Legal Dogmatics of the Model of “Paying with Personal Information”

In the era of digital economy, Internet platforms usually do not charge users money for their services, but instead request users to grant consent to the extensive commercial use of a large amount of personal information. The essence of this “free” service is to “pay with personal information”, and a bilateral onerous contractual relationship is established between the users and the platform, in which the users are obliged to “grant consent + provide personal information”. Under the model of “paying with personal information”, the users’ consent is no longer a revocable unilateral consent, but a contractual license. The recognition of the practice of information subjects’ consent as a contractual license is not only conducive to the comprehensive protection of the rights and interests of information subjects as consumers, but also contributes to the vigorous development of the digital economy.