In a bid to increase the amount of data available in Europe to compete with Asia and America, the European Commission introduced the idea of “data altruism”. Commissioner Thierry Breton has stated: "With the ever-growing role of industrial data in our economy, Europe needs an open yet sovereign single market for data,". Europe’s proposed Data Governance Act will allow business and research organisations to tap the potential of such vast data volumes.
A data lake is simply a large repository of data that is unstructured and un analysed that can receive contributions from many different sources, whether structured data from business processes or unstructured data from the Internet of Things (IoT) and social media. Users of the data can examine and sample whatever they want. Businesses that have used data lakes have been shown to improve organic sales growth by 9% by being able to perform better data analytics on their data (Lock).
Data associated with an individual should be regarded as private and treated in the same way as a tangible asset, that is it would be theft to take it without informed consent. GDPR in Europe only partially protects our data but it should be the default legal position (through regulation) that any attribute of an individual that is digitised (data) should be regarded as that persons property.