Abstract

This paper develops a novel account of privacy rights grounded in beneficial ownership. While tech companies and regulators often frame privacy in terms of data ownership, the nature of property rights in personal data remains unclear. I argue that treating personal data as fully owned property fails to capture the contextual sensitivity of privacy rights and conflicts with basic intuitions about privacy. Instead, I propose understanding privacy rights through the model of beneficial ownership, where data subjects retain rights to use and benefit from their data while others may control and transfer it only as trustees. This “Beneficial Ownership Model” better aligns with our privacy interests, which stem from our distinctly social form of agency and our need for selective self-presentation. The model has significant implications for the attention economy, suggesting reforms to how platforms manage user data and pointing toward new institutional arrangements for personal data governance. Beyond its practical applications, the model illuminates why personal data, like our physical bodies, inherently resists full ownership while still requiring robust protections.