Constructing a remedy for data hoards

This article considers how a constructive data trust—a court order that someone holds property for the benefit of another—might offer a reparative solution in privacy and data governance cases. This proposal is situated within an algorithmic reparative framework, which seeks not only to compensate for individual privacy harms but to redress the structural inequities and ill-gotten gains inherent in massive data collection. While scholars have increasingly advocated for data trusts as voluntary governance models to manage information flow, this article distinguishes its contribution by proposing the constructive data trust as an equitable remedy rather than a mere administrative structure. By repurposing this traditional legal instrument, we can transition from a defensive posture of data protection toward a proactive model of data reparation that restores the benefits of data hoards to the communities from which they were extracted.