| NOTAS: | "What does it mean to live in, or to create, an empowered data society? Data powers Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, but any agreement around who should use it, for what purpose, and how its benefits are to be shared remains elusive. Data is unlike an industrial product, which is consumed with use, or intellectual property, which loses its value once shared. Rather, the value of data often increases with availability and repeated analysis. Individual contributions may have little value while their aggregate can be priceless. A single data point alone can either be meaningless or the key for detecting a critical anomaly, and it is often impossible to know which is true at the moment it is first collected. Policy solutions that attempt to govern data use generally assume that they must choose between two routes: either capitalizing on the promise of innovation or protecting fundamental rights, such as privacy. This apparent choice is rooted in a paradigm that starts with the organization. How to improve company performance? How to minimize undesirable behaviour through regulation? Instead, what if policy solutions began with the human beings who generate and are affected by data? What if the goal were to empower people to benefit from the data about themselves and to set the agenda for how they want it – and themselves – treated in today’s “datafied” societies? Here, “either/or” can become “and”. Empowered data societies are ones where the use of data is governed in a human-centric way, i.e. in a way that centres around the values, needs, and expectations of people, groups, and communities. When this human-centric approach to data is the norm, people are understood as being aware and active agents in the data ecosystem that is society, where they form data relationships entailing risk, vulnerability, and trust. Human-centricity entails treating data collection, analysis, and interpretation as sources of opportunities – insights that can become meaningful actions with positive outcomes for society while maintaining the utmost respect for the people who are part of it." |
