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

By Linnet Taylor. Big Data & Society, 2017

567 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 justice – fairness 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.

Subfields: Information Systems, Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/748b7608e5450523e4a8009f99d68d223ee8c363

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Information Systems

1. Patrick J. Wolfe
2. Danish Contractor
3. Brent J. Hecht
4. Sofia Charlotta Olhede

In Law

1. Patrick J. Wolfe
2. Sofia Charlotta Olhede

In Sociology and Political Science

1. McKane Andrus
2. Patrick J. Wolfe
3. Jeffrey Brown
4. Brent J. Hecht
5. Alice Xiang
6. Elena Spitzer
7. Sofia Charlotta Olhede

Citations in the corpus

• Behavioral Use Licensing for Responsible AI (2020, background): “efforts to achieve “fairness in the way people are made visible, represented and treated as a result of their production of digital data” [60].”
• The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations (2018, background): “The public debate includes examples with disparate impacts in low- and middleincome countries [90,91], and clearly our understanding of global data flows and their impacts is still in its infancy.”
• What We Can't Measure, We Can't Understand: Challenges to Demographic Data Procurement in the Pursuit of Fairness (2020, background): “Similar to this work, important contributions emerging from various academic fields and activist communities on the issue of justice in data use interrogate when and where it is acceptable to collect what types of data and what degree of control data subjects should have over their data thereafter [”