COVID-19 and the Data Governance Gap

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted many complexities involved in using data and advanced technologies to help resolve public health emergencies. These complexities highlight the need to embrace a broader framework of data governance with three foundational questions: (a) who decides about data flows, (b) on what basis, and (c) with what accountability and oversight. These questions can accommodate the issues that have arisen in the literature regarding new types of data harms. However, these questions also foreground important issues of power, authority, and legitimacy. Data governance can provide an organizing normative framework to address emerging data themes including access to data, collective decision making, data intermediaries, data sovereignty, design and digital infrastructure, regulatory technologies, the rule of law, and social trust and license. The pandemic experience with contact tracing apps, in particular, showed the many unresolved governance challenges.