Data Rights Glossary
A plain-language reference to the terms, laws, and mechanisms that shape human data rights in the age of AI.
- Human data rights
- The rights people hold over the personal data they generate — to own it, be fairly compensated when it creates value, have transparency about its use, and opt out of AI training.
- Data dividend
- A recurring payment to individuals in return for the value their data generates for AI and platform companies — a data-era analogue to a resource royalty or basic income. See fair compensation.
- Data provenance
- The traceable record of where data came from and how it moved through a system — the audit trail that lets a claim or model output be attributed back to its source. Central to the right to transparency.
- Machine unlearning
- Techniques that aim to remove the influence of specific data from an already-trained AI model without retraining it from scratch. It remains an unsolved research problem, which limits the practical "right to be forgotten" for AI. See opt out.
- Opt out
- Withdrawing your data from AI training. Today this is done platform-by-platform (e.g. ChatGPT Data Controls) and via robots.txt for websites; the coalition advocates a single enforceable mechanism. See the opt-out guide.
- GPTBot / ClaudeBot
- The named web crawlers operated by OpenAI (GPTBot) and Anthropic (ClaudeBot) to gather training and retrieval data. Site owners can allow or block them in
robots.txt, alongside Google-Extended, CCBot, and PerplexityBot. - Collective licensing
- A model in which a group negotiates, on behalf of many individuals or creators, the terms and payment for use of their data — similar to how music performing-rights organizations license songs. One route to fair compensation.
- Data-funded universal basic income (UBI)
- The idea that because AI generates wealth from mass-scale public data, citizens should receive a regular payment or dividend in return. One of the mechanisms discussed for realizing fair compensation.
- GDPR
- The EU's General Data Protection Regulation — grants rights of access, rectification, erasure, and portability over personal data. It establishes partial control rather than full ownership.
- CCPA / CPRA
- California's Consumer Privacy Act and its amendment, the Privacy Rights Act — give residents the right to know, delete, and opt out of the sale or sharing of their personal information.
- EU AI Act
- The European Union's landmark AI regulation, which (among other measures) requires providers of general-purpose AI models to publish summaries of the data used to train them — a step toward the right to transparency. See the timeline.
- EU Data Act
- A 2025 EU regulation extending data-access and data-sharing rights to industrial and non-personal data, reinforcing data sovereignty across the economy. Covered in our news.
- Data sovereignty
- The principle that data is subject to the laws and governance of the individual, organization, or nation that generates it — and that people should retain meaningful control over their own data.
- Federated learning
- A machine-learning approach that trains a shared model across many devices or servers holding local data, without moving the raw data to a central location — a privacy-preserving alternative to centralized data collection. Covered in our news.
- Text-and-data-mining (TDM) reservation
- A rights-holder mechanism, recognized under EU copyright law, for reserving works from automated text-and-data-mining — including AI training — often expressed in machine-readable form on a website.
Go deeper
Read the four rights, the practical guides, and the FAQ.