Approaches to Publicly Available Data Regulation: a Comparative Analysis

The research is aimed at investigating the problem of publicly available personal data regulation with an objective to determine worldwide tendencies within this sphere and to pinpoint possible variations of national legislation reform in this field. The author examines theoretical aspects of publicly available personal data regulation by the means of personal data legislation and general information regulation of the Russian Federation and also conducts a comparative analysis of legal regime of publicly available personal data in the European Union, in the United States and several Asian states, primarily Singapore. The major aim of the theoretical part of the study is to specify the definition of publicly available personal data, distinguish the concept among other similar legal phenomena like publicly available information (under the Russian Federation law) and determine the main sources of publicly available personal data. All of these questions are referred in the first chapter of the thesis. The second chapter is of a more practically applied nature. It analyzes the rights and duties of the data subject and the controller of publicly available personal data, reveals the conditions and legal basis for access publicly available personal data, particularly in social networks. The methodology employed involves perusing the regulatory documents of the leading social network services. The result of the research suggests that the most effective way of reforming Russian personal data legislation concerning publicly available data will be liberalization of publicly available data processing in a lawful manner by bona fide controllers and processors even if further processing veers from the purpose of original disclosure of personal data in question. In fact, this means extending the regime of publicly available information completely to publicly available personal data regarding collection and access. The use of publicly available personal data may be limited in cases where there is a risk of a substantial violation of the data subjects' rights within such use. Given the provisions of social networks legal agreements that any information, to which the subject has not restricted access, is considered publicly available information, the its collection for the purpose of indexing it by data analysis products should not be impeded within the means of protection under intellectual property law.