We hope you enjoy this excerpt from Litigation Daily, the exclusive source for sharp commentary on mega court battles, winning strategies and the issues that obsess elite litigators. Law.com subscribers can sign up for The AmLaw Litigation Daily newsletter here. Anyone else can click here to subscribe.  

In the world of the internet, there's sort of a built-in assumption that if you're getting it for free, you and your personal information must be the product.

Tons of you-get-a-cool-service, we-get-your-data language has been cooked into the clickthrus, acknowledgments and consent buttons we all breeze past on our way to set up whatever cool new doodad we have found for our computer, tablet or smartphone.

Former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang has launched a campaign to try to rejigger that assumed arrangement and to try to get consumers paid for their personal data. His campaign, called the Data Dividend Project, takes the position that consumers should have a legal property interest in their personal data. This week Yang and the project called on lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner to back plaintiffs suing Google in a case pending before U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, which is poised to test whether personal data is property under California law.