Trade secrets vs. data privacy: navigating the overlap with GDPR and other data protection laws                        

  Author: Sahaj Agarwal, a Law Student at Jindal Global Law School

Contemporary digital economy is based on the unyielding aggregation, processing, and commercialization of information that creates a deep jurisprudential tension between intellectual property rights, namely trade secrets, and basic data privacy systems. Although the law of trade secrets, which is based on the TRIPS Agreement and local equity, encourages innovation by providing business organizations with commercial exclusivity to confidential information, data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and India Data privacy Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, give individuals the right to access, manage, and delete their personal data. This research paper is a critical analysis of systemic overlap and the inherent conflicts of these divergent streams of law. It discusses the philosophical conflict between utilitarian property rights and human dignity by examining how these two theoretical foundations are reflected in modern controversies in the law regarding transparency in algorithms. This paper will assess the recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) jurisprudence, especially the Schufa case, to show how commercial secrecy is now being questioned more than ever where it interferes with the right to know, the right to explanation. Besides, it also examines the duality of proprietary databases, using the Indian common law paradigms in the case of Navigators Logistics and Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak to expose the issues of data portability and the Right to be Forgotten. The paper states that trade secrets and data privacy do not exclude each other but must comply with stringent tests of judicial proportionality. Finally, it suggests a unified structure that uses Privacy- Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and regulatory sandboxes, in which the safeguarding of commercial innovation does not overwhelm basic data rights.