[MyData & Open Data] Website & Domain Name

Wed Oct 9 18:58:31 UTC 2013

On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 05:54:45PM +0100, Laura James wrote:
> Although it would be nice to avoid the issue altogether, this seems
> challenging at the moment as many people are starting to conflate open data
> conversations with those around personal data sets and licensing.

this is exactly my point when i talk about mixing of conflicting memes. it
confuses people.

> As such it's useful to openly discuss the issues, I think.

there's currently such discussions on a broader scale in the european
parliament, and it seems deliberately stalled, so some positive actions would
be very helpful.

anyway my proposal is to clearly state that open data is about only a subset
of all data. a good amendment to the http://opendefinition.org/ from a privacy
POV would make a lot of sense, also raising awareness towards dataminimization
for private data would be very useful. i think we need to make clear that
there is a continuum of data from private to public, and that the open data
movement is about the public part. i think trying to define the borders to the
gray area separating clearly public from clearly private data is something
that makes sense, but the private part should be referred to orgs that have
such competences. i'm sorry, but privacy is about trust, and in this regard
the okfn is "not yet there", with time, commitment and some inhouse
competences this trust can be earned. let's introduce a privacy
officer*/community manager ratio for measuring this with bare numbers ;)

knowing how geeky and technical the okfn is i think a very fitting way to
contribute would be the research into cryptographic multiparty computation
protocols to proactively provide privacy-by-default data-analysis and
collection protocols would make sense, where statistics can be calculated
based on private data in a way, that does not reveal any private data, but all
the participants learn the result of the computation. like everyone learns the
avg height of all participants - assuming honest participants. 

what would be really cool if the okfn - interfacing with so many datasets -,
would act also as a watchdog and working actively with data sources who
unnecessarily collect private data. a low hanging fruit would be the  datahub
or similar repos could also have metadata regarding privacy aspects of the
datasets. or people could flag leaking datasets.

anyway another thing i'd like to see debated and a more proactive stance is
the open data aspects of whistleblowing. there's excellent datasets out there
that have been quite neglected by this crowd.

-- 
pgp: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/stef.gpg
pgp fp: FD52 DABD 5224 7F9C 63C6  3C12 FC97 D29F CA05 57EF
otr fp: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/otr.txt