Amy Klobuchar suggests taxing companies making money off user data

Minnesota senator and presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar has floated the idea of taxing tech companies when they exploit user data. Platforms like Facebook “use us, and we’re their commodity, and we’re not getting anything out of it,” Klobuchar said today during a SXSW interview with Recode co-founder Kara Swisher. “When they sell our data to someone else, well, maybe they’re going to have to tell us so we can put some kind of a tax on it.”

Klobuchar acknowledged that she was simply floating an option, not putting forward a detailed policy prescription. And the idea isn’t nearly as mainstream as passing privacy legislation or toughening antitrust policies, two areas Klobuchar also emphasized — saying she wanted to scrutinize whether companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google had suppressed competition. But she said a major problem with the tech landscape was that “we just thought ‘Oh, we can just put our stuff on there and it’s fine,’ and they’re making money off of us.”