Kieron's Research Presentation
The Transparency Agenda of the Coalition government promises to revolutionise government, public services and public engagement, by ‘holding politicians and public bodies to account, reducing the deficit and delivering better value for money in public spending, and realising significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit
organisations to build innovative applications and websites using public data’, to quote the Prime Minister. This is an ambitious programme with laudable aims, yet it naturally has limits. Personal data are of course protected by data protection legislation, but is there a grey area where non-personal data could still be revealing? There are obviously techniques that can be brought into play to ease potential conflicts, such as redaction and aggregation, but these must be used in principled ways in order to preserve commitments not only to privacy but also to the legitimacy of the transparency programme itself. This talk will ask what these principles might be, and how they should operate to
the maximal benefit of the individual and the community.
