Round and round the garden? Big data, small government and the balance of power in the information age

With personal data caught in a revolving door between private and public sector access, the privacy harms arising from the monitoring of individuals are more difficult to qualify than ever. Concepts of personal data that depend on identifiability permit practices where governments and companies can single out otherwise unidentified persons on the basis of their behaviour or interests. Concepts of harm that rely on evidence of material damage ignore the way in which access to data not only maintains but re-enforces existing power imbalances. This article will look at the notion of privacy harms from an EU perspective taking into account the discussions on the role of personal data in the context of the ongoing revision of the EU data protection framework