Breaking Down Information Silos with Big Data: A Legal Analysis of Data Sharing (original) (raw)

Big Data and Governance

A Digital Janus: Looking Forward, Looking Back

Harms arising from digital data use in the big data context are often systemic and cannot always be captured by linear cause and effect. Individual data subjects and third parties can bear the main downstream costs arising from increasingly complex forms of data useswithout being able to trace the exact data flows. Because current regulatory frameworks do not adequately address this situation, we propose a move towards harm mitigation tools to complement existing legal remedies. In this article, we make a normative and practical case for why individuals should be offered support in such contexts and how harm mitigation tools can achieve this. We put forward the idea of 'Harm Mitigation Bodies' (HMBs) which people could turn to who feel they were harmed by data use but do not qualify for legal remedies, or that existing legal remedies do not address their specific circumstances. HMBs would help to obtain a better understanding of the nature, severity, and frequency of harms occurring from both legal and illegal data use, and they could also provide financial support in some cases. We set out the role and form of these HMBs for the first time in this article.

The Politics of Big Data: A Three-Level Analysis

2013

What role does politics play in the emerging Big Data domain? The paper argues that Big Data political power struggles surface at three distinct levels of analysis: the social sciences, the information state, and bureaucratic politics. At the social sciences level of analysis, Big Data threatens to divide social scientists into antagonistic methodological camps as it does not conform to traditional research techniques. At the information state level of analysis, a handful of powerful agencies and corporations created around data generation are consolidating their competitive advantage and are unlikely to support important data access and privacy protections. The one brighter spot for Big Data is found inside governmental bureaucracy. Here, trends such as “governance by numbers” at the sub-national level and mutually profitable data exchanges at the national level suggest that Big Data may propel agencies to share information better. The article concludes with a proposal to view Dr. John Snow and his work to stop the cholera epidemic in central London in 1854 as an early harbinger of the Big Data movement. Snow’s work displays redeeming features that may mitigate less desirable effects of Big Data projects across the three levels of analysis. These features are a sense of purpose, ingenuity, clever data collection design, collaboration, humility and humanity. Lay summary: The paper explores the role of political power struggles in the emergent big data domain. It finds that power struggles manifest in three arenas: the social sciences, the information state, and public sector bureaucracy. The most positive opportunities for utilizing and advancing big data are in the arena of government bureaucracy where big data may prompt agencies to engage in more efficient data sharing. Publication significance: Big data and its impact on the citizen, society and the state is of increasing importance in the information state. This timely paper examines the political power struggles that influence the potential of big data to benefit or burden citizens and the state. The paper's findings (that big data is potentially most beneficial at the level of government bureaucracy where it can prompt agencies to share data more efficiently) present a focused future direction for big data research and innovation.

Big Data & Society: Big Data & Society On behalf of

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...

The "Dark Side" of Big Data: Private and Public Interaction in Social Surveillance, How data collections by private entities affect governmental social control and how the EU reform on data protection responds

Computer Law Review International 2013, 161-169, 2013

The revolution in social analysis due to Big Data and their predictive capacities poses different questions related to risks of asymmetries in the control over information.In order to have access to this technology and to exploit its power, it is necessary to have the availability of large data sets and to invest heavily in equipment and research. Only governments and big companies have these resources and, consequently, are able to exercise such control over digital information both to enhance their performances and to enhance their control over individuals. Considering the role of government agencies and their increasing requests of information to the private sector for public security purposes, it appears necessary to adopt specific rules in order to regulate the information flow, to define the rights over data and to ensure adequate enforcement. If it is true that information is often publicly available, it is also true that the line between the public and private sphere will become even more blurred in the Big Data era. After a brief introduction (I.) this article first outlines the new scenario of Big Data (II.) before analyzing the governments’ interplay with private entities which crucially enhances their social control (III.). Finally, the currently envisaged changes by the EU reform on data protection are scrutinized in their potential effects on the future of social control (IV.).

