Towards an international data governance framework

V. Carlino – G. Milani (edited by), The Principle of equality. New and Old Challenges, Series: Consulta OnLine – Rivista di diritto e giustizia costituzionale, 2024

This research examines the digital strategy of the European Union in the context of fostering digital development amidst social and democratic challenges exacerbated by the pandemic. It delves into the premise that technology is inherently biased, shaping human behaviors based on regulatory frameworks. The paper scrutinizes whether the Internet remains a space of equality and freedom as envisioned in its inception. Specifically, it evaluates the EU's response to these transformations, focusing on data governance. The discussion highlights the impact of big data control on societal inequalities and assesses the European Data Strategy's implementation to create data spaces promoting competition and human rights protection.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2019

Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences, and life chances but our very democracies. Expert international contributors consider political questions about data and the ways it provokes subjects to govern themselves by making rights claims. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, this book demonstrates that without understanding these conditions of possibility it is impossible to intervene in or to shape data politics. Aimed at academics and postgraduate students interested in political aspects of data, this volume will also be of interest to experts in the fields of internet studies, international studies, Big Data, digital social sciences, and humanities. ISBN: 9781138053250 (hbk) ISBN: 9781138053267 (pbk) ISBN: 9781315167305 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

This policy brief is part of the applied research A New World of Data, conducted between 2016 and 2017 by the Law and Technology Research Group of Fundação Getúlio Varga´s School of Law, São Paulo. It is based on empirical evidences about the use of data in the following economic sectors: (i) digital health, (ii) smart cities, and (iii) digital agriculture. The necessities and deficiencies highlighted by the case studies are then used as a basis to reflect on the current draft bills discussed at Brazilian Congress. This policy brief´s goal is to contribute to the legislative debate around a general data protection law in Brazil. Specifically, it serves as a short reflection on the main concepts concerning the topic: (i) definition of personal data, sensitive data, ownership, and anonymization, (ii) consent rules, and (iii) international transfer of data.

International Political Sociology, 2016

The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper is to outline a research agenda that can be used to raise a broader set of sociological and practice-oriented questions about the increasing datafication of international relations and politics. First, it proposes a way of conceptualizing big data that is broad enough to open fruitful investigations into the emerging use of big data in these contexts. This conceptualization includes the identification of three moments contained in any big data practice. Secondly, it suggests a research agenda built around a set of sub-themes that each deserve dedicated scrutiny when studying the interplay between big data and international relations along these moments. Through a combination of these moments and sub-themes, the paper suggests a roadmap for an international political sociology of the datafication of worlds.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

With growing use of data in international development, there is growing interest in data justice. One argument is that this must best be understood in terms of structural data justice (SDJ): the degree to which society contains and supports the data-related institutions, relations and knowledge systems necessary for realisation of the values comprised in a good life. But only hypothetical models of SDJ have been proposed to date. The purpose of this paper is to take one of the proposed SDJ models and revise it on the basis of experience with field studies of big data and other new data streams in India and Kenya. Those field studies produced three tests of a data justice model, asking whether it can encompass: the impact of social structure on data systems; the impact of data systems on social structure; and the role of datafication and related technological affordances. On the basis of the three tests, a revised and improved model of structural data justice is developed, which is commended as a conceptual frame to use in future research on dataintensive development. The model is shown to incorporate all types of data justice, and to be of particular value to critical data studies in understanding how both "power over" and "power to" are exercised in data-intensive development. The model is also the basis for derivation of a "Data-Justicefor-Development Manifesto", which can be used to guide development policy and practice.

he Snowden revelations about National Security Agency surveillance, starting in 2013, along with the ambiguous complicity of internet companies and the international controversies that followed provide a perfect segue into con- temporary conundrums of surveillance and Big Data. Attention has shifted from late C20th information technologies and networks to a C21st focus on data, currently crystallized in ‘‘Big Data.’’ Big Data intensifies certain surveillance trends associated with information technology and networks, and is thus implicated in fresh but fluid configurations. This is considered in three main ways: One, the capacities of Big Data (including metadata) intensify surveillance by expanding interconnected datasets and analytical tools. Existing dynamics of influence, risk-management, and control increase their speed and scope through new techniques, especially predictive analytics. Two, while Big Data appears to be about size, qualitative change in surveillance practices is...

Information Technology for Development, 2019

The 'data revolution' marks a time of growing interest and investment in data-big, small, or otherwise. Critical attention to data is also proliferating, exposing the diverse ways that data produces inequality of opportunity and harm in society. This paper draws the nascent field of critical data studies into conversation with emerging narratives in data-for-development (D4D) to advance the conceptualization of data inequalities, explaining how they both align with and diverge from core tropes of digital inequalities research-and why this matters for development. The paper examines the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to three 'data divides'-access to data, representation of the world as data, and control over data flows-through examples of digital identity systems and national data infrastructures, user-generated data, and personal behavioral data produced through corporate platforms. This understanding provides a basis for future research, practice, and policymaking on data-related (in)equalities in development contexts and beyond.

The environment in which public policy is made has entered a period of dramatic change. Widespread use of digital technologies, the Internet and social media means both citizens and governments leave digital traces that can be harvested to generate big data. Policy-making takes place in an increasingly rich data environment, which poses both promises and threats to policy-makers. Helen Margetts, 2013 In just four decades, the systems of statistics in Africa went through three seismic waves. The first of these occurred immediately in the aftermath of decolonisation. During this time, Africa experienced a decade of dramatic rise in the development of its systems of national statistics, particularly in the implementation of population censuses and household surveys. This lecture focuses on the emerging need for good social and economic data that can help African nations develop statistical systems that will provide on time information on socioeconomic development that will affect resource mobilization and allocation more proactively. The research questions addressed the relevance Big Data may have to the huge range of public policy questions. Big data challenges policy makers because it can offer real-time results that require a rapid, adaptive policy in return. Big data is often a rich data, offering refined data points and high quality observations that span different levels of analysis and the data is often fragmented, so researchers spend time trying to locate and access diverse data sets. The data requires translation – between languages, and between disciplines. Data-ism is a recently coined term for a kind of data philosophy or ideology. Big data refers to a process that is used when traditional data mining and handling techniques cannot reveal the insights and meaning of the underlying data. Data that is unstructured or time sensitive or simply very large cannot be processed by relational database engines. The lecture further discusses data modelling, data augmentation, algebraic modelling & algorithm and research initiatives on Big Data and Public Policy. It further elaborates on the promises and threats of big data for public policy-making how big data has changed public policy. Data transformation deals with turning numbers into knowledge, conceptualizing data management: the information value chain mapping the flow of data, matching your needs to the software and triangulation.

The increasing availability of 'data fumes' (Thatcher, 2014) – data produced as a byproduct of people's use of technological devices and services – has both political and practical implications for the way people are seen and treated by the state and by the private sector. Yet the data revolution is so far primarily a technical one: the power of data to sort, categorise and intervene has not yet been explicitly connected to a social justice agenda. In fact, while data-driven discrimination is advancing at exactly the same pace as data processing technologies, awareness and mechanisms for combating it are not. This paper posits that just as an idea of justice is needed in order to establish the rule of law, an idea of data justice is necessary to determine ethical paths through a datafying world. Based on three proposed pillars of a notion of data justice: (in)visibility, (dis)engagement with technology and antidiscrimination, I propose a vision that integrates positive with negative rights and freedoms. The resulting framework encourages us to debate both the basis of current data protection regulations and the growing assumption that being visible through the data we emit is part of the contemporary social contract.