[LINK] Public data

Fri May 6 10:24:27 AEST 2016

At 9:44 +1000 6/5/16, Tom Worthington wrote:
>Angus Taylor MP, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation, emphasized the importance of government releasing raw data for the research and private sector to use in his talk Wednesday night at Parliament House. ...

There's no doubt that there are further benefits to be gained from open access, and from transparency.  I've sung from this song-sheet as well.

But now that there's a pretty big cheer-squad for it, it's time to get the excessive claims under control, and to manage the risks at the same time as exploiting the opportunities.

The Productivity Commission has started an Inquiry into 'Data Availability and Use' which has this as a central theme - but with a number of very awkward aspects tacked on to it:  http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/current/data-access

I sent in my Submission yesterday.  It's here:
http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/PCDUA.html

As always, feedback from Link Institute much appreciated!

                       _________________

                       Executive Summary 

This Submission provides evidence and argument in support of one general statement and further statements on six key issues.

The general statement is that many issues arise in relation to personal data that are of limited relevance to other categories of data. There is a serious risk of positive recommendations in respect of most categories of data being undermined by inevitably contentious debates about personal data.

1. The 'Big Data' Meme

The 'big data' meme is being accompanied by wildly excessive enthusiasm. Its proponents have failed to factor in issues of data quality, inferencing quality, decision quality, large volumes of false positives, and incompatibility of data drawn from multiple sources and applied in ways very different from the original purposes of collection.

2. Public Trust and Distrust

Data quality is in many circumstances highly dependent on trust by the data subject in the organisations that the data subject deals with. The abuses of trust involved in secondary use of data, re-purposing of data, and disclosure of data, result in greatly lowered data quality.

Distrust is becoming a very serious issue in Australia, because the abuses are increasingly evident to the public. Current examples include Census 2016, the PCEHR / MyHR, telecommunications data retention, myGov and so-called 'positive' credit reporting.

3. Government Policy

Although the Australian Government has paid lip-service to transparency and open data, many actions by the Government and by individual government agencies have been thoroughly inconsistent with those values.

4. Data Propertisation vs. Data Openness

The ongoing unbalancing of copyright law in favour of copyright-owners and against users of copyright works has created very substantial economic incentives for corporations to develop and sustain data monopolies. There has been a strong tendency away from business models based on services towards the extraction of rents through data propertisation.

5. 'Data Rights' not 'Data Ownership'

The 'data ownership' meme was invented by US business, for US business. Its purpose is to reduce privacy from a human right, by treating it as a mere economic right. That would enable corporations to buy consumers out of their privacy rights for very low costs.

The notion of ownership is not applicable to data, because there are always many parties that have interests in data. An appropriate legal regime needs to establish rights relating to data that vest in different parties, some of which are inalienable, and to enable balances to be achieved through constructive tension among those parties and rights.

6. Re-Identifiability vs. Anonymisation

Rich data-records are largely incapable of being effectively anonymised, because they offer so many opportunities for re-identification. Irreversible 'data falsification' - a strong form of the technique of 'data perturbation' - is the only approach that can enable data that originally related to specific individuals to be used and disclosed without breaching both individual privacy and public trust.

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>I was supposed to be on a panel after, but the Minister was so entertaining that we just kept asking him questions instead. He is the author of "The Promise of Digital Government", published 1 April 2016 (but is not a spoof). This is, ironically, is not available free on-line, but there is an Amazon preview: http://blog.tomw.net.au/2016/05/promise-of-digital-government.html
>
>ps: More on the budget and IT: http://blog.tomw.net.au/2016/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20162017.html
>
>
>-- 
>Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
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