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New Frameworks Beyond the Binary
Section 3.2 Broader Implications: Democracy, Data, And The Future Of The City
It’s a familiar pattern: technology brings societal change to the city, and local democratic institutions respond to that change with the adoption of new policies. What often gets overlooked is that while new rules and regulations serve a practical, legal function in the literal work of managing urban space and markets, and regulating technology, these administrative or legislative texts also play a performative and symbolic role. Taken as cultural artifacts these policies reflect and codify societal values, and contemporaneous attitudes toward a given technology and its impacts. Understanding such value judgments inherent in tech policy can help us take stock of our assumptions and see more clearly what kind of new world they might be ushering in. In short, emerging tech policies have stories to tell—and if we want to understand where we are and where we are headed, these stories are worth listening to.
This final section of the report seeks to articulate, summarize, and prompt questions about some of the stories of cultural values and assumptions playing out in the development and implementation of local government platform data sharing mandates the debate surrounding them—and what it all might mean for the future of data infrastructure, digital rights, and technological sovereignty in the emergent smart city.
New Frameworks Beyond the Binary
Our hypotheticals from this report’s introduction speak to the apparent tension between intuitive ideas about user privacy and about government oversight of urban digital platforms and the data they generate. However, while review of the literature and close examination of the landscape of platform urbanism data sharing policies and programs may not bring us to the “correct” answer for how to balance these interests, the trend of more and more local governments mandating access to platform data suggests an increasing desire for governments to play a more active and informed role in the administration of digital services and the management of
digital communities in certain contexts in urban space—or perhaps a distrust of private platform companies operating these kinds of services, communities, and marketplaces, unsupervised.
How should we make sense of this trend? I argue that it is critical for the field to move beyond false binaries of public vs private and of privacy vs democracy as we find a way forward.
Local government platform data sharing policies can be seen to define the terms of engagement and data sharing between two parties: a public agency and a private platform. However, it is important to keep in mind that community members—by which I mean the overlapping categories of both urban residents and platform users—are also inherently party to this arrangement. As users, they generate platform data, and as residents, they experience impacts on urban space, infrastructures and markets. Future conversation and research on platform data sharing should therefore move beyond the zero-sum binary of public (agency) vs private (platform) to considerations of how various governance, oversight, and rights-protection models can balance interests between public agencies, private urban platforms, and community members.
The current debate seems to involve platforms and governments each claiming to be the rightful protectors of community interests. Platforms claim to speak for their users by defending their data privacy and advancing their unimpeded access to platform services accountable to consumer market demand. Local governments simultaneously claim to speak for residents in defending their neighborhoods from risks and harms and by using data-informed policy to advance community goals in ways accountable to democratic feedback.
Rather than spoken for, community members—as residents and as users—should be centered in this debate, with urban communities directly consulted about their views on data collection, data sharing, program oversight, and platform governance.
Not Privacy Vs Democracy, Privacy And Democracy
Similarly the privacy debate surrounding local government data sharing mandates poses legitimate concerns about the protection of sensitive user data and about the fundamental data rights of users and of platforms themselves. Local governments have made compelling arguments about the need for access to platform data in order to enforce democratically legitimate rules and evaluate impacts in ways accountable to democratic processes. These issues are complicated, and reasonable actors might disagree on the specifics, but best practices for responsible data sharing can help the conversation and state of practice move beyond the false binary of privacy vs democracy toward protecting both of those important societal values.
Harm Reduction vs Public Benefit - What is B2G Data Sharing For?
As we saw in tracing the origins of platform data sharing in section 1.2 of this report, early advocates and evangelists for public access to private data (a form of “business to government” or “B2G” data sharing) like UN Global Pulse Initiative Director, Robert Kirkpartrick, called for data sharing not necessarily for the purpose of regulatory enforcement or even harm reduction, but for the generation of new public information assets as a “data commons” to advance societal good through data-powered analysis, decision making, and social science research.
In speaking with government officials, the idea of the data commons seems to underpin many local government approaches to B2G platform data sharing represented in the policies reviewed by my research. However, no policy included in our policy database contains the word “commons” nor do any of the policies explicitly cite the concept of a “data commons” as a goal, with the closest analogue likely being policies that allude to the need for data to inform policy and planning, and, to a lesser extent, policies that seek to publish privacy-respecting summarized/aggregated open data derived from data shared by platforms as a means of informing the public. Instead of building public knowledge, most data sharing programs focus
on harm reduction measures, such as regulatory enforcement and impact evaluation.
An important exception to this trend is the DECODE (DEcentralised Citizen Owned Data Ecosystems) project112, an initiative undertaken by the cities of Amsterdam and Barcelona and associated programs like the Barcelona Data Commons113 that explicitly focus on the production of useful platform-derived data as a public asset.
In the contexts of the “public vs private”, and “privacy vs. democracy” binaries described above, a focus on harm reduction through regulatory enforcement and impact evaluation makes sense for local government platform data sharing mandates. However, when considering broader perhaps collective/community-centered questions of digital infrastructure, and democratic power it may make sense to revisit the notion that local government should take up the mantle of building or at least stewarding the production of public knowledge via an urban data commons.
Figure 44. “Platform Data Sharing Justifications / Government Purpose.”
112 admin, “What Is DECODE?” 113 “Our Vision – Data Commons Barcelona,” accessed April 18, 2022, https://datacommons.barcelona/ourvision/.
