UK Data Protection Reform | Part 1: From Protection to Participation
By Georgia Meyer (LSE)
In the first part of this two-part blog, prompted by the proposal to reform the UK’s data protection laws, Georgia Meyer (MPhil/PhD candidate at the LSE) discusses the tensions at work in the current framing of the ‘data economy’ and the ambitious projects to reimagine this concept. Part 2, which discusses the responses to the consultation process about the new legislation, can be found here.
On Friday 17 June the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published the response to the government’s ‘Data: a new direction’ consultation. This is ahead of the imminent release of the Data Reform Bill, a post-Brexit piece of legislation designed to redefine the UK’s data economy outside of the EU and the GDPR. Navigating the tensions implicit in the twin goals of growth and protection — or growth versus protection — are the poles between which emergent ‘data economy’ ideological battlegrounds are forming. Yet this framing is limiting.
The embedding of personal data as means to achieve economic growth presents just one paradigm of relations for how we might conceive the nature and role of ‘personal data’. Other well established framings are ‘data for public good’ which is positioned as an uncontroversially happy bedfellow to the economic growth narrative in UK government policy documents. Increasingly personal data is also positioned within discourses on national security.
Whilst these framings rest upon quite different ontological assumptions about the nature of ‘personal data’ — they have in common a limited scope for individuals to contribute to the debate. Our proximity to these discussions is neutered since value-defining apparatuses (whether private or public) are located at a statistically informed macro-level within which individual capacities and contributions are obfuscated. And, yet whilst agency at the individual level is hard to discern, the economic and legal lexicon around which the notion of ‘personal data’ has emerged is well established. This framing is dependent upon meaningful and stable categories that describe ‘things unto themselves’ — and — that these categories have delineable ownership.
Exposing this folly, Professor Diane Coyle’s paper, Socializing Data (2022), critiques both statistically-informed macro-measures and property rights based conceptualisations of data. This critique is also explored in her book Cogs and Monsters (2021) which expands the conversation to the performativity of metrics — a subject most pertinent in the age of data: “you are what you measure” springs to my mind as a quip for the tentative humility to complexity. Navigation from the macro to the micro (and back again) is echoed in the calls to address the ‘urgent need to ensure people’s digital self determination so that ‘humans in the loop’ is not just a catch-phrase but a lived experience both at the individual and societal level.’ (International Network on Digital Self-Determination).
Yet there is immense complexity in this: self determination in the digital world is in part identifying the moments when individuals have (‘real’) choices about their (level of) participation in a digital system. Crucially it is also forging a potential for individuals in defining the sense-making apparatuses, the metrics, the measurement systems, within which their ‘personal data’ takes form and then is used within an articulated concept of value. Moreover, exploration of the labyrinthine relationality, and from ‘me to we’ flows, that underpin data processing techniques, are another crucial route to better expanding our imaginations about what a ‘data economy’ might be — and even what ‘individual agency’ really means when the reality of our entangled relationalities are made more plain. These are complex onto-epistemological questions with a consequentially pronounced ethical dimension: wherein meaningful participation (as a means) in their exploration is an end in itself.
With this lens of agency, participation and relationality, this short article sets out: (i) a summary of some participatory focused recent papers in Data & Policy; (ii) exciting work underway in terms of reimagining data; and, (iii) UK government responses to section 1 of the Data: a new direction consultation (Reducing barriers to responsible innovation). For further resources on the consultation see:
- ODI’s excellent suite of documents on the consultation from Dr Zimeta and Lucas Stiglich.
- A brief summary of each of the five sections and the Privacy focused roundtable.
- Heather Burns’ breakdown of cookies and consent via Data Reform and the Online Safety Bill.
- Hawktalk’s analysis of the government’s stated savings (but omitted costs).
(i) Participatory data
In ‘Reimagining data responsibility’, Professor Verhulst puts forward 10 new approaches to help foster trust in the re-use of data to ‘address critical public needs’. These are grouped into three priority areas for emergent data governance theory and practice: ‘Rethinking Processes and Systems, Rethinking Duties and Roles, and Rethinking Rights and Obligations’. The approaches cover things like a neat reframing of ‘privacy by design’ to ‘responsibility by design’ and, relatedly, ‘decision-provenance’. The latter is particularly pertinent when considering data governance with lenses of agency and participation; highlighted further in another suggested approach, ‘Greater use of assemblies and public deliberation’. This angle is addressed further in Wu et al’s (2021) paper, ‘How data governance technologies can democratize data sharing for community well-being’, an analysis of data trusts that identifies four barriers to their efficacy. One barrier, lack of data literacy and skills, is mirrored in recent ODI work on this subject, also a key strategic objective identified in the UK National Data Strategy.
Published this year, Wong et al’s paper, ‘Data protection for the common good: Developing a framework for a data protection-focused data commons’, outlines the limitations of legal and technological solutions to data protection and presents a detailed discussion of existing collaborative data stewardship frameworks and then the commons, including Ostrom’s eight design principles that lead to their success. Based on a series of interviews with experts in the development of an urban or data commons they present ‘a practical policy checklist to support commons policy-makers in developing data protection-focused data commons that supports genuine and adequate engagement.’ Principles for collaborative data governance, though not explicitly framed in terms of the commons, are brought to life in Sharp et al’s paper (2022), ‘A participatory approach for empowering community engagement in data governance: The Monash Net Zero Precinct’. This paper looks to understand ‘community engagement in smart city development and data governance’ and also makes a methodological contribution in terms of mapping the prototypes and perspectives in action as Monash University looks to realise its net zero emissions by 2030 target.
(ii) Reimagining data
Reconceptualising what a data economy could be is high up the agenda. I’d like to note some examples of projects here — with excitement: Dr Jeni Tennison’s new Connected By Data project; Professor Diane Coyle’s stewardship of Ada Lovelace’s new Re-thinking Data group; Dr Mahlet Zimeta’s Experimentalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution work; the Omidyar Network’s Innovation Challenge to Re-think the Future of Data and the International Network on Digital Self-Determination. This work is amplified by conference themes of June-July 2022 like Practising Sovereignty. Interventions for Open Digital Futures (Weizenbaum Institut), Designing Digital Futures (Oxford Internet Institute), Empowering People in Their Digital Lives: A Conference on Digital Self-Determination (Directorate of International Law) and Beyond Critique to Repair (Just AI Network).
Cumulatively this is critical work laying foundations upon which greater participation can emerge since it refocuses our attention to (re)imagining the moments and meaning of agency — and of participation in the decision-making processes about which direction(s) to take and how to evaluate our ‘progress’ towards those goals. Part two of this series takes themes of agency and participation to address the Government Data: a new direction consultation responses specifically.
About the author
Georgia is an MPhil/PhD student in Information Systems & Innovation at LSE. She researches the ‘data economy’. She is a Fellow of The Open Data Institute and on the Data for Policy communications team.
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This is the blog for Data & Policy (cambridge.org/dap), a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Cambridge University Press exploring the interface of data science and governance.
