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Data Protection Day

By josellanos, on 28 January 2020

By Dr Jose Tomas Llanos, Research Fellow in PACE (Privacy Aware Cloud Ecosystems) at UCL STEaPP

Data Protection Day (or Data Privacy Day outside Europe) is an international holiday held every year on 28 January. The declared purpose of this holiday is “to give everyone a chance to understand what personal data is collected and processed and why, and what our rights are with respect to this processing.”[1] The date was not randomly chosen: it is the anniversary of the opening for signature, in 1981, of Council of Europe’s Convention 108 for the Protection of individuals with regard to automatic processing of personal data.[2]

Convention 108 introduced the concept of ‘protection of personal data’, as well as important data protection principles that were later enshrined in the Data Protection Directive[3] and included (in a somewhat more elaborate fashion) in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)[4]: personal data must be obtained and processed fairly and lawfully (lawfulness and fairness); stored for specified and legitimate purposes and not used in a way incompatible with those purposes (purpose limitation); adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are stored (i.e. data minimisation); accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date (accuracy); and preserved in a form which permits identification of the data subjects for no longer than is required for the purpose for which those data are stored (storage limitation).[5]

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Why partnership and collaboration are the future of data in cities?

By maria.solis.18, on 14 June 2019

MPA candidate María Jarquín attended the City Data Conference in Birmingham to learn about innovative solutions in which collaboration between local authorities could bring new approaches to urban issues.

Data is the future. However, this future is built upon collaboration. This is the main take away of the City Data Conference organised by NESTA, in partnership with the University of Birmingham and the West Midlands Combined Authority in early June. The purpose of this event was to bring solutions to the data challenges faced by local authorities.

The Conference started with insights from the first keynote speaker, Kit Collingwood from ThoughtWorks, who discussed the growing demand of expertise in data collaboration, which translates in having career transitions and cross-functional teams where developers can work with data scientists, policy-makers and users. Two solutions (and creative outcomes) shared were the FixMyStreet project and the Dear Data experiment.

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