Article by Christopher Graziul and Cheryl M. Danton: “In March 2025, the European Union published the European Health Data Space (EHDS) regulation, creating a legal framework that will make the electronic health records of roughly 450 million residents available for secondary use by March 2029, including commercial product development, pharmaceutical research, and AI training (Regulation (EU) 2025/327, 2025). The system defaults to inclusion: citizens must opt out, and, currently, the opt-out is all-or-nothing, making no distinction between academic research and commercial pharmaceutical development. Seventeen leading scholars have warned that the framework risks enabling corporations to extract value from population health data without equitable benefit-sharing, producing a system where citizens bear both the data burden and the cost of products developed from it (Marelli et al., 2023). That is, the EHDS does not merely regulate existing sensitive open data. Rather, it creates a new category where governments convert private health records into commercially accessible information through legislative mandate.
This is the commodification of sensitive open data in real time. In a previous article, we addressed the governance challenge of sensitive open data: how to balance transparency and protection for personal data in public records like police radio transmissions and public health records (Danton & Graziul, 2026). This piece asks a different question: whose economic interests does inadequate governance serve? The answer, from Washington to Brussels to New Delhi, involves a global data brokerage industry that treats public records and government-collected personal data as raw material for commercial extraction (Grand View Research, n.d…(More)”.
