According to OECD in 2015, data is seen as the very infrastructure underlying the modern digital economy.
To succeed in the modern economic environment, businesses and technology models heavily rely on huge amount of data to thrive. Top companies like Facebook, amazon and google, some of the world’s digital economy leaders, are leaders in the business world due to their access to immense amount of data from their users which they then apply with their algorithms. it helps keep their market at a remarkably high level.
The questions of who owns the data, who gets access to it and whether data is something that can be owned in the first place is yet to be settled. In the same vein, it leaves us with so many questions on intellectual property rights.
Although there exists bits and pockets of legal frameworks for data, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which came in force in 2018 took centre stage and replaced most existing data laws, particularly Directives 95/46/EC (the Data Protection Directive) and 2002/58/EC (the ePrivacy Directive). Other new regimes like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which became operative on the 1st of January 2020 is also a subject of much discourse.