The EU General Data Protection Regulation: Toward a Property Regime for Protecting Data Privacy

Abstract

This Comment considers the new EU draft regulation on data privacy - especially its controversial provision establishing a "right to be forgotten" - and argues that the regulation implicitly creates the kind of propertized data regime that scholars proposed and debated a decade ago. The Comment identifies the key conceptual features of a data property regime, explains how the draft regulation implicitly embodies these features, and compares this property-centric framing to the human-rights framing that tends to dominate discussions of data privacy.

Keywords: Information Privacy, Right to Be Forgotten, Personal Data, General Data Protection Regulation, European Union, Property, Intellectual Property