ABSTRACT
Personal data protections have become solidly rights-based in most jurisdictions, and personal data is seen as a form of private property over which subjects have rights to exclude others, as well as rights to use, abuse, and alienate ‘their’ data. It is common today for datum to provide the principal basis for all types of reasoning and calculation, and for data and information as pluralised, aggregated and mechanically and technologically processed stages of datum to provide principal sources of instructive knowledge. Mantras or cliches such as ‘data is the new oil’ shared across neoliberal capitalist and, increasingly, alternative market economies (i.e. China) provide obvious and colourful indicators of what is at stake from mass datafication and the proliferation of global data markets. Data and information are the ultimate mediators of experience and being in today's world, powerful yet not immutable sources of truth. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts in this book.
