Winter 2022, December, Volume 1

As consumers worldwide increasingly entrust online platforms with their sensitive user data, regulation (both in terms of specific privacy or data protection rules, and antitrust rules) have scrambled to keep pace. Data has famously been called the “oil” of the new economy. Just like oil, raw data is not valuable in and of itself. Rather, its value is created when it is collated quickly, completely, and accurately, and connected to other, similarly relevant data. How such data is used and shared between companies is therefore key to its value, and this raises obvious privacy (and competition) problems.