Is Data Collection from Internet Users a Form of Exploitation?

Abstract Whenever you use apps, websites, or digital infrastructure owned by large platform companies, these companies collect data from your activity. They then use the data for various highly profitable purposes, e.g., by designing targeted advertising and selling it to third parties. This paper argues that such data collection should be considered a form of wrongful exploitation. We begin by defending the simple and relatively uncontroversial idea that to exploit is to extract excessive advantage from vulnerability. We then argue that platform companies’ data collection practices are exploitative in this sense. Many internet users are vulnerable because they have limited capacity to make an informed and voluntary decision about exchanging access to their data for access to the companies’ services, or because they have no reasonable alternative to doing so. Moreover, platform companies take advantage of these vulnerabilities to extract profits that they could not otherwise have extracted. The paper ends by discussing what governments and other third parties should do about this form of exploitation. We distinguish preventive measures, which remove or mitigate users’ vulnerabilities, from prohibition and regulation, which leave these vulnerabilities intact but block companies from taking advantage of them.