Oxford Business Law Blog

Ridiculously low ceilings on administrative fines hindered the effectiveness of EU data protection law for over twenty years. US tech giants may have seen these fines as a cost of doing business. Now...

The changes in the EU’s legislative framework concerning payment services have opened the way to a new era of payments in Europe. While the Payment Service Directive 2015/2355/EC (PSD2) is intended...

Since 25 May, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been directly applicable in all EU member states. Our recently published book, FinTech and Data Privacy in Germany deals with the...

Should traditional rules of contract law apply to transactions in markets for personal data involving consumers? The protection of consumer information in the United States (US) has followed a ‘...

Do you remember the last time you ‘sold’ your personal data for some digital content or digital services? Google, Uber, Facebook, Netflix, Spotify—you name it. They all accept data as a ‘payment’...

In our new working paper entitled ‘The Future of Data-Driven Finance and RegTech: Lessons from EU Big Bang II’ we argue that 2018 marked an important point in the evolution of finance: a Big Bang of...

On 11 September 2018, the European Court of Justice (‘ECJ’) heard arguments in Google, Inc. v CNIL, a case that concerns the territorial scope of European data protection law. Among the questions...

Numerous applications of ‘Big Data analytics’ drawing potentially troubling inferences about individuals and groups have emerged in recent years. Major internet platforms are behind many of the...

What the Cambridge Analytica debacle and the resulting U.S. Senate hearing revealed in no uncertain terms is that the U.S. does not have adequate data privacy laws. Despite the grandstanding by...

Benjamin Franklin famously said, ‘in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes’. However, when it comes to our digital deaths the old adage is far from true. On 18 June...

Trade in data is becoming crucial for economic growth in Europe. In this context, creating data ownership rights is one way to provide a clear legal framework for the emerging data economy. However,...

Within the academic community, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has triggered a lively debate regarding whether data subjects have a “right to explanation” of automated decisions made...

Blockchain technology is the new word on the street. A blockchain is in essence an append-only decentralized database that is maintained by a consensus algorithm and stored on multiple nodes (...

Reporters are in the habit of looking at emerging technologies in isolation when describing their benefits, and that’s certainly the case with biometrics, blockchains, smart contracts, artificial...

Cities throughout the world are becoming smarter thanks to AI, big data, the Internet of Things (‘IoT’), and, more recently, blockchain. Smart cities automate administrative decision-making with...

FinTech is rapidly transforming the financial services sector. Based on a broad range of different new technologies and innovations, it increasingly attracts the interest of national, global and...

The increasing pace of innovation in technology used for financial and banking services (“FinTech”) both raises alarm bells and brings high expectations. On the one hand, traditional banking players...