Your Footsteps, Their Profits: Why It’s Time to Bring Community Assets Home

Recently, a local telecom provider began selling something most of us did not realise we were giving away: our own movement.

Where we walk. When we pass through an area. How long we remain there. All of this is aggregated from ordinary subscribers going about their day, then packaged and sold to organisations that want to know where crowds gather.

There is probably nothing illegal about it. Consent is probably buried somewhere in a terms-of-service update that nobody reads.

And that is precisely the problem: once again, we are the product.

This is not really about one telecom company. It is about a pattern that has become so common that we barely notice it anymore.

Walk through a town square and you become a data point. Open an app or use a “free” platform, and you generate value that flows upwards to shareholders. It rarely flows sideways to the people who actually created it.

The community supplies the raw material. A company extracts it, refines it and sells it to the market at a profit.

The community receives nothing in return—unless we count the privilege of being tracked slightly more efficiently.

Consider “the cloud”, a name that sounds almost communal. In reality, it represents some of the most tightly controlled and revenue-concentrating infrastructure on the planet.

The same pattern can be seen with data brokers and platforms that mine our attention. It also appears in services that were once treated as public goods but are now operated primarily to generate returns for investors rather than to serve the people who depend on them.

The input is social. The output is privatised.

Every time.

It may be easy to dismiss the issue when it involves footfall data. After all, who really cares if a retailer knows what time a particular street becomes busy?

But what happens when the same principle is applied to health information, energy consumption, transport patterns and, increasingly, our conversations with artificial intelligence systems?

All of this information can be harvested and monetised in much the same way.

Each individual example may appear insignificant. Added together, however, they represent an enormous and largely invisible transfer of value from communities to capital.

With every data point collected, the company becomes smarter, richer and more entrenched. The community that generated the information receives little more than a better-targeted advertisement.

We would object if a company pumped water from a public well and sold it back to the town without offering anything in return—although, regrettably, we sometimes permit that too.

Yet we accept the informational equivalent almost every day.

The alternative to this predicament is not new. We have simply stopped using it.

Cooperatives are not a nostalgic throwback. They are one of the few ownership models designed specifically to keep value within the communities where it is created.

Imagine a community-owned telecom cooperative. It could still sell aggregated insights; that part would not necessarily change.

What would change is who controls the organisation, who participates in its governance and who benefits from its profits: the subscribers, residents and small business owners who generate the value—not distant shareholders on another continent.

This model is already proven.

Credit unions have operated according to this logic for more than a century. Rural electricity and broadband cooperatives have built entire networks through community ownership. Community land trusts are applying similar principles to housing, while platform cooperatives are beginning to bring the model into digital work and data.

The cooperative model works.

What is missing is the political, commercial and social will to apply it to the assets increasingly defining modern life: data, connectivity and digital infrastructure.

There are several practical places to start.

We can evaluate data-generating infrastructure—such as telecom networks, transport systems and utility grids—not only according to efficiency, but also according to who governs it and who profits from it.

We can treat aggregated, community-generated data as a shared asset that requires meaningful consent and benefit-sharing, rather than as a free by-product that regulators simply wave through.

We can fund cooperative ownership structures seriously, instead of praising them as admirable ideas while providing no meaningful financial support.

We can also ask our local service providers directly:

What are you doing with the information we generate?

Who benefits from it?

Where does the value ultimately go?

We are at a turning point.

Artificial intelligence systems, connected devices and sensor-based infrastructure are multiplying rapidly. As a result, the amount of value communities generate—often without even realising it—is increasing dramatically.

Left unchallenged, that value will continue to flow in one direction.

None of this is radical. It is an old principle adapted to modern circumstances:

What a community builds together, a community should own and govern together.

The people generating the data are not raw material. They are stakeholders.

Our ownership structures should finally begin treating them as such.