Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang speaks during National Action Network 2019 convention at Sheraton Times Square. (Photo: lev radin/Shutterstock.com) Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang speaks during National Action Network 2019 convention at Sheraton Times Square. (Photo: lev radin/Shutterstock.com)

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.