The argument is not that the data extracted from me is already my “property” or “possession” and as such must not be appropriated by another. For until the act of extraction there was no boundedness to the information relating to my life stream—as we have noted many times, data itself is not raw material. What previously was just part of the flow of my activity becomes separately identifiable and so potentially transferable only through the act of extraction. This transformation has nothing to do with whether the individual is already identified. Rather, since life (like land in Karl Polanyi’s historical account of industrial capitalism) is not the sort of thing that is naturally commodified, data requires for its creation institutional processes of extraction and demarcation, from which potential commodities can be generated.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 472