description: "The title is a line from an article on international loans, but it's also an appropriate description for data dividends and pay-for-privacy."
---
The title is a line from Dearden's article, but it's also an appropriate description for data dividends and pay-for-privacy.
[Dearden, N. (2020, October 14). It's official, the global economy is a 'debtor's prison.' *New Internationalist.*](https://newint.org/features/2020/10/14/official-global-economy-debtors-prison)
> *Deep transformation of the debt system, long overdue, must fundamentally shift the balance between creditors and debtors. It is rank hypocrisy that private creditors who make a killing on ‘risky’ high-interest loans to lower-income countries still expect to get paid out when their gamble fails. Just as obscene is the way the IMF still forces austerity and liberalization on countries, as they have done for 40 years, as a condition of recycling their debt. Any solution needs to cut the power of both sorts of lenders.*
[Tsukayama, H. (2020, October 26). *Why getting paid for your data is a bad deal.* Electronic Frontier Foundation.](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/why-getting-paid-your-data-bad-deal)
> *Data dividends run down the wrong path to exercising control, and would dig us deeper into a system that reduces our privacy to just another cost of doing business. Privacy should not be a luxury. It should not be a bargaining chip. It should never have a price tag.*
