One easy free-market-friendly libertarian-approved solution would give citizens and residents of California a choice - your data can be kept private, or you can get a sizeable precentage of the value if you opt-in to data collection and sharing.

I'm not really sure how much this would be worth - and would it scale? How much value does the data from a worker at the lower end of the labor pool wage scale have in relation to that from the C-suite members of a mid-size corporation? Should we all have the right to climb up on the block and sell our data to the highest bidders, while collecting the majority of the profits from the transaction ourselves? It might make more sense to sell your data in five-year future contracts - opportunity to renegotiate rates now and then makes sense.

It's informational data, and in worlds like the commodity markets, information is invaluable. Traders have access to everything from satellite data of oil tankers to insider information from drilling rigs and they pay a lot to keep their data current and accurate, get access to proprietary databases and even nation-state classified sources.

Thus, if human data is so valuable, the humans generating the data should be the ones collecting the majority of its financial value if they opt to sell it. From this view, the real crime here is theft of worker value by data collectors and resellers in a monopolistic market system.