Data Protection and the Open Society (DPOS)

*** Full and up-to-date information on this project is now available on the Centre's dedicated DP Flash mini-site http://www.csls.ox.ac.uk/dataprotection (also available if required as text-only version at http://www.csls.ox.ac.uk/dp) ***

 

Over the past decade, deployment of Data Protection (DP) concepts has increased within the worlds of law, business, politics and public policy.  This exciting new project, led by CSLS and Balliol College Research Fellow Dr. David Erdos and funded by the Leverhulme Trust under its Early Career Research Award Scheme, will explore the origins and functioning of DP law and related practices from an Open Society perspective.  It will specifically examine, and hopefully partially resolve, tensions between DP/Privacy and other important societal values including, in particular, freedom of information and expression.  The three-year time frame of the project will allow for a really deep analysis, lead to a better framework for accounting for the various values at stake and feed into the revision of the European Data Protection Directive which is currently underway.

Overview and Rationale

Data Protection is often conceived within public debate as a valuable shield guarding against potential assaults on a liberal society.  Issues regularly critiqued through this lense include the proliferation of CCTV, increasing governmental requirements as to the disclosure of private data and the large scale loss of such data by both governmental and commercial organizations.  These developments indicate that the nature both of modern technology and contemporary socio-political pressures on governmental and corporate actors mean that ensuring appropriately robust personal data privacy has never been more important.  At the same time, however, it is also clear that the basic concepts of DP fit uneasily with critical parts of the “Open Society” aspect of liberal democracies, most notably, freedom of expression and freedom of information.  Given that it also has its roots in a radically different technological era, DP may also severely, if unwittingly, curtail valuable social activities.  These various tensions may be perceived, albeit only inchoately and somewhat anecdotally, in situations where DP has restricted photography in public places, the dissemination of archival material to the public, the carrying out of research critical to the public interest and even the distribution of first names of fellow pupils to the parents of schoolchildren.  Given all this, a detailed analysis of Privacy/DP laws and practices from an Open Society perspective is clearly required. This project will constitute the first such systematic inquiry, thereby contributing to a better quality of public debate on these matters and hopefully ultimately to better law and policy.

Principal objectives

• To systematically explore the history, law, governance and social practices around DP and, more broadly, the collection and use of human data.
• To explore the history, law and understandings of other important societal values including, most particularly, freedom of expression and freedom of information.
• To bring these two stands of inquiry together in order to assess ways in which current DP laws and practices are, or are not, adequate for the modern environment.
• To make suggestions for an improved framework for the protection of personal information, thereby feeding in to the current revision of the European Data Protection Directive.

Underlying assumptions

• Information and information rights are of growing and critical importance in the modern economic, social and political environment.
• Current laws have grown up haphazardly with insufficient consideration both of interactions between them and the variety of implications which they may have.
• More specifically, DP as currently formulated in Europe may have its roots in another technological and social era.  This poses particular dilemmas and requires reform.
• At the same time, it is clear that the nature of modern technology means that personal data privacy has never been more important.  It is therefore vital to get law and practice in this area right.
• Finally, in an era of mass transnational data flows, the international dimension cannot be ignored.

Research Themes

DPOS will investigate within four key themes of study.  Alongside
       1.  An analysis of the general philosophy, structure and history of DP law and practice
the project will explore specific open society puzzles and tensions which arise when DP norms and practices confront
       2. The Media (including the New Social Media and Internet)
       3. Research (including the growth of research governance policies and practices and also the management of historical archives)
       4. Governmental and non-government Transparency initiatives (including FOI Laws)