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Data have become a crucial element of today's economies and societies, which has in turn sparked a vivid debate on how data shall be regulated as resources out of both efficiency and fairness concerns. The European Union embarked on the ambitious project to create a 'European single market for data', thus turning data into tradable commodities through various initiatives including legislative ones. Data are an uneasy legal object and their role as resources cannot be easily untied from their other dimensions. In particular, data protection law (with the flagship GDPR) addresses the harms that data processing by others can cause to individuals identifiable through data and, ultimately, to democratic societies. A crucial question is thus whether EU data legislations geared toward the establishment of data markets can be squared with personal data protection. Based on her doctoral research, Charlotte Ducuing addresses this question with a novel and original approach based on commodification studies. A must-read to understand data legislation, its commodification dynamics and their impact on data protection law and to take a fresh perspective on the GDPR.

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