Data is Political

Ginette Azcona, a Senior Researcher UN Women recently stated that while they were attempting to track the progress made on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, they were facing a significant lack of data on women and adolescent girls. Countries across the world don’t seem to collect much information about them.

Data has become an alarming word. It is often associated with BigTech, which collects our personal information for financial gain, something that belongs to us but is used at our expense.  When governments invest in collecting data and in digital infrastructure it immediately sparks debate about privacy and worries about surveillance. But data is not inherently bad, and governments collecting information about their citizens is not necessarily problematic.  In fact, often, the opposite is. 

Data brings visibility to communities and to their circumstances. Data allows governments to implement targeted, more effective policy responses, which is an important part of state legitimacy. Thus the absence of data often signals that the needs of certain individuals and communities are not taken into consideration. Zeynep Pamuk writes in her article Contours of Ignorance that the limits of our knowledge are not solely determined by the complexity of natural and social phenomena. Often, what remains unknown is not an intrinsic fact about the world but the consequences of the decisions that scientists, experts, and policymakers make about what counts as significant knowledge and what kind of ignorance we can live with. 

Data is political, not neutral, because it proceeds a decision on where to focus one’s attention, whose problems to solve, and whose problems to ignore. One can understand who are the most underserved, marginalized groups by looking at where the data gaps are.  

Governments collecting individual data is not inherently wrong; often, the opposite is. The key is to ensure greater accountability and public control over what purpose the data is used for, how it is collected, and what happens to data afterwards.