Reining in the Big Promise of Big Data: Transparency, Inequality, and New Regulatory Frontiers (Northwestern Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property)

The growing differentiation of services based on Big Data harbors the potential for both greater societal inequality and for greater equality. Anti-discrimination law and transparency alone, however, cannot do the job of curbing Big Data's negative externalities while fostering its positive effects. To rein in Big Data's potential, we adapt regulatory strategies from behavioral economics, contracts and criminal law theory. Four instruments stand out: First, active choice may be mandated between data collecting-services (paid by data) and data-free services (paid by money). Our suggestion provides concrete estimates for the price range of a data-free option, sheds new light on the monetization of data-collecting services, and proposes an " inverse predatory pricing " instrument to limit excessive pricing of the data-free option. Second, we propose using the doctrine of unconscionability to prevent contracts that unreasonably favor data-collecting companies. Third, we suggest democratizing data collection by regular user surveys and data compliance officers partially elected by users. Finally, we trace back new Big Data personalization techniques to the old Hartian precept of treating like cases alike and different cases – differently. If it is true that a speeding ticket over $50 is less of a disutility for a millionaire than for a welfare recipient, the income and wealth-responsive fines powered by Big Data that we suggest offer a glimpse into the future of the mitigation of economic and legal inequality by personalized law. Throughout these different strategies, we show how salience of data collection can be coupled with attempts to prevent discrimination and exploitation of users. Finally, we discuss all four proposals in the context of different test cases: social media, student education software and credit and cell phone markets. Many more examples could and should be discussed. In the face of increasing unease about the asymmetry of power between Big Data collectors and dispersed users, about differential legal treatment, and about the unprecedented dimensions of economic inequality, this paper proposes a new regulatory framework and research agenda to put the powerful engine of Big Data to the benefit of both the individual and societies adhering to basic notions of equality and non-discrimination.

S-M-L-XL Data: Big Data as a New Informational Privacy Paradigm

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Can informational privacy law survive Big Data? A few scholars have pointed to the inadequacy of the current legal framework to Big Data, especially the collapse of notice and consent, the principles of data minimization and data specification. 1 These are first steps, but more is needed. 2 One suggestion is to conceptualize Big Data in terms of property: 3 Perhaps data subjects should have a property right in their data, so that when others process it, subjects can share the wealth. However, privacy has a complex relationship with property. Lawrence Lessig's 1999 proposal to propertize personal data, was criticized: instead of more protection, said the critics, there will be more commodification. 4 Does Big Data render property once again a viable option to save our privacy? To better understand the informational privacy implications of Big Data and evaluate the property option, this comment undertakes two paths. First, I locate Big Data as the newest point on a continuum of Small-Medium-Large-Extra Large data situations. This path indicates that Big Data is not just "more of the same", but a new informational paradigm. Second, I begin a query about the property/privacy relationship, by juxtaposing informational privacy with property, real and intangible, namely copyright. This path indicates that current property law is unfit to address Big Data.

Introduction: Politics of Big Data Special Issue, Digital Culture & Society 2:2, 2016

This special issue offers a critical dialogue around the myriad political dimen-sions of Big Data. We begin by recognising that the technological objects of Big Data are unprecedented in the speed, scope and scale of their computation and knowledge production. This critical dialogue is grounded in an equal recogni-tion of continuities around Big Data’s social, cultural, and political economic dimensions. Big Data, then, is political in the same way in which identity, the body, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are political, that is, as sites of struggle over meaning, interpretations, and categorisations of lived experience. Big Data is political in the way circuits of production, distribution, and consumption are political; that is, as sites where access, control and agency are unequally distrib-uted through asymmetrical power relations, including relations of data produc-tion. Big Data is political in the way contemporary politics are being reshaped by data analysis in electoral campaign strategy, and through state surveillance as strikingly evidenced by the Snowden revelations on the NSA and GCHQ. Big Data is also political in the contestation of this advanced scientific practice, wherein the generation of data at unprecedented scale promises a precise and objective measure of everyday life. However, the computational dreams of an N = all verisimilitude – that is, of datasets providing a one-to-one correspon-dence to a given phenomenon – are haunted by the normative biases embedded in all data. This is not to suggest that Big Data – more specifically processes of datafication1 – are best or at all understood as socially constructed. Indeed, discursive analysis or unreconstructed social theory cannot fully grasp how data re-articulates the social, cultural, political and economic in a deeply recursive manner. Thus, any political reckoning must equally account for the materiality of data, alongside the logic guiding its processes and the practices that deploy its tools. In short, what are the power relations animating the knowledge generated by data analytics?

Regulation of Big Data: Perspectives on strategy, policy, law and privacy

Health and Technology, 2017

This article encapsulates selected themes from the Australian Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre's Law and Policy program. It is the result of a discussion on the regulation of Big Data, especially focusing on privacy and data protection strategies. It presents four complementary perspectives stemming from governance, law, ethics, and computer science. Big, Linked, and Open Data constitute complex phenomena whose economic and political dimensions require a plurality of instruments to enhance and protect citizens' rights. Some conclusions are offered in the end to foster a more general discussion.