Sir, – Barrister Pauline Walley's call for a digital bill of rights, as reported in Erin McGuire's "800 years after Magna Carta, it is time for a digital bill of rights" (Law Matters, June 1st), was valid and timely. The Insight Centre for Data Analytics has called and continues to lobby for a "Magna Carta for Data" at the European level.
A “Magna Carta for Data”, or a bill of rights for the cyber-self, is immensely important when it comes to protecting privacy as well as an individual’s right to have online material taken down. It is also very important for the communities engaged in data research. Our vision is that it must lay out the rules of engagement for the creators, users, owners, researchers and analysts of data.
As one of the largest data research institutes in Europe, Insight Ireland believes that the only way to make sustainable progress when it comes to data research is to ensure that people control the use of their own data. If citizens don’t have control and ownership of their information, the field of data research will become an adversarial one where data owners, data researchers, and data analysts are at odds with one another.
Data research should be a co-operative effort, where citizens have control of their data and make the final decision on how it is used. If citizens see data research as being of benefit to them and society, they will be more willing to consent to the use of their data. Trust is paramount to a sustainable and beneficial research process.
The challenge for Insight Ireland, and anyone engaging in this field of data rights, data ethics and even philosophy, is the fact that the thinking on the matter is quite underdeveloped. In our endeavour to put the rights of citizens at the centre of what we do, we have to examine whether we are asking the right questions, whether we are devising something that will allow for the inevitable growth of the area. This field of thought is young and, so far, it has been characterised by a lack of cross-disciplinary communication. Ethicists have engaged with this, politicians have engaged with it, lawyers have engaged with it, data scientists have engaged with it, but few if any of these groups have engaged with each other about the issues that concern them.
Tweaking existing legislation is not enough. Europe, and indeed the world, needs a “Magna Carta for Data”. – Yours, etc,
Prof BARRY O’SULLIVAN,
Insight Centre
for Data Analytics,
University College Cork.