What is data justice? The case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally

Abstract

The increasing availability of digital data reflecting economic and human development, and in particular the availability of data emitted as a by-product of people's use of technological devices and services, has both political and practical implications for the way people are seen and treated by the state and by the private sector. Yet the data revolution is so far primarily a technical one: the power of data to sort, categorise and intervene has not yet been explicitly connected to a social justice agenda by the agencies and authorities involved. Meanwhile, although data-driven discrimination is advancing at a similar pace to data processing technologies, awareness and mechanisms for combating it are not. This paper posits that just as an idea of justice is needed in order to establish the rule of law, an idea of data justicefairness in the way people are made visible, represented and treated as a result of their production of digital data -is necessary to determine ethical paths through a datafying world. Bringing together the emerging scholarly perspectives on this topic, I propose three pillars as the basis of a notion of international data justice: (in)visibility, (dis)engagement with technology and antidiscrimination. These pillars integrate positive with negative rights and freedoms, and by doing so challenge both the basis of current data protection regulations and the growing assumption that being visible through the data we emit is part of the contemporary social contract.

The politics of big borders: Data (in)justice and the governance of refugees

“…Analysing data-driven governance within such a framework is important because it makes an explicit link between data and social justice -a framework of 'data justice' -on terms that demand a response that is necessarily contextual, collective and historically rooted. Whilst a data justice framework is still nascent and varied in interpretation, approaches tend to unite around an emphasis on outlining data in relation to structural inequality and social (in)justice (Newman 2015;Dencik et al 2016Dencik et al , 2018Heeks and Renken 2016;Taylor 2017;Johnson 2018). As such, it challenges the notion that data and data-driven technologies are neutral artefacts, and that what is at stake can be sufficiently captured by simple binaries such as efficiency vs. privacy, or good vs. bad data.…”

Algorithmic accountability and digital justice: A critical assessment of technical and sociotechnical approaches

“…Finally, it can be protective, with the goal of mitigating the power of the surveillance state, which uses its ability to collect vast amounts of data about citizens (Fink, , p. 13). This approach to digital justice emphasizes “resistance to government surveillance based on principles of social justice” (Taylor, , p. 7).…”

“…One characteristic that is common to these approaches is that digital justice is not based on a foundation of individual rights because “data injustice increasingly tends to occur on the collective level” (Taylor, , p. 8). Big data analytics aggregate data and generate insights about groups and populations meaning that digital justice is better seen as a structural concept that involves concern for preserving the privacy of groups in part by enhancing their ability to control their engagement with data and data organizations which, in turn, extends their capacity to control their data visibility, and their rights to non‐discriminatory interactions with institutions that gather big data and make use of big data analytics.…”

Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together

“…Multi‐disciplinary research has emphasised the disciplining aspects of data through surveillance constraining social movements (Dencik et al., ), data‐driven governance entrenching power asymmetries (Johnson, ), and data technologies making the poor visible (Heeks & Renken, ). Taylor () calls for establishing a common direction in future data justice research to account for how data can lead to discrimination, discipline and control; acknowledge both the positive and negative possibilities of data; and apply across social contexts. While these conceptualisations of data justice are preliminary, they situate data within structural power relations and promote putting those understandings into practice (Our Data Bodies ).…”