#TIL: Is it Open, Closed or Shared?
By Snehil Singh
India is set to pass the data protection legislation — ‘The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2020’ currently under review by the Joint Parliamentary Committee. Over the past few years, growth of global digital trade has propelled concerns around collection, storage, consumption and privacy of data. Recently, a Joint Parliamentary Panel in India held review meetings with some of the biggest digital and technology platforms in India on aspects related to data protection and data privacy.
As the digital economy continues to grow in prominence and permeate everyday life, the debate on data protection throws up terms such as , “Open Data”, “Closed Data” or “Shared Data”. While they may read straightforward, knowing the underlying nuances among them is critical to build a robust data governance ecosystem in India.
Open data, as defined by the Open Data Institute, refers to any data that is freely available and accessible for the consumption of everyone. The legal bearing of it is licensed in a way that permits use and retribution data for commercial and non-commercial purposes by anyone, by giving due credits. While there are no set conditions on how open data can be used, a data provider may require data users to credit them in some appropriate way. This is to make it clear if the data has been changed, or that any new datasets created using their data are also shared as open data. The prominent use cases of open data are Central government’s Open Government Data, Mission specific platforms such as Smart Cities Mission or State portals- Telangana Open Data. Other examples are Creative Commons, stock market data, scientific/academic research etc. The objective of making data open is to improve efficiency, drive accountability and trigger innovations.
On the other spectrum lies Closed Data, which is data accessible only to a particular organisation, institution or an individual collecting and holding the data. Bulk of this data isn’t retrievable easily and requires a customised data license for redistribution or reuse. Examples of closed data are business sensitive reports, sales data, contracts or user data. Sensitive data pertaining to national security is another example of closed data as public access to these poses a risk.
The third category, i.e, Shared Data lies somewhere in the middle of open and closed data. It refers to data that is shared with a) a specific group of people, b) individuals or c) public with limited access for a specific purpose. It is a broad term that covers a huge amount of data that is collected every day. An example of shared data is election data or public-private partnerships such as Ola City Sense program which utilises Ola’s cab ride data to enable data based mobility governance with state governments and multilateral organisations. World Bank Development Data Partnership, a platform designed to improve governance through data collaborations between private, public and non-governmental organisations.
Understanding the three different shades of data is important to know “how” one can capitalise the vast amount of data getting generated every day in the digital world. A starting point to answer the “how” could be by bucketing it as closed, shared or open data, basis three key criteria:
- Where does that dataset come from?
- Who has the permission to access the dataset?
- What can one do with that dataset?
Today I learnt (TIL) is a weekly series by OMI that brings you interesting nuggets of information that you didn’t know you needed.
Follow us on Twitter for regular updates.
