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The Dark Side Of Open Data: It's Not Only How Much You Publish, But How And Why

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A few days ago, the World Wide Web Foundation established by Sir Tim Berners-Lee released the second edition of the Open Data Barometer, a report on the impact and prevalence of open data initiatives around the world. Turns out the UK government is the "most transparent" in the world, when it comes to public access to official data, with US and Sweden in second and third place respectively.

That's fantastic, isn't it? Opening the data (which already belongs to the public, as it is produced with taxpayers' money) can expose corruption and abuse, provide new insights on sensitive topics, help engage citizens in important debates, improving, in the end, the overall quality of democracies. So, kudos to the British and God forgive the Kenyans, whose country has fallen from to 22nd to 49th in the Barometer's rankings. Shame on them. Or, at least, that's how the prevailing narrative goes.

There's undoubtedly a lot of truth in this position. Transparency can help keep public servants, or even private companies accountable for what they do. However, the very idea that data can be a tool of change highlights the fact that it is not "neutral". The release has an impact on society and the kind of impact it has depends a lot on the way it's done, by whom and for what reasons. The concept that the more you release, the more you benefit, while not wrong, might at least be a little simplistic.

Some scholars, for instance, have questioned the motivations of politicians engaged with the open data agenda. Take the UK, proud winner of this year's ranking. In an interesting piece posted on Democracy Audit, University of Sheffield’s lecturer Jo Bates has maintained that the progressive ideals behind Open Government Data are being used to further interests of the neoliberal state.

In her perspective, while labeled as a way to boost citizens' engagement, some OGD initiatives are in fact functional to the marketization of public services, the privatization of public assets and to the efforts to leverage financial market growth in the exploitation of societal risks.

Instead of rebuilding trust between citizens and the public sector, transparency initiatives can be a way of turning citizens' critical gaze upon the same public services that are the subject of austerity and marketization policies, making it easier to justify the hollowing out of the state.

In other words (and you will pardon me if I lower the level of analysis), first they leave you in dire straits, cutting all funding, then they put the blame on you for offering poor services, showing citizens that instead of buying 100 pens for the office, you could have bought only 75. In turn, this could be used to justify the selling of public assets - or parts of them - to private corporations. A very sensitive issue, especially when it comes to services that are crucial to the well-being of citizens, like the National Healthcare Service (NHS) in Great Britain.

As for leveraging financial markets, Bates explains how the release of vast amounts of weather data by the MET Office, was used to fuel the UK weather derivatives market, making it more competitive with the US one.

Other scholars argue that, in certain contexts, opening the data might in fact just "empower the empowered". In an article of a few years ago, but still definitely worth reading, the Next Generation Internet Foundation's director, Daniel Kaplan, mentions a paper on the digitization of land records in Bangalore, which shows how access to land ownership and title information in Bangalore was used by people belonging to the upper and middle class, to "steal" the land away from the marginalized and the poor.

Then, there's always the possibility of authorities tinkering with the data. In fact, Kaplan argues, it's possible to envision a scenario in which "in order to make sure that even independent, computer-intensive analyses will provide the results the data producers expect", data are simply skewed.

It's probably to avoid this risk, that the Royal Statistical Society, in a Data Manifesto published in September, calls for an end to pre-release access to official statistics, whereby some people in government see statistics before the public. "Ministers and public officials - the Society adds - should handle the data with integrity."

Last but not least, to avoid the emergence of a new form of digital divide - between those who are actually able to read and process the data, and those who are not - data literacy must be encouraged from an early age. There's little point in releasing a lot of data, if only a small fraction of the population is able to read them. Actually, it could even lead to more inequality, and to the cherry-picking of public profitable services by the private sector, as Bates and others point out.

There's no reason to doubt that opening to the public of data previously unreleased by governments, if well managed, can be a boon for the economy and, ultimately, for the citizens themselves. It wouldn't hurt, however, to strip out the grandiose rhetoric that sometimes surrounds them, and look, case by case, at the contexts and motivations that lead to their disclosure.