Data governance in a digital age: Who makes the rules for the information trade?
In a recent talk on our data-driven future, American author and academic Susan Ariel Aaronson argued for the necessity of governing this new economy. This edited transcript launches a series of essays on “Data governance in a digital age,” commissioned by the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
There’s nothing new in the trade of data. As long as humans have traded, they have traded data about the world they encountered.
But in recent years, thanks to the development of “the cloud” (computing power as a service), firms have developed new sectors that use various types of data to create new services. These sectors include health care apps; personal assistants such as Alexa or Siri; and businesses built on artificial intelligence, such as Stitch Fix or Waze. These new firms are constantly hungry for additional data to train their algorithms. The more data these firms gain access to, the more and better services they can provide to both businesses and consumers. Many of these firms utilize our personal data — which we agreed to provide freely to companies such as Google, Facebook, or apps such as Tinder — in return for the free search or social networking services they provide to us. These firms in turn also sell our data to other firms, creating a new data-driven economy.
The thing is, the rules governing trade in data have to be different than the rules governing trade in steel or deodorant. This is because data can be many things simultaneously. Data can be a good, it can be a service, it can be both at the very same time. It’s incredibly easy to trade.
In recognition that data will be an important asset, countries such as China and trade blocs such as the EU are trying to obtain comparative advantage in these sectors through a mix of domestic regulations and trade strategies.
We need to find a way to make the rules governing data interoperable – working across different nations. That’s one of the reasons the Canadians, the Americans and the Mexicans are trying to find common ground on digital trade in NAFTA. All three nations have very different rules around privacy, which the Europeans call data protection. Also, they have different norms and values about what data should be public, what data can be censored, what is national security data. We are going to need to find common ground if we are going to continue to trade data across borders.
Given the unique nature of data, people deserve very clear rules. However, the data behemoths that stalk the earth sucking up and processing our data have outsize influence over the drafting of these rules.
