What is Data-Dichotomy

The chapter discusses the traditional expectations about privacy protection and argues that current models for the governance of data do not adequately fulfil these expectations. The traditional models of privacy protection are based on the assumption that strict anomymisation of released statistical data is the way to protect privacy and ensure public trust in the research enterprise. It will be argued that the main barriers to privacy preservation and the perpetuation of public trust are due to the capabilities of information technology on the one hand and the availability of numerous data sources on the other. Furthermore, both types of resource enable certain types of organisation to ‘read’ and categorise other people. The realities of data-processing technologies challenge the dichotomy, present in the legal framework for data-protection, between ‘personal’ and research data. This dichotomy, moreover, is not useful in the protection of informational privacy. The chapter will refer to several examples of uses of data in what are in effect ‘socio-technical systems’, which arguably challenge accepted methods of privacy protection in this area.