Introducing our first articles: reflecting on data re-use, protection and governance

Today Data & Policy publishes its first set of peer-reviewed articles, which reflect upon the mechanisms needed to protect personal data in order to ethically realise the transformative potential of data science for innovations in policy and to serve the public good.

Like many more significant things, the plan to release these articles was disrupted by Covid-19. Originally, we had intended to coincide our first publications with the now-postponed AI UK event organised by one of our partners, the Alan Turing Institute.

Though not directly related to the pandemic, we publish them now to contribute to the heightened deliberation and study of the value and risks of using data for public decision-making.

The outbreak of Covid-19 has highlighted both the promise of data and data-driven technology, and the urgent need for data governance. We have seen numerous examples of responsible data re-use and open data access, including the availability of pre-prints and peer-reviewed papers on Covid-19 and the mining and mapping of these resources. Human intelligence is being augmented by machine intelligence in order to extract insights from data to help predict and model outbreaks. However, action is needed to build the data infrastructure to tackle pandemics and other social and environmental threats. And the tracking of movement through mobile data to prevent the spread of the disease has raised concerns about its impact on individual privacy.

The papers we have reviewed and packaged for release reflect on data re-use, governance and protection along the following spectrum:

• An article by Giorgia Bincoletto engages with the context of cross-border access to personal health data in the European Union, in the form of interoperable Electronic Health Records, and investigates the data protection issues that need to inform future EU strategies for digital healthcare.
• Swee Leng Harris’s report introduces Data Protection Impact Assessments as a framework for helping us know whether government use of data is legal, transparent and upholds human rights.
• A paper by Gefion Theurmer and colleagues distinguishes between data trusts and other ways of facilitating data sharing and emphasises the need for systems and workflows designed with data protection in mind.
• Jacqueline Lam and colleagues propose a proxy that integrates fine-grained data from satellites and other sources to understand environmental inequality and socio-economic disparities in China, and also reflect on the importance of safeguarding data privacy and security.

Data & Policy is a platform dedicated to the full range of “policy-data interactions”, publishing contributions that consider how systems of policy and data relate to one another. Over the next few weeks we will be publishing further papers that illustrate the extent of this scope.

You are invited to submit your research, case studies and discussion papers for review; we also welcome contributions to this blog, and proposals for special thematic collections.