By Reilly Dodd
Fifteen years ago, the world annually produced approximately two-trillion gigabytes of data.[1] Today, that much data is generated in five days.[2] Not surprisingly, companies commonly capitalize on this “big data” to streamline business operations.[3] Governments, meanwhile, leverage it to improve public health outcomes (e.g., the COVID-19 epidemic).[4] Others, called data brokers, simply collect vast swaths of consumer-generated data to sell it for such downstream usage.[5] This brokerage industry, trading an estimated 200 billion dollars of data access rights, is still largely unregulated.[6] It is also responsible for incentivizing severe breaches of United States privacy law, including significant HIPAA violations.[7]
Many onlookers have well-founded fears about what the emergent age of big data truly portends.[8] Comparatively less light, however, is shed on ways individuals harness big data to shore up this regulatory gap, oftentimes through digital collective intermediaries. These digital collectives come in a variety of legal structures, such as data cooperatives, data trusts, or data corporations.[9] All are generally defined as voluntary collections of individuals who agree to pool their data and data access rights together for a common interest.[10]
This common interest can range widely. Some have created structures to bridge research gaps for the betterment of immigrant community health management.[11] Many create tools to increase consumer data privacy outcomes,[12] while others work together to effectuate feminist empowerment in agricultural communities.[13] Data collectives prove useful because they aggregate disconnected or otherwise siloed data together into a useable format, and can selectively steward sensitive data sets after conditioning their usage on terms favorable to the collective’s members.[14] Such terms may include profit-sharing amongst participants, conditioning purchases on the buyers’ adopting privacy-increasing blockchain technologies, or providing increased transparency as to data usage.[15]
Altogether, while big data does come with emerging challenges to our rights, and perhaps even to society itself, a more optimistic picture also seems to be being painted alongside those risks by individuals across our digital globe. It is an inspiring reflection of the human condition to see how those who live in big data continue to find new and interesting means of harnessing it in their daily lives, not only for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of all.
Reilly Dodd is a second-year law student from Nashville, Tennessee. Before law school, he worked as a senior legal assistant at Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, LLP assisting in a variety of plaintiff’s lawsuits, including Qui Tam, 401k Mismanagement, and False Claims Act claims. He will be clerking for Sims Funk, PLC this summer in Nashville.
[1] Fabio Duarte, Amount of Data Created Daily (2025), Exploding Topics (April 24, 2025), https://explodingtopics.com/blog/data-generated-per-day [perma cc forthcoming].
[2] Id.
[3] See Javier Canales Luna, What is Data Monetization? Strategies to Create Value from Data, DataCamp (Sep. 4, 2024), https://www.datacamp.com/blog/what-is-data-monetization [perma cc forthcoming]; see also, KPMG, https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2025/unlocking-value-data-products.html [perma cc forthcoming] (last visited Aug. 21, 2025).
[4] Zengtao Jiao et al., Application of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Epidemic Surveillance and Containment, 3 Intelligent Med. 36, 36 (2022).
[5] Urbano Reviglio, The Untamed and Discreet Role of Data Brokers in Surveillance Capitalism: A Transnational and Interdisciplinary Overview, 11 Internet Pol’y Rev. no. 3, 2022, at 1, 3.
[6] Id. at 2.
[7] See, e.g., Press Release, F.T.C., FTC to Ban BetterHelp from Revealing Consumers’ Data, Including Sensitive Mental Health Information, to Facebook and Others for Targeted Advertising (March 2, 2023) [hereinafter F.T.C. Press Release] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/ftc-ban-betterhelp-revealing-consumers-data-including-sensitive-mental-health-information-facebook [perma cc forthcoming]; Kirsten Peremore, Are Mental Health Platforms Like BetterHelp HIPAA Compliant?, Paubox (June 8, 2023), https://www.paubox.com/news/are-mental-health-platforms-like-betterhelp-hipaa-compliant [perma cc forthcoming].
[8] See, e.g., Roxana Ologeanu-Taddei, Surveillance Capitalism and the Rise of the Data Havens, Medium (Nov. 17, 2025), https://medium.com/policy-panorama/surveillance-capitalism-and-the-rise-of-the-data-havens-f84ec8dbc3b1 [perma cc forthcoming].
[9] See Jamie Duncan, Data Protection Beyond Data Rights: Governing Data Protection Through Collective Intermediaries, 12 Internet Pol’y Rev., Sept. 5, 2023, at 1, 2–3.
[10] Id. at 1-3.
[11] Tanvir. C. Turin et al., Community-Based Health Data Cooperatives Towards Improving the Immigrant Community Health: A Scoping Review to Inform Policy and Practice, 5 Int’l J. Popl’n Data Sci. 1 (2020).
[12] See Saule Gabriele, Nadia Leonova & Lukas Utzig, Who Owns Your Data? Organization of the New Capital, Medium (June 23, 2022), https://medium.com/urban-ai/who-owns-your-data-organisation-of-the-new-capital-a4900a64fbb [perma cc forthcoming].
[13] Bapu Vaitla & Astha Kapoor, Unlocking the Power of Feminist Data Cooperatives, The Data Values Dig. (Mar. 14, 2023), https://datavaluesdigest.substack.com/p/unlocking-the-power-of-feminist-data [perma cc forthcoming].
[14] See, e.g., Nat’l Insts. Health, https://allofus.nih.gov/ [perma cc forthcoming] (last visited Aug. 23, 2025); see also Vand. Inst. for Clinical & Translational Rsch., What is the All of Us Research Program?, https://victr.vumc.org/data-resource-all-of-us/ [perma cc forthcoming] (last visited Aug. 23, 2025); Alessandro Blasimme, Effy Vayena & Ernst Hafen, Democratizing Health Research Through Data Cooperatives, 31 Phil. & Tech. 473, 473 (2018); Gabriele et al., supra note 12.
[15] Vinden Wylde et al., Cybersecurity, Data Privacy and Blockchain: A Review, 3 SN Computer Science 127 (2022); see Igor Calzada, Data Co-Operatives Through Data Sovereignty, 4 Smart Cities 1158, 1162 (2021).