## 2 Characteristics of Data and Resulting Consequences for Data Administration
Since it is almost impossible to anticipate this need in advance, data administration must be able to manage and process data as cost-effectively as possible, since it is not feasible to distinguish between worthless and valuable data. VIII. Data can be manipulated indiscernibly: Tangible commodities are usually relatively resilient to manipulation. For instance, crude oil could be deliberately contaminated, but this can be detected and subsequently purified. In the worst case, sources can be corrupted to such an extent that they become unusable. However, this problem is far worse in the case of intangible commodities and, in particular, data. Data can be manipulated indiscernibly and, above all, in a targeted manner. Malicious parties can falsify data either in their favor or to harm the data consumers, blend fake data with real data, or withhold data. This can happen both when transferring data from the sources and while storing the data. Since the manipulation generally goes unnoticed, it is also almost impossible to undo the contamination. To make matters worse, besides third parties, data producers themselves may have an interest in falsifying the data they provide. Measures must therefore be taken to verify the authenticity and genuineness of data and to prevent subsequent manipulation. * _Data may be subject to special restrictions:_ Tangible commodities such as oil are primarily subject to rights related to ownership. Whoever owns the oil well may extract, refine, and sell the oil. With regard to the last two issues, there may be further restrictions, e.g., regarding the environmental friendliness of the refining process or regarding sanctions that affect exports to certain customers. However, these restrictions always relate to the product as a whole. With data, the situation is much more complex. In particular, when it comes to personal data, the data subject (which is not necessarily the data producer) has far-reaching rights when it comes to data processing. For instance, the consent of the data subject is required for the processing of such data. This consent can be withdrawn at any time. However, even with the consent of the data subject, there are further restrictions to be observed when processing personal data, such as a purpose limitation or data minimization. Furthermore, the data subject has the right to request that all data about him or her be erased. Yet, this applies not only to the raw data themselves, but also to all data products in which the raw data in question have been incorporated. Data administration must therefore take measures to implement such privacy rights. These include, e.g., the use of privacy filters that either anonymize data or reduce the amount of contained information to a required minimum, or provenance mechanisms that make it possible to trace which raw data has been incorporated into which data products. * _Data require new trading concepts and infrastructures:_ When trading tangible commodities, the main problem is to build distribution infrastructures that bring the goods to international trading partners in time. This is not the case with data. Thanks to the Internet, data can be made available in an instant anywhere in the world. Explicit distribution channels therefore do not need to be established. With data, however, three novel trade problems arise: First, due to the large amount of constantly emerging data, there is an elevated risk of losing track of the available data. However, potential customers must be able to find data that are relevant to them. Second, customers must be able to rely on the provided data. This means that they must be able to use the data for their purposes and that there are no conflicting confidentiality or privacy restrictions. For instance, if privacy filters have to be applied to the data in advance, this contaminates the data and reduces the quality of the data. Data administration must therefore ensure that a customer can rely on the authenticity and quality of the data despite the use of such privacy techniques.