From property to power: Why governance, not ownership, will define personal data in the age of AI

In Pixar’s Finding Nemo, a flock of seagulls gather on a dock, fixating on whatever morsel of food drifts into view, each frantically crying ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’ This comic scene captures the modern discourse around personal data: corporations, governments and individuals alike stake claims of exclusive ownership. Yet, the analogy quickly unravels. Unlike oil or land, data is non-rivalrous, co-generated and infinitely replicable. Attempts to force it into property categories generate contradictions: who owns a single credit card transaction, or the fragment of a dataset that shapes an artificial intelligence (AI) model’s weights? This paper advances a clear thesis: in the age of AI, property framings collapse; only governance frameworks can reconcile rights, accountability and innovation. From the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD) to China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), modern regimes embed rights, lawful bases and accountability mechanisms, not ownership. The challenge intensifies in AI ecosystems where model ‘memory’ resists erasure and generates inferences far beyond original inputs. What endures, and what must guide the future, is governance based on autonomy by design. This paper departs from prior critiques of data ownership1 by situating the shift within a broader redistribution of institutional power across regulators, corporations and individuals, catalysed by the European Union’s (EU) post-2019 data acts. The argument therefore reframes data law not as property’s decline but as the constitutionalisation of governance. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.