This is a worldwide trend, seen in global IT companies — now often referred to as surveillance capitalism.
that have a much more uneven history in the quest for reliable knowledge. How far can such new methods be trusted, especially when they carry such heavy freight of responsibility for people’s choices, life chances and even human life itself ?
Confronting New Questions
The large question to be addressed has to do with data governance. This is closely connected with questions of trust and, thus, also ethics, in both relations with the state and with corporations, in all their early twenty-firstcentury complexity. Trust has been deeply damaged in both corporate and governmental domains, due to data breaches, surveillance overreach, unfair outcomes in policing and security, and disturbingly protective secrecy. Data governance should not be seen in only a technical or legal sense; data justice in data governance would align this with human flourishing and the common good. Canada and similarly aligned countries cannot expect to advance their strategic and economic interests, let alone foster human flourishing, without rebuilding trust. This, in turn, relates to the focus of security concerns. If Canadian citizens suspect that the actual focus of security seems to refer to governmental, economic or technological activities and systems alone, then trust is once again threatened. However,
if those interests are seen to be under an umbrella of human security (Zedner 2009), where personal, communal and environmental protection are the focus rather than states or national security, this will help to recover trust. These considerations underpin the specific comments that follow. Given the major challenges of new analytic methods in state security endeavours, trust can only be developed by paying attention to protecting the kinds of basic rights and freedoms enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This also requires robust safeguards against erroneous and malicious use of data, not to mention transparency about government-related (such as the RCMP) use of private surveillance companies for monitoring dissent — at pipeline sites, for example, or at major inter-governmental summit meetings. Such safeguards would nurture human security and, with it, heightened trust. Turning to specific questions of the digital, and to data in particular, how these are handled is of utmost significance. As the methods of addressing security challenges are shifting fundamentally, so the questions for regulating and overseeing security-surveillance must also change. What was once thought of primarily as a question of data collection is now primarily one of analysis and use of data (Broeders et al. 2017). Along with this is a discernible shift toward data governance in terms of broad ethical frameworks, rather than of privacy alone (Bennett and Raab 2018). As far as analysis is concerned, duties of care are required both in data collection and curation, and in the use of algorithms that are central to any analysis. Both internal audits and external reviews should be guided by Data breaches, surveillance overreach, unfair outcomes in policing and security, and disturbingly protective secrecy have damaged citizens’ trust in both corporate and governmental domains. Safeguards against erroneous and malicious use of data, and, importantly, transparency about government use of private surveillance companies to, for example, monitor dissent at pipeline sites, are required. (Photo: arindambanerjee / Shutterstock.com)