Legal Responses to the Commodification of Personal Data in the Era of Big Data: The Paradigm Shift from Data Protection towards Data Ownership

Background

The transition from the traditional economic model of neoliberal markets in the post-industrial era to “informational capitalism” (Cohen 2016), based on a data-driven economy has challenged conventional legal thinking. Often referred to as the oil of the 21^st century, data has become a valuable asset for the key stakeholders offering services in the digital era. At the same time, the law has been struggling to cope with this overbroad scope and definition of “data”, as it does not purely address the user’s privacy, being able to reveal one’s identity but it can also be valorized and thus imply property entitlements for user generated data. The following section explores how data can be legally assessed during various stages of processing: in doing so, it is intended to demonstrate how big data appears to be an area not overly addressed by the current regulative framework, which focusses mostly on data protection and appears to bear little attention to how data can gain monetary value and thus allow for property based claims.