Data Futures

Abstract

This chapter explores what kind of data future we want to create and strategies for realizing our visions. It highlights the need to enact 'a digital ethics of care', and to claim and assert 'data sovereignty'. An ethics of digital care is practising reciprocal and nonreciprocal care with respect to digital life, including data practices: that we care for ourselves and others in ways that we expect to be treated, and are supportive and promote wellbeing and not exploitative. This means acting in moral ways with respect to the generation and use of data. Accompanying an ethics of digital care should be digital rights and entitlements. Data sovereignty is the idea that we should have some authority and control over data that relates to us and that other individuals, companies, and states should recognize the legitimacy of that sovereignty. In other words, we should have a say in what data are generated about us and have an ownership stake in those data that dictates how they are treated and shared, and for what purpose they can be used.