This past month, Associate Professor Amanda Parsons was awarded the Reidenberg-Kerr Award for Outstanding Scholarship by a Junior Scholar at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC).
Parson’s research, titled “Valuing Social Data,” was coauthored with Salome Viljoen of University of Michigan Law. The project explores the role of social data in the modern economy. Social data is data that stores traces of human activity as well as data that is used to infer or predict human activity.
Social data produces value from its capacity to apprehend, prediction, and potentially modify social behavior. This “prediction value” is a value form that is distinct from and does not always transform neatly into monetary exchange value (i.e. price). For example, prediction value stemming from social data gathered by companies could be used for purposes as diverse as facilitating targeted advertising, improving products and services, and building up a company’s economic and political power.
Unfortunately, various legal regimes have yet to recognize prediction value as a new and distinct value form and, as a result, are not effectively governing this increasingly important mode of production in the modern economy.
“[In the paper], we argue that prediction value is yielding distinct challenges for different camps of legal scholarship,” Parsons said. “The first camp is fields like tax law that view themselves as engaged in the business of regulating value creation, but are not recognizing that prediction value as a new and unique value form. The second camp is fields like privacy law that have never viewed themselves as engaged in the business of regulating value creation but now are. We go through specific examples of how the failure to recognize and understand prediction value is causing legal and regulatory failures in each of these two “camps.””
Parsons focuses her research on corporate and international taxation, emphasizing the impact of digitalization on tax law. She shared that the paper came about from conversations had between Viljoen and herself during their time as Academic Fellows at Columbia University.
“...Salome’s research focuses specifically on data governance and privacy law, while my research focuses on tax law,” Parsons explained. “[During our time as fellows], we spent hours in each other’s offices talking about the data economy, how it was impacting our respective fields, and how other scholars and policymakers in our fields were responding to it. The paper is a product of those conversations.”
The University of Colorado Law School is grateful to have Parsons’ scholarship and engagement as a part of our faculty, and look forward to the continued impact her research will continue to have in the years to come. Congratulations, Professor Parsons, on this incredible achievement!
