Privacy discourses and a Data Governance Stewardship Council

Abstract

Data Management and Use, a joint report from the British Academy and the Royal Society, has recommended that a data governance stewardship council be set up to influence the evolution of the landscape, as data play an ever more prominent role in our daily lives. The report leaves open the question of what principles the council should be endeavouring to preserve, and what its priorities should be. There are many potential functions that such a body could undertake. The report itself focuses on three broad groups of function: anticipation and evaluation of trends; building practices and setting standards; enforcing norms
and remedying harms. In this short paper I propose a framework for separating out and distinguishing the functions it might take on. I will apply a framework currently under development to understand and disentangle the many overlapping discourses on privacy, whose aim is to resolve at least some of the confusion, complexity and category error characteristic of privacy discussions. Privacy is of course one of the central factors in data governance, indeed a factor which, according to the report, is “under unprecedented strain” (p2). I will therefore focus on privacy; however, the framework may be extendable to other aspects of data governance. Privacy is only a part of such a council’s competence, but an important part.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Kieron O'hara: orcid.org/0000-0002-9051-4456

Catalogue record

Export record