Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Brave New Open Data World?
From the abstract: "There is a growing tendency to release all sorts of data on the Internet. The greater availability of interoperable public data catalyses secondary use of such data, which leads to growth of information industries and better government transparency. Open data policies may at the same time be in conflict with the individual’s right to information privacy as protected by the EU Privacy Directive. This directive sets rules to the processing of personal data. Technological developments and the increasing amount of publicly available data are, however, blurring the lines between non-personal and personal data. Open data does not seem to be personal data on first glance because it is anonimyzed or aggregated. However, it may become personal data by combining it with other publicly available data. In this article, we argue that these developments extend the reach of EU privacy regulation to open data and may obstruct the implementation of open data policies in the EU. " Read more
