 07, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20529/IJME.2026.014

Views
, PDF Downloads:

Data and privacy: Putting markets in (their) place

Reetika Khera
Abstract:

Should privacy be a tradeable right? This is an issue for urgent consideration, given how much personal data collated from different sources can reveal about our personal lives. The rise of digital technologies and of the digital economy on the one hand, and of data mining capabilities on the other, present economic opportunities that are being harnessed, often at the cost of our privacy. Some see this as a case of “missing markets”, where appropriate markets with adequate rules and regulations should be put in place. In this paper, I argue that the creating of a market for personal data, amounts to making the right to privacy a tradeable right. Further, a market for personal data/ privacy has all the characteristics of what Debra Satz characterises as “noxious markets”. Other economists, notably Bowles, Hausman and MacPherson and Sandel, have sought to delineate the moral limits to markets in cases of child labour, the organ trade, etc. I argue that the market for personal data should be treated similarly.


Copyright and license
©Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 2026: Open Access and Distributed under the Creative Commons license ( CC BY-NC-ND 4.0),
which permits only non-commercial and non-modified sharing in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Full Text

HTML | PDF

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Please restrict your comment preferably to 800 words
Comments are moderated. Approval can take up to 48 hours.

Help IJME keep its content free. You can support us from as little as Rs. 500 Make a Donation