Privacy, security, trust, transparency: how to enable data-sharing in government
At the Global Government Digital Summit, digital leaders set out the barriers to government data sharing – from citizens’ suspicions to systems that disincentivise departments – and shared ideas for making it as easy as in the private sector
“People are very willing to give their data and their personal information in exchange for private sector services where they see obvious benefits,” said Stephen Burt. “But they’re quite suspicious about doing the same thing when it comes to government actors, because they have this outsized perception of what we’re going to do with their data, and a set of assumptions around what we’re already doing with it that are completely erroneous – both in terms of the capabilities that we have in place, and the legislative barriers that exist.”
Speaking to 58 top digital leaders from 24 nations and international organisations, gathered at the 2024 Global Government Digital Summit in Ottawa for informal discussions on the challenges they face in common, Canada’s chief data officer was expressing a frustration common to public sector digital leaders across the democratic world. Citizens will blithely hand over detailed information on their private lives, lifestyles and circumstances to companies whose only goal is to make money out of them, but often begrudge any use of far less personal data by public servants interested only in improving their health, wealth and wellbeing.
“Across Europe and North America, there’s a cultural challenge: a suspicion of what government is going to do with your information,” said Burt, speaking in the session addressing the question: ‘Why is data sharing so hard in government?’ What’s more, commented Martin Bowyer, deputy director for securing government services at the UK’s Central Digital and Data Office [which has since become part of the Government Digital Service] civil service digital leaders face another, internal challenge.
Read more: Digital identity dilemmas – and how governments are working to overcome them
Providing clear and concrete benefits
“Our system actively disincentivises data-sharing” between government departments, said Bowyer. “The benefit of sharing my dataset is diffuse; it’s systemic. If you’re a permanent secretary, an accounting officer, you can buy into that from an intellectual perspective – but you don’t get any personal benefit. At the same time, it costs you money, you can’t transfer the risk, and you’re open to public challenge.”
For departmental leaders, Bowyer added, “their primary focus is around trying to deliver their minister’s priorities. Sharing data sucks up scarce resources, and they can’t see all the consequences of sharing it. If you add all those things up, you understand why everything that happens underneath that permanent secretary level is so blooming hard. If anyone has any magic wands on how to solve those problems, I’d love to hear them!”
Nobody did. But there is an approach that’s helpful in tackling both problems, digital leaders suggested: providing those who engage with digital public services and agree to share data – citizens and departments alike – with benefits as clear and concrete as those offered by private companies.
When the advantages of sharing data are immediate and obvious, people are willing to share data with private companies, attendees noted
The same dynamic applies to public bodies, Innocent Bagamba Muhizi, the chief executive of the Rwanda Information Society Authority, said. “We had a situation where some of the departments didn’t want to share their data,” he recalled. The solution lay in demonstrating how doing so would benefit them: having arranged access with one reluctant department, “we were able to dig into their data with a company that was helping us to do data analysis – and we identified patterns that they didn’t know about. Then they started to see the value of data, and asking us for help. That opened up the conversation about allowing data-sharing.”
In Catalonia, said Open Government of Catalonia chief executive Miquel Estapé, digital leaders have made good progress by attaching data-sharing to other services that public bodies find valuable. “In Spain, there’s a regulation that all relevant information from government has to be open – but people don’t follow it,” he commented. “We’re a government agency that provides really good platform services that are interesting to other government bodies; and with those services, we manage all the data in the cloud. Our contract says that we’re managing their data, and that we’re going to open it up according to this regulation.
“So we don’t ask them to share data,” he added. “We provide something that’s really interesting to them, and data-sharing is part of that service.”
Read more: Aiming high with AI: making artificial intelligence ubiquitous across government
Tackling mistrust with transparency
Digital leaders must provide immediate, concrete benefits for citizens and public bodies that are willing to share their data, providing the pull factor so effectively exerted by private companies online, those present concluded. And as well as strengthening incentives, they must also tackle disincentives – particularly the public mistrust of government that Burt had identified.
Here, the Canadian CDO argued, the most powerful strategy is simply to be completely open about what government is doing: “Addressing privacy, security and trust is going to have to be done in lockstep with addressing sharing and transparency, so that people can see what’s happening when government uses their data,” he said. “As we look at addressing the multiple barriers across our legislative system and pursuing data-sharing to break down those silos, we’re going to have to address the transparency elements that would allow citizens to see what we’re doing in real time.” Burt highlighted the Estonian model, under which citizens “get pinged whenever a government agency accesses your personal information, whether it’s a police service or a doctor”.
This approach made sense to one senior public sector attendee. The final piece of this puzzle, they argued, is public sector leadership. In particular, leadership from the political level that can help make progress happen.
“And what I’ve seen recently across government is that senior people who own the risk are seeing the benefits of data-sharing.
“We’re reaching a critical mass of uses cases that are, hopefully, going to tip the balance,” they concluded. “I think we’re on the cusp of getting there.”
The invitation-only Global Government Digital Summit is a private event, providing a safe space at which civil servants with senior digital, data and AI roles in government can discuss and debate the challenges they face in common. GGF produces these reports to share some of their thinking with our readers – checking before publication that participants are content to be quoted.
Our four reports cover the four daytime sessions. This article summarises the fourth and final session. The first covered how to make AI ubiquitous across government, the second looked at how governments are shifting from a cloud-first to cloud-smart strategy, and the third covered digital identity dilemmas and how to overcome them.
Read more: Looking skyward: how governments are moving from cloud-first to cloud-smart
About Matt Ross
Matt is Global Government Forum's Contributing Editor, providing direction and support on topics, products and audience interests across GGF’s editorial, events and research operations. He has been a journalist and editor since 1995, beginning in motoring and travel journalism – and combining the two in a 30-month, 30-country 4x4 expedition funded by magazine photo-journalism. Between 2002 and 2008 he was Features Editor of Haymarket news magazine Regeneration & Renewal, covering urban regeneration, economic growth and community development; and from 2008 to 2014 he was the Editor of UK magazine and website Civil Service World, then Editorial Director for Public Sector – both at political publishing house Dods. He has also worked as Director of Communications at think tank the Institute for Government.
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