USA Africa Dialogue Series - Privacy and Open Government: We need your feedback!

Making government more open and responsive should not mean compromising on privacy and data protection. At the Open Government Partnership Summit last year, privacy was identified as a “thorny issue”. Taking up the challenge, the authors of the Open Government Guide recognised the primacy of privacy to good governance and asked Privacy International to contribute a chapter on this topic. This draft chapter identifies that privacy and data protection are implicated in the work of many government institutions, but particularly the police and public security services, whose work necessarily involves intrusion into the private sphere.

Because technologies are so rapidly changing the nature and value of information, and because huge volumes of personal data are being rapidly generated, transmitted, shared and collated, it is essential that governments are transparent about the types and amount of data they collect and the means and modes of surveillance they conduct. There must be strong oversight and accountability mechanisms in place and clear, explicit laws must govern State use of surveillance powers and access to communications data.

Another significant issue is ensuring that when officials make existing government datasets public in digital form (“open data”), the rights to privacy and data protection are at the forefront of their minds. This means thinking about, for example, whether an anonymised dataset, when matched with other datasets, could reveal personal information about individuals.