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Content type: News & Analysis
22nd February 2014
“Open government” – the push for greater transparency, accountability and innovation from governments – is an idea that has gained increasing traction in recent years, as the potential for new technologies to enhance democracy is being realised.
But making government more open and responsive should not mean compromising on privacy and data protection. The Open Government Guide outlines steps governments can take towards more open government and Privacy International has written a draft chapter…
Content type: Long Read
17th July 2019
By Valentina Pavel, PI Mozilla-Ford Fellow, 2018-2019
Our digital environment is changing, fast. Nobody knows exactly what it’ll look like in five to ten years’ time, but we know that how we produce and share our data will change where we end up. We have to decide how to protect, enhance, and preserve our rights in a world where technology is everywhere and data is generated by every action. Key battles will be fought over who can access our data and how they may use it. It’s time to take…
Content type: News & Analysis
12th November 2012
Let's be clear: the Open Data movement is not about the pursuit of complete and unconditional openness. We know that it would be unwise to publish details of police patrol patterns, or the combination to the safe containing the crown jewels. We believe that fundamental reference data like ordnance survey maps, transport timetables, and company information should be freely available to all - information about objects, rather than information about people. Internationally, slightly different…
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
Brazilian supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to resume publishing complete COVID-19 statistics. The government had purged the health ministry website of historical pandemic-related data and said it would stop publishing the cumulative death toll and number of infections in order to “refine” the official data. Independent media estimated the tally at 37,312 deaths and 710,8987 infections; Bolsonaro accused the media of creating a panic.
https://www.…
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
After predicting that the incoming COVID-19 caseload would exceed an “unsustainable surge capacity” of ICU beds by July 6, for several days in late June Texas Medical Center hospitals stopped updating key metrics. The gap followed complaints by Texas governor Greg Abbott about negative headlines regarding ICu capacity. When TMC resumed publishing the data, it had deleted eight of the 17 slides it had been updating daily for three months. After the Houston Chronicle highlighted the missing…
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
As the mounting infection numbers and deaths took Brazil to second-worst affected in the world, the country took down the website on which it had been publishing daily, weekly, and monthly figures non infections and deaths in Braziliant states. A newspaper that supports president Jair Bolsonaro implied that some states were exaggerating the toll, and a council of state health secretaries said it would fight the changes. Two days later, the country restored the site after the Supreme Court…