Data Owner

A data owner is the person or role accountable for a set of data — what is collected, who has access, and how it is used.

A data owner is a governance role, not a technical title; not necessarily whoever stores the data, but whoever decides about it and is accountable for it. Its importance shows when responsibility is fuzzy: if it is unclear who owns a data set, no one makes a firm decision about its quality, access and deletion, and ownerless data grows both low-quality and high-risk over time. In privacy this role ties to the split between “controller” and “processor”: the controller decides why and how data is processed, the processor acts only on the controller's instruction. Naming a data owner is the first step of any serious data governance, because without a defined owner, policies stay only on paper.