I tend to think that; if you do not own the data, then your rights in regards to the data, including rights to privacy of that data, are curtailed and likely non-existent.
Er -- this is clearly not true in the EU member states and other countries with strong data protection regimes. For that matter, it's not even true under certain U.S. laws (common law privacy, Fair Credit Reporting, PPA, COPPA, HPPA, etc., etc). So you might need to revise that thinking a little bit. DLB
Te question of course then becomes who owns the data and who has copyright to the data because those are different things.
To the extent that the data constitutes factual indicia, there will be no copyright because facts are not protectable under copyright at all. Some types of social science "data" (e.g., ethnographies) might be the subject of copyright. But I agree they are two different things. -- Dan L. Burk Chancellor's of Law University of California, Irvine 4500 Berkeley Place Irvine, CA 92697-8000 Voice: (949) 824-9325 Fax: (949)824-7336