Monday’s column in the Fin published as “Debate should be on best-use, not ownership of public data”
Data is in the news but we’re still working out how to think about it. Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ve got the Wrong Metaphor. Let me explain.
There’s endless argy-bargy about who ‘owns’ firms’ customer data – them or their customers? And the government wants access to stored ‘metadata’ on our internet activities – what sites we’ve been to, who we’ve communicated with. Then there’s all that data governments collect through the five yearly census – next due in 2016 – which the government recently wondered aloud whether to scrap. (Should it really cost the best part of half a billion when most citizens could be surveyed online?)
As governments gear up their surveillance armoury and we disgorge terabytes of data to Facebook and Google, we’re jealous of our privacy – as well we might be. In our commercialised age, this becomes a debate about who should ‘own’ data. Yet notions of property arose to help us think about and control physical things – like personal possessions and land. Subtle traps await those using the metaphor of property to deal with incorporeal things like ideas and data.
Remarkably Thomas Jefferson explained the problem at the dawn of the information age. He’d disapprove of the term ‘intellectual property’. For him patents and copyright were state sanctioned monopolies over the most valuable thing of all – ideas. So they should be tightly constrained.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Like ideas, data is potentially reusable, endlessly valuable. Our reflex instinct to think of data as property leads to an endless cascade of consents in principle for each use of the data.
Next time you’re enduring a robot informing you of your presumed consent to its organisation’s privacy policy, while you wait to speak to a human think of this. 2003 Australian of the Year Fiona Stanley and her team linked up ‘other people’s data’ to confirm the connection between folic acid deficiencies and spina-bifida in babies and as a result markedly reduced its incidence. But without what might today be regarded as the brazenness of using people’s data without their consent, their work could never have been done. They’ve performed plenty of other miracles since, but could perform a lot more with better access to more data. And no they’ve never breached anyone’s privacy.
To protect privacy we should worry less about the blizzard of consents when the data is collected – specifying how the data will be used. Who knows how it could improve our lives in the future? It’s permissions like that, sometimes baked into legislation, that continue to obstruct the linkage of government data that could help us better understand and improve citizen health and wellbeing.
If data has been successfully aggregated so it’s ‘anonymised’ then it should be available for any research whatever it’s been collected for. There are no losers from such action, only winners. And as an additional safeguard, if someone is clever or lucky enough to de-anonymise data strict penalties should apply for circulating or improperly benefiting from their knowledge.
Which brings me to that 2016 census. You won’t ‘own’ any of the data you provide government. But your privacy will be well protected. Oh – and you won’t be asked to consent. That’s because it’s compulsory.
And while it’s hardly a paradigm for private corporations’ data or a precedent for surveillance metadata on your internet surfing, the census nevertheless remains a salutary example of a different, very valid way of thinking about data. Just as we have an obligation to pay our taxes in return for all the public goods those taxes fund, so – subject to strict privacy protection – we have an obligation to provide information to governments where that data can be anonymously aggregated to assist in generating the knowledge that functions as a public good for anyone to access, whether they are seeking to improve government services or understand the market in which they’re trying to make an honest profit.
Postscript: The interview of the column. In two installments (the second of which contains some commentary on Troppo’s Paul Frijters’ collision with the unethical middle-management enforcers of UQ’s ethics process.
Thanks Nick,
A really interesting article. quite thought provoking
Use value??
WTF.. this is against ALL current trends, use value against ownership..bwwaahha.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. The post doesn’t contain the term “use value”, so I don’t know what you’re objecting to, or agreeing with.
Btw, that was you colleague Paul Fritjers, got done over by his universities apparatchiks for doing reseach with a social edge his bosses didnt like, I was reading the other day?
The very same. As fine a testament to the corporatisation and bureaucratisation of university life as one is ever likely to encounter.
Swallowed up by the small minded arse covering of middle managers – who were backed up by more senior managers until things unraveled for them.
If privacy concerns had been similar in the last century, the telephone book would have been impossible.
Good point.
On second thoughts, one’s appearance in the phone book is voluntary. One can have a silent number. So the only thing was not getting explicit consent, but everyone knew the ropes.
Nicholas , do many really think of personal ‘shopping’ data as ‘property’ in the economic IP sense, as apposed to the ‘ personal private property’ sense?
There are already too many deliberate extensions of IP into things that are not IP , without doing it accidentally.
Absolutely there are. We’re encouraged to think of it as ‘my’ data. One doesn’t need to impute formal IP rights to this – as in copyright – for people to claim that, it being ‘their’ data, they should be able to withhold it and/or sell it as they see fit. I’m not greatly exercised by that – as it’s probably the best way to get the data flowing – through information intermediaries. But it’s pretty disastrous when the data from government systems can’t be used in various ways without the consent of those from whom it’s been collected, whom it is about.
I think that much of this , least in relation to government held data, turns on : can we trust that the data will really be stripped of the information that would identify , ‘me’.
And it also turns on the fact that very few of the general public , including most of our pollies, really understand what meta means, no?