Digital self-determination: an alternative paradigm for emerging economies
Wenxi Zhang, Li Min Ong, Mark James Findlay · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023
This paper explores the digital divide between the digitally rