Who Does What with My Data?

The amount of data we produce every day – from our holiday photos to our mobility, financial and health data – is growing relentlessly. Between 2020 and 2025 alone, it will triple – to an expected 27 terabytes per person per year. Particularly in the urban context, the questions of who can and may use this data and for what purposes play an important role in shaping social and ecological development paths and the distribution of design power in the digital transformation.

What might social-ecological data governance look like that preserves individual rights and freedoms, ensures participation, and contributes to sustainable urban development? Developing answers to this question is about developing appropriate policies, processes, and structures, but also very specifically about specifying and formalizing decision rights, procedures, and controls. Is the data generated by daily mobility behaviour private or public in nature? What does this mean for data sharing or for targeted and sustainable use of the data? What roles can so-called intermediaries like a data trustee play?

We discussed this in the eleventh edition of Wandelwecker, our morning impulse for a social and ecological metropolis, with the following guests:

• Dr. Max von Grafenstein LL.M. is a professor within the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) for "Digital Self-Determination" at the Berlin Career College of the University of the Arts (UdK). He is also co-leader of the research program "Data, Actors, Infrastructures: Governance of Data-Driven Innovation and Cybersecurity" at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). His research focuses on the regulation of data-driven innovation, with an emphasis on "Data Protection and Security by Design" and "Data Governance". His new startup INNOVATION AND LAW specializes in privacy and security-by-design solutions, as well as data protection certificates and codes of conduct.
• Ingo Kollosche (Dipl. Soz.) is research manager for "Future Research and Transformation" at the Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment and co-supervised the project "Data Governance and Regulation for a Sustainable Berlin" as part of the Ecornet Berlin research network, where he was responsible for the scenic analyses of possible data regulation regimes. In the second part of the project on the topic of data trustees, he will take over the project management. In the context of his research field, he devotes himself to the connections between futurology and artificial intelligence in terms of basic theory.

Moderation: Valentin Tappeser, Overall Coordination Ecornet Berlin, IÖW