This playbook was born out of a podcast series from the Global Data Justice Project produced and hosted from March to October 2021. There were three main motivations to work on this project: one, most of the conversations surrounding technology and human rights focus on top-down solutions, quite often ignoring the lived experiences and expertise of grassroots organisations, social movements, and communities. This results in more importance being given to technical training covering data technologies rather than an analysis of their encroachment into people’s lives. We wanted to prioritise the human element of data justice, which leads to the second aspect – that there is still a dearth of conversations surrounding digital technologies and data in the ‘mainstream’ that centre social justice instead of seeing it as an add-on. We wanted to talk with civil society actors, the core of whose work is social justice, and discuss how they view and engage with life worlds around data. Three, we came into this project with the awareness that social change doesn’t happen in a vacuum nor does it happen as a result of a single individual or group’s efforts, and therefore we were interested to explore the value that the collective brings to the governing of data.
About the project
Places and populations that were previously digitally invisible are now part of a ‘data revolution’ that is being hailed as a transformative tool for human and economic development. Yet this unprecedented expansion of the power to digitally monitor, sort, and intervene is not well connected to the idea of social justice, nor is there a clear concept of how broader access to the benefits of data technologies can be achieved without amplifying misrepresentation, discrimination, and power asymmetries.
We therefore need a new framework for data justice integrating data privacy, non-discrimination, and non-use of data technologies into the same framework as positive freedoms such as representation and access to data. This project will research the lived experience of data technologies in high- and low-income countries worldwide, seeking to understand people’s basic needs with regard to these technologies. We will also seek the perspectives of civil society organisations, technology companies, and policymakers.