Our Keynote at Open Belgium 2020 Conference
On March 6th 2020, we had the pleasure to be invited as speakers at the Open Belgium 2020 conference, a community driven conference about Open Data and Open Knowledge hosted in the Hasselt University Campus. This annual conference is THE place to be for IT, data, government researchers and professionals to get together and catch up on the latest happenings on Open Data and Open Knowledge.
As speakers, we talked about our mission to bring transparency in data use between consumers and companies, but also about the importance of data fairness. At DataPlug, we believe that to restore trust, companies must treat consumer data with transparency and fairness. We believe in data transparency and easy access to personal data, rather than hiding consumer data behind reports and denying them access. We also emphasized the importance of fairness, as it's something that is usually left on the side, perhaps as it's not crystal clear how it can be measured.
To tackle the problematic of lacking KPIs for measuring data fairness, we proposed the below framework for measuring data fairness, based on 4 different parameters:
Security: are you storing customer data securely, encrypted and taking prevention measures against breaches?
Privacy: if your customers don't want to be seen (tracked), do you allow them this option?
Monetization: is the value your customer is getting out of your service equal to your profits or are you making an unproportional profit from your customer's data?
Ethics: are you treating your customer's data with respect or are you asking them much more than what you really need for them to complete the transaction?
Our proposed framework for measuring data fairness
The framework we follow and aim to promote as much as possible to increase data fairness is based on 3 pillars:
Education: data literacy is a ongoing, lifelong process. Technology evolves faster than humans can adapt, so ongoing education on the topic is essential.
Software: software applications that are easy to use will make the difference in bringing transparency to user data
Labeling: by regulating and certifying fair data usage, consumers can find trusted partners and build long-lasting relationships with companies that respect their data.
How to increase data fairness
We also highlighted the problems in the user experience nowadays caused by lack of understanding of technology tools and how the knowledge gap is magnified by new technologies, especially for a big part of the society today. Most internet users nowadays are faced between 2 extremes: either accept it all or reject it all; and when they are exceptionally able to manage their preferences this is a very effort-full and time-consuming process.
We tried to manage our preferences while using Techcrunch, an authority reference for tech knowledge worldwide, without a lot of success - most of the times the only option was to accept.
We were excited to see that there is a rising awareness and concern by people on data privacy and the use of their data. Most keynote attendees and speakers addressed data privacy in their presentations and the rising need to give back customers ownership of their data. We attended some interesting talks and use cases that prove this:
Thor Galle has been claiming back his private data from websites like Google maps and Spotify to create his own data visualizations and perform data analysis. He's visualizing these data in forms of heatmaps and other visualizations which are easy to understand, you can see an example of his work here.
Cake app, the integrated banking app rewards users for sharing their anonymous banking data by paying them directly in their accounts.
It was a great experience and we definitely recommend it for every data professional. We will be looking forward to the next edition.
