Data is being heralded as ‘the new oil’ but the legal, commercial, ethical and regulatory areas are increasingly complex, and phenomena like metadata tracking and the proliferation of data-gathering devices (the so-called ‘internet of things’) are only making things more complex. As the number of providers sharing data and their respective data sets increases, the complexities around what information is quarantined and what is shared, and who owns what and can use what, exponentially increase.