data surveillance camera collected

Data is data. Yet the short- and long-term consequences of collecting data in environments where appropriate legal and institutional safeguards are lacking have not been properly explored. Amassing ip camera and analysing data always has the potential to enable surveillance, regardless of the well-intentioned objectives that may underpin its collection. Development is not merely about economic prosperity, and social services. It is about providing individuals with a safe environment in which they can live in dignity.

Towards accountability

In their recently published paper, Big data and Due Process: Towards A Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms, Crawford and Schultz propose a new framework for a “right to procedural data due process,” arguing that “individuals who are privately and often secretly 'judged' by big data should have similar rights to those judged by the courts with respect to how their personal data has been used in such adjudications”.

Unlike the common model of personally identifiable information, big data does not easily fall within legally protected categories of data. This means there are no legal provisions protecting the data surveillance camera collected, processed and disclosed, and the rights of individuals whose data is being analysed.

Therefore, Crawford and Schultz have innovatively re-visited some relevant founding principles of the legal concept of due process. Due process (as understood in the American context) prohibits the government from depriving an individual’s rights to life, liberty, or property without affording them access to certain basic procedural components of the adjudication process. The concept equally exists under European human rights law, though is more commonly called procedural fairness.

By doing so, Crawford and Schultz are challenging the fairness of the process of collection rather than the attempting to regulate it, which would be more complex and contested. They have thus applied these principles to address existing privacy concerns linked to the development and use of big data, namely:

requiring those who use big data to “adjudicate” others, to post some form of notice disclosing not only the type of predictions they are attempting, but also the general sources of data that they are drawing surveillance system upon as inputs, including a means whereby those whose personal data in included can learn of that fact;