The European Right to Data Protection in Relation to Open Data

Abstract

The rationale underlying open data—unfettered technical and legal openness—is logically bound to clash with other rights, freedoms, and interests, when the latter regulate or impede information disclosure. The rights to privacy and to the protection of personal data, in particular, are amongst the starkest and most notable limits to open data. Privacy and data protection are often conflated, the latter misconstrued as a synonym of the former. Albeit historically connected, they are however two distinct fundamental rights within the EU legal framework. Privacy and data protection answer to partly overlapping and yet distinct rationales, each of which clashes with open data for different reasons. This chapter aims at disambiguating the right to privacy from the one to the protection of personal data within the EU fundamental rights framework, underlining the ways in which data protection relates to (and can clash with) the concept of open data.