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Allocating Personal Data Rights: Toward Resolving Conflicts of Interest over Personal Data

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Abstract

Conflicts of interest over personal data arise from the variety of legal subjects involved and the value of personal data in today’s information society. This article attempts to resolve such conflicts of interest by examining the possibility of allocating data rights which balance competing interests. It suggests that the allocation of personal data rights should follow certain rules to ensure that the interests of relevant data subjects are protected. By examining the reasons for conflicts of interest over personal data, as well as the subjects and substance of such conflicts, the article puts forward an appropriate approach for allocating personal data rights by balancing the interests of different data subjects. For source data subjects, personal data rights are allocated, to protect personal information and data property interests; for data controllers, data property rights are allocated to protect their data property interests when they make data valuable, meanwhile liabilities are allocated to data controller, in case of infringing on other subjects’ interests; for data supervisors (mostly the government), allocating the right to protect or make use of data on behalf of public interests and the power of supervising data use industry; for the data users, they are allocated data property rights with the consents of source data subjects and data controllers when make use of data.

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Notes

  1. The introduction to the company on its website reads as follows: “As a professional AI data service provider, Datatang is dedicated to providing data collection and data product services for global AI enterprises through three service modes: massive AI data sets with its own copyrighted [massive shared copyright AI datasets], AI data customization service and data annotation platform.” See: https://en. datatang. com/en/index. (visited on September 27, 2019).

  2. RadioShack Corporation Filed for Bankruptcy in 2015, Case # 15–10,197, filed in the U. S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. See further Attorney General Laxalt Joins Objection to Sale of Consumers’ Personal Data in RadioShack Bankruptcy Case. Targeted News Service; Washington, D. C., 26 Mar 2015.

  3. Heck and Karl Larenz admitted that the essence of the theory of interest measurement is conflict resolution. Heck believed that the highest task of the law is to balance interests. Larenz considered that in order to reconstruct the legal order after a conflict between two rights, it is necessary for one right to give way to the other or for concessions to be made to both rights to achieve a balance. See Heck’s lecture at Frankfurt University in 1932 and Larenz’s masterpiece, Methodenlehre.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law, Anhui Normal University, Wuhu, China

    Xiaolan Yu

  2. Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China

    Xiaolan Yu

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  1. Xiaolan Yu
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Correspondence to Xiaolan Yu.

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Conflict of interest

The author is grateful to the 67th Ph.D. Project “Research on the Conflict of Shareholders and the Governance of Private Law in the Public Use of Government Data” (Project No. 2020M671083). It is also the ongoing research result of the Sub-topic “Research on Technology Governance of Intellectual Property in Digital Cyberspace” of the National Social Science Foundation’s Major Project “Research on Intellectual Property Governance System in Digital Cyberspace” (19 ZDA164).

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Yu, X. Allocating Personal Data Rights: Toward Resolving Conflicts of Interest over Personal Data. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 14, 549–563 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-021-00330-w

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