Journal of Guangzhou University (Social Science Edition). 2024, 23(6): 73-84.
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Personal data, generated through cooperation of multiple agents, carries characteristics of shareability, non-exclusivity and non-excludability. Its impact exhibits clear externalities and spillover effects. These characteristics indicate that personal data has a public nature. The public nature of personal data not only carries specific moral principles and ideals, but also requires the establishment of certain normative order, which needs to be defined from two dimensions: substantive publicness and formal publicness. Relationships and boundary between ″ publicness / privateness″, especially the balance be- tween individual protection and public interests, are the key functioning factors to understand the public nature of personal data. Following the interpretive path of ″public / private″ distinction, we can understand the connotation, the limitations and the normative issues of the public nature from the three perspectives of rights, structure, and ability. In governance practice, the individual self-determination logic of in- formed consent mechanism and the market logic of platform autonomy both treat personal data as a right frame and adopt the private law approach for its regulation, which makes it difficult to ensure the efficient implementation of the public nature. Therefore, future data governance and legislation should focus on establishing a collaborative governance system that integrates public and private laws and connects the public and private sectors, introduce national logic for moderate control and intervention, promote relevant ethics and norms of publicness, and consider structurally embedding ″upstream links″ such as data code design. However, no matter how significant the public value of data may be, the individual protection behind data cannot be forgotten.