The future of data governance
It’s time to move beyond individualistic approaches to data governance
The coronavirus pandemic should make us reflect on the future of data governance and the limitations of our existing approaches. No one questions the prominence of data in our society and its increasingly prominent role in all of its systems, including public health. But a “data-driven” approach takes on an entirely new meaning in an unparalleled global crisis of the nature of COVID-19. Many of us believe that data and data analytics will be the answer to this crisis — our way out — or that an app or sophisticated technological response will save us. If that is true, then we’d better plan to upgrade the way we relate to data too.
To date, we have almost exclusively thought about data governance through the lens of data privacy or, rather, “data protection” per European jurisprudence. The first data privacy-related laws emerged in national regulations in the 1970s, around the time when computers went from exclusively military-grade equipment to commercially available hardware. It was in the 1970s that governments in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere began keeping digital records and creating databases of information about their constituents, prompting the need to define the rights of individuals over the information in those databases.
