Data Governance in The Digital Information Economy

The so-called Forth Industrial Revolution has an important urban component. Typical city-services and activities like transportation, housing, the hospitality industry, security and even match-making are increasingly provided and facilitated by digital and data-driven models of intermediation (‘platforms’). Platforms are essentially services that operate through a digital interface (an app or website) and that tap on wide-spread internet and smartphones and the collection of locational and other types of information (like ‘preferences’) helping ‘users’ match or find goods or services that they are looking for at a hyper-efficient rate. The platform economy is related to the urban phenomenon because the urban environment and the information and knowledge spillovers typical of cities facilitate the type of “matching” that technological platforms enable. At the center of this urban landscape increasingly intertwined by digital technologies are “data” – the information users and citizens produced with these technologies. Data drive much digitally enabled economic activity they are key enablers of the digitally enabled business models. The information platforms have and gather about the city – broadly understood not only as a space, but an agglomeration of social and economic interactions between people, businesses, municipal government actors and the cities’ infrastructure – is unprecedented. These data shows how and when people move, which streets and shortcuts they use, when usage of public utilities or services peak, etc. As several actors are calling for enhanced oversight on the technology sector, enhanced access to data is often part of that wider call. A key problem is, indeed, that there is an important information asymmetry between these companies and regulators, civil society, their users and researchers.