This paper examines “data prosumer” as an ideological construct essential to contemporary capitalism, framing users as virtual data producers who leverage personal data to assert privacy rights and engage in market activities. This abstraction helps commodify social interactions, reducing diverse human activities to exchangeable data units. While personal data is governed by individual rights, non-personal data is appropriated by governments to create data markets that support visions of digital sovereignty in the global economy. The paper explores the reduction of labor to data prosumers in AI governance, emphasizing how digital labor markets exacerbate socio-political inequalities and informal labor conditions, especially across the Global Majority. It critiques the global political economy’s reification of individuals as “data populations” and reintroduces class analysis to challenge data commodification amid generative AI’s mystification of labor. Finally, it argues that the push for digital sovereignty through data ownership obscures the exploitation inherent in capitalist, data-driven expansion.