Whose data?
Privacy, personal data and the markets built on them. 16 publications, from 2021 to 2025.
All 16 publications
Newest first2025
European Digital Sovereignty: From Naïveté to Sustainability?
Two decades of hyperactive EU digital rule-making have not delivered “digital sovereignty,” but instead exposed a strategic naïveté: Brussels built a Digital Single Market that turbocharged non-European cloud and platform…
Statutory Obsolescence in the Age of Innovation: A Few Thoughts about GDPR
This article examines the problem of statutory obsolescence in the regulation of rapidly evolving technologies, with a focus on GDPR and generative AI.
The Regulation that Cried Wolf: Generative AI Training Data and the Challenge of Lawful Scale
This essay examines how the EU’s Digital Markets Act unintentionally reshapes the foundations of generative AI. By barring gatekeepers from relying on “legitimate interest” as a legal basis for processing personal data, the DMA…
Artificial Intelligence and Data Policies: Regulatory Overlaps and Economic Tradeoffs
Ginger Zhe Jin, Liad Wagman and Mengyi Zhong
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked intense policy debates worldwide on whether and how to govern the technology. Because data is an input into the training of modern AI systems, existing data regulations may…
Towards Efficient Data Sharing in Platform Markets
Bertin Martens, Geoffrey Parker, Georgios Petropoulos and Marshall Van Alstyne
Platforms collect valuable data that they do not share. Welfare then suffers as information asymmetry produces market failures. Current proposals to address this, however, fail because they grant access to an entity’s own data…
2024
Privacy or Antitrust First? Answering with Agent-Based Modeling
Legal scholars have long been interested in predicting the effects of new rules and standards. They have focused very little on the timing of regulation.
Generative AI: The Input Data Riddle
Generative AI systems create new outputs from input data. This raises an issue under existing laws, notably the GDPR, which focus chiefly on the conditions of data input.
Who Owns Generative AI Training Data? Mapping The Issue And A Way Forward
Access to data is a critical factor in developing and training artificial intelligence systems, and it plays a key role in AI progress. With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) – the type of AI that powers…
2023
Transparency by Design for Large Language Models
Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, Robert Mahari and Tobin South
Large Language Models – like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude – are akin to modern day oracles: they provide impressively useful outputs without revealing their reasoning.
The Proof Is In the Digital Enforcement Pudding
The past years have seen a tremendous rise in the volume of technology regulation in the European Union, with the Digital Services package, the AI Act, and the Data Act, as mere examples of the waves of digital regulation…
Competition law and privacy: extensive data acquisition as the “eye” of the problem
Traditionally, competition law and privacy have been seen as separate. GAFAM companies, however, have blurred the line between privacy and competition law regulation.
Dark Patterns Everything: An Update on a Regulatory Global Movement
Catalina Goanta and Cristiana Santos
In the past years, regulators around the world found a new focal point in addressing online information asymmetries. This focal point is dark patterns.
2022
Digital Consumers in European Law & Policy – Highlights #1
Consumer protection has been embedded in European policy since 1975 (Valant 2015, p. 4), and specifically in internal market policy since 1985 (Stuyck 2013, p. 3).
2021
Practical approaches to data in competition policy
Digital markets tend to become ‘winner-take-all’ markets in the first instance because of network effects whereby all participants benefit the more people join a platform.
Who Owns My Data?
This month’s revelations by Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen have brought renewed scrutiny to Big Tech. Haugen’s concerns relate not to the more common antitrust complaints about firms like Apple, Google, Amazon, and…
Do our Privacy Laws Strengthen the Already Strong?
The rise of the data economy increased concerns that some uses of data will infringe privacy and harm human dignity. Accordingly, privacy and data protection laws, which place limits on the right to collect, store, or use…