[MyData & Open Data] What do you think the Open Data & Privacy project should work on?

[Andy Turner]

Hi,

A fairly nebulous topic that might be considered is research data management and ethics. This is really two topics, but they overlap significantly and can be sliced, diced and spiked in various ways with respect to open data and privacy. The research landscape itself is vast and varied, research can take on many different guises and involve many different types of organisation.

I am based at the University of Leeds and involved in various institutional research data management and research ethics activities. I am involved in on-going research looking at detailed individual level data some of which is personal data. I have a wealth of research experience that has involved data about people and places and that has attempted to map, model, predict and forecast what is likely to happen to these people and places.

Let us ignore the fuzzy boundary between consultancy and research in a higher education institution for the time being. There is a significant difference between University research funded via a public purse and research funded commercially or by a charity organisation particularly with respect to the Universities obligations to the funder and the funders requirements for (and restrictions on) data sharing. Metadata about publicly funded research projects is being made more openly available and there is a strong call (indeed a mandate) to make the underlying data generated by publicly funded research projects publicly available unless there is a good reason not to. For research that involves participants and for research that integrates data to reveal more about individuals there are numerous open data, ethics and privacy issues.

In terms of research ethics, there are issues to do with overt and covert data collection; obtaining consent for data collection from participants, using and sharing data; anonymisation and pseudonymisation; and the special legal status of a researcher and what are legally and ethically required to do with regard storing and processing data supplied under consent, covertly or by happenstance.

I am interested in the differences between open data and data availability, how the knowledge about the existence of some data is restricted. I'm curious about what we can do to help people by integrating data and by making data available for others to integrate. I appreciate some of the arguments about the dangers of linking data and of what is being termed Big Data analysis. My gut feeling is that the benefits of opening up more rather than less is a good way forwards.

I am also interested to some extent in authority and governance, authorisation, authentication and access control.  

I could go on, but I'll pause there in case there is any feedback on this.

I am looking forward to the workshop this week.

Best wishes,

Andy Turner
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/index.html

________________________________________
From: mydata-open-data [mydata-open-data-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Sally Deffor [sally.deffor at okfn.org]
Sent: 09 June 2014 21:01
To: stef
Cc: mydata-open-data at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [MyData & Open Data] What do you think the Open Data & Privacy project should work on?

Thanks all! Definitely not too late. I am sure quite a bit of the discussion will touch on some of these issues, as some of them (though not worded quite like this) appear in the workshop reader/primer.

Sally

On Monday, 9 June 2014, stef <s at ctrlc.hu<mailto:s at ctrlc.hu>> wrote:
howdy,

On Thu, Jun 05, 2014 at 02:54:14PM +0100, Laura James wrote:
> *Hi everyone, As you may know, Open Knowledge and the Open Rights Group
> have a joint project, funded by OSF, to explore Open Data & Privacy issues.
> This is an area where we (and others!) are still figuring out the space, so
> it's fairly broad in remit. A one-liner about the project might
> be: Exploring the issues around the opening up of data where there may be
> elements of personal information involved*
>
> *Now, this isn't a huge project, but we'd love to know what you - the
> MyData & OpenData working group - think we should do. There will be
> discussions about this next week at a workshop we're holding in London, but
> it would be great to hear from folks on list about what you think we might
> focus on, and what you think might be useful outputs. Thanks all,Laura*

i went through the list archives, and collected these unedited bits of
ideas over the course of the existence of the mailing-list.

most importantly:
> define red lines, what is data that should be protected on privacy grounds,
> and which classes of knowledge belong to the open knowledge realm? i expect
> there will be a lot of interesting corner-cases at the border between these
> two categories. in case of doubt, privacy trumps and dataminimization should
> be recommended.
>
> how much is personal data worth, on the market, for private persons, for
> society? economic cost/benefit analysis costs/benefit analysis of
> surrendering privacy on an individual level and society level.
>
> how are privacy protections defeated today (aggregation, opt-out-by-default,
> singling-out, deanon, predictive behavioural analytics, etc), how is
> personal data abused today?
>
> in the context of open knowlegde (a beautiful term mixing up various
> concepts) what are the areas covered exactly, (non)copyrighted stuff in
> general, data and knowledge that should be in the public domain, data funded
> by public money, etc. what are the ethical considerations in each specific
> category? (consider human rights in general, like right to privacy, access
> to knowledge, etc) also clearly separate the question of ownership and
> contain it to the cases where it makes sense.
>
> how to avoid censorship of legitimate open/public knowledge like in the
> google right to be forgotten case?

sorry if it's a bit late, i hope it helps though.
s

--
otr fp: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/otr.txt
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Sally Deffor
Open Data & Privacy Project Coordinator | skype:deffor.selase | @SDeffor | +44 (0)7774 734206
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