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Laws and Regulations

Laws and regulations define the expected compliance and behaviour that your initiative needs to follow when publishing open data, and include:

Data protection regulation: these rules can provide guidance on how to protect people and communities’ data rights and privacy. You might look at:

  • the main privacy or data protection laws, policies and regulatory authorities that impact the access, use or sharing of personal data and/or anonymised data between different organisations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union

  • any additional regulation related to consent when collecting and managing personal data in your field, such as those required in the open banking initiative or specific privacy protections around health data

  • the privacy or data protection laws and regulations governing the access and exchange of data between third parties across sectors and/or across borders.

Intellectual property laws: these are rules governing the intellectual property of data or data infrastructure. Find out:

  • whether any intellectual property legislation may be relevant to the use of data required

  • any requisite agreements and approaches to data licensing in the country you are looking at building infrastructure in, including a short review of a selection, and if adoption of government open data license is required

Sector-specific regulations: any applicable laws or regulations in relevant sectors that may impact on the access, use or sharing of data between third parties. Consider assessing sector-specific laws ruling how your initiative might collect, share or use sensitive data such as about an individual's health and finances.

Broader laws: any mandatory regulation on how data should be accessed, shared and used, while protecting socioeconomic and environmental rights of specific groups or communities, such as environmental, equality and competition laws.

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