They say data is the new oil, and countries are trying to figure out how to control it.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dremalli.

It's impossible to quantify the amount of data generated by citizens around the world.

With no mistake, though, data is a commodity, and not just to companies that monetize it,

but also to governments making laws around how to protect it, who can access it, even where

to store it.

These choices are guided by how leaders think data can advance their national interests,

according to Jillian D. Bold, who just did an analysis on this for the Center for Data

Innovation.

She compared data policies in China, the UK, the European Union, Singapore, and India.

On one end of the spectrum would be China, and they are using data to exert social control.

And obviously, that also includes economic nationalism and data protection, and using

data as an economic resource.

And India is not really quite as interested, I would say, in the social control aspect,

and they kind of take the more Western view of consumer privacy, and they do have different

policies that protect consumer privacy.

But at the same time, they also have this sort of interesting non-personal and data as

a kind of a development resource.

So that would be the second bucket would kind of be the countries that are using data

as a development resource.

And so I would say that China kind of falls in that bucket a bit.

...