‘Datafication,’ Transparency, and good governance of the data city

Alison POWELL a

a London School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract. It is easier than ever to collect data about all kinds of aspects of daily life. This data can have significant value for the people who produce it, but also for corporations and governments. This chapter investigates how this process of ‘datafication’ operates in the space of the city, where globalization and other political-economic pressures have shifted the notion and practice of citizenship. Through an investigation of the concepts of ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’ the chapter highlights some significant shifts in the power relations related to data collection and use, and identifies directions for future research and policy making in this area. .

Keywords. Citizenship, openness, transparency, datafication

We experience technologies and artifacts as altering our pre-existing capabilities vis-a-vis the physical world, but technologies and artifacts also mediate our embodied perception of that world – of how it is organized and how it works. Because they are both tools for producing useful results and tools for representing the world, networked communication technologies shape our perceptions of reality more comprehensively than simpler artifacts do [1], p. 199.

Introduction: The Data City

The practice of everyday life has the potential to generate enormous amounts of data. These data both fit into a variety of systems of control, and provide the opportunity to improve life for individuals. Increasingly, data mediate all kinds of activities: movement, transaction, pollution, location. To illustrate: transport systems rely on passenger and traffic data to centrally monitor and control the flows of people, vehicles, and goods, as well as to inform passengers when the bus or train is due to arrive. Mobile phone companies collect location data about mobile phones, and call and web browsing data from the people who use them. Air quality monitors read particles in the air, CCTV cameras record vast amounts of visual information, credit cards record purchases, energy meters record – in real time – the use of electricity, and crimes are mapped by police forces and presented to the public.

These data are retained and calculated by government and corporate entities, or combined, analysed, repackaged and sold. New data analysis techniques as well as new data generating media (including the sensor technology that comprises the ‘Internet of Things’) extend the range of ways that data is produced, as well as the number of ways it is understood, and thus the importance of accountability and governance of that data.

We are persistently promised by the promoters of these technologies that this intensification of data gathering, especially in cities, will improve experiences of everyday life. Keeping these promises depends on a number of assumptions about the relationships between individuals, data, and governments. First, it depends on the relationship constructed between individuals and institutions. Are governments responding to the needs of citizens and creating public goods, or are they driven by the demands of a market and the interests of consumers? Indeed, new commercial models of data processing construct both governments and individuals as consumers. Second, it depends on the significance of values such as openness and transparency. These values promise better social outcomes through greater visibility of actions that might previously have been concealed, but these values also establish different kinds of power relations that are exercised, for example, in the indeterminacy of the value of data, breaking down necessarily hierarchical relationships between powerful surveillance and resistant ‘sousveillance’.

This chapter will assess the ethical and governance implications of the intensification of data production, use and analysis, employing examples related to everyday life and citizenship in cities. The city is chosen as the locus of examination here because it is a site where citizenship has transformed as a result of globalization [2] and where policies of openness and transparency have been advanced in concert with efforts at reducing expenditure on public services. This notion of the ‘data city’ thus provides the framework for developing the concepts of openness, transparency and datafication in this chapter. The chapter discusses these concepts to identify directions for a future research agenda, and concludes with a reflection on future policy considerations.

1. Citizenship, communication and datafication

Citizenship in rich Western countries appears to be increasingly knitted together by access to and participation through networked communication. This has created a range of situations in which citizenship, technological access and communications are connected. Kevin Robins notes that under conditions of globalization, citizenship can move from being understood in national terms of identification and identity, to being more loosely explored through economic and cultural perspectives [3]. Building on Robins’ work, Myria Georgiou identifies the relationship between this more expansive citizenship and practices of communication: ‘the city is not only an experimental space, but also a political space where struggles for power, control and ownership are reflected and shaped through the intense (mediated) meetings of people, technologies and places’ ([2], p.224). Communication, then, can be a key way that this broader mode of citizenship is developed.

Describing situations where citizenship is exercised via communication, Darin Barney highlights the fact that they are often ‘situations where the experience of inequality and exclusion are acute, and where this coincides with a deficit of publicity – whereby actionable information is scarce, communication is tightly controlled, and participation denied or meaningless’ ([4], p. 79). In these situations, expectations about communication and indeed participation take on the character of political demands, and communicating becomes a form of political action. This is the case in places under autocratic rule or where control of information is a form of political control: in mainland China, where images of the Tianamen Square protest are routinely censored, heavily encoded messages referring to the date of the protest, circulate as acts of political opposition. This perspective underlines the significance of communication as a means of establishing legitimacy within public and political space. Taken forward, it also highlights the significance of information dissemination as a feature of political engagement.

Communication is also perceived as short-circuiting political participation, as the act of communication (especially via the production of data) comes to take on more significance than the message it’s meant to carry. Jodi Dean argues that that the norms of publicity – information, communication, and participation – have come to stand in for the political ends that they were presumed to serve. In other words, the act of communicating a message has come to stand in for the message itself. The message is part of a data stream and its most important feature is its circulation. This formulation of communication is important for considering citizenship in the data city. Dean’s insight is that the fact of communicating a message, rather than the content of the message itself, has become the most important action. She refers to a ‘communicative capitalism’, which ‘designates that form of late capitalism in which values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies’ ([5], p. 51). These values include access, inclusion, discussion and participation – in other words, the foundations of expectations of openness and transparency. They are realized through the expansion, intensification and interconnection of global telecommunications.

In political terms, this has led to a situation in which publicity drives politics. Dean’s work relates to the process of what Josée van Dijk calls ‘datafication’, a ‘secular belief’ in the value of data as a fundamental means to understand the world. Datafication valorizes the results of data analytics as key means of understanding society. Van Dijk writes, ‘datafication as a legitimate means to access, understand and monitor people’s behaviour is becoming a leading principle, not just amongst techno- adepts, but also amongst scholars who see datafication as a revolutionary research opportunity to investigate human conduct.’ ([6], p. 198). Within a culture that valorizes communication for its own sake, it is quite acceptable to share status updates, check-ins and other location-based and personal data. Sharing this information validates the existence of the person producing it. In combination, such information can be used to build up a narrative of personal experience that can be presented to others without additional commentary. More extensive data collection affords this communication for communication’s sake. In addition, this information is also collected and analysed by governments and corporate actors, contributing to optimized experiences on the part of the individual as well as optimized analytics for providers of services, whether public or corporate entities.

In the data city, the benefits of unconscious and indeterminate data collection are things like energy reduction, responsive interior environments (and, in a world with uncertain environmental outcomes, perhaps also exterior environments), seamless communication and easier transactions. Yet these benefits do not accrue unless collected data are analysed and mined. This analysis and mining requires significant financial and calculative resources [7] that are often found within private organizations able to leverage the appropriate resources, including data storage, calculation, and packaging of analytics. This in turn means that computation and analysis technologies do have politics, as they are constructed by particular actors and made to function in particular ways [8].

1.1. Repositioning Citizenship

The move towards datafication occurs at the same time as a shift in the notion of citizenship. In a representative democracy, citizenship has rights and duties: the right to vote, work and live somewhere, and the responsibility to pay tax, obey the law (and presumably to vote). In many contemporary data cities, residents may not have official status as national citizens, but they may possess a de facto citizenship based on their participation in cultural life or formal and informal labour markets. This is one way of defining citizenship from the perspective of the citizen. In an expanded form, this also encompasses the notion of being a ‘good citizen’, and the opportunity to express this kind of belonging through creative acts.

From the point of view of a government, pressure to roll back the state sets up a new kind of perspective on citizenship that shifts from seeing citizens as those with civic responsibilities and engagements, to classifying them as consumers who purchase services from providers. Datafication often appears to promise greater efficiency in the delivery of services, since information can be obtained at the point where these services are delivered: for example, a sensor on a rubbish bin ensures it is emptied only when full, which might facilitate more efficient refuse collection.

A consumer perspective on citizenship transforms the relationship between government, individuals and corporate entities. In a data city, this transformed relationship is evidenced by production, exchange, and brokerage of data. Citizens can become consumer-producers of data, creating value for governments and for the companies that provide brokerage of that data. Governments too become consumers, of analytics that help them to rationally manage resources that are deemed scarce. This situation invites participation from brokers who can negotiate the relationships between these two entities, positioning them both as consumers, but of different packages of analytic data.

To illustrate, consider an example of data brokerage around an everyday urban activity. The commuter application Urban Engines acts as a data intermediary and also promises ‘optimization’ of data for both governments and individuals. Individual commuters agree to have their commuting measured through a GPS enabled application, and in exchange are notified of ways to better optimize (i.e. reduce) their commuting time, perhaps by setting off earlier or using a route that the application determines has fewer people using it. The application ‘provides rewards for small changes to commuting times that reduce congestion’ (https://www.urbanengines.com/). At the same time that personalized recommendations are available to individual commuters who use the service, aggregate analytics based on the data of many commuters are provided to cities, offering the transport authority an opportunity to employ ‘micro-targeting’ of commuters to encourage specific types of behaviour.

This exemplifies a kind of coercive orientation towards citizenship: people must be provided with incentives in order to behave in a way that generates collective benefits; furthermore, collective benefit is associated with any optimization of a system where the most use can be made from the smallest possible investment. This is citizenship in a straitened age, away from the responsibility of cradle to grave welfare, or where the discourse of authority insists on presenting public services in terms of value for money. This consumer perspective on citizenship combines with the ethos of datafication to result in a situation where citizen participation in improving a public service takes the form of collecting and sharing personal data. The mode of citizenship is not altruistic, nor is it based on responsibility; instead, it is based on the notion of exchange, where personal data is exchanged for information intended to optimize an individual’s experience. In turn, that optimization is meant to lead to a change in behaviour that is itself measurable, and hence valuable to the city government.

This entire datafied relationship is meant to be ‘open’ – that is, it is meant to operate within a system accessible to many players – and ‘transparent’ in that its function can be visible or known. There is not space in this short chapter to elucidate the relationship between these concepts, but the sections below identify that they are related and that they significantly influence the experience of citizenship in the data city. The next sections outline some features of the relationship between these concepts that open opportunities for future research.

2. Ideologies of openness

Openness is a broad term that can refer, in general, to the possibility of participating in a process, especially a process of governance. In the context of data cities, openness is also a quality of the (technical) data gathering systems, and the participation they permit or invite, through technical as well as other modes of governance. Nathaniel Tkacz traces the emergence of open governance ideologies from the software cultures of the 1980s through more recent network cultures. He notes that from its beginnings in the philosophy of free and open software, which decried closure of source code, two competing ideologies emerged: one interpretation grounded in the free software movement that perceived the opposite of ‘open’ as being proprietary (see [9]) and another where openness is primarily concerned with the mode of software production. Over time these ideas have been translated into new situations that conceive openness a new way of addressing issues of participation, management of knowledge and political legitimacy. Notions of openness have shifted from being pragmatic suggestions about the sharing of code to being political or moral positions suggesting openness as a key to a better society [10]. This moral position can indeed have paradoxical consequences, as illustrated by responses to revelations of large-scale surveillance by the NSA and other intelligence agencies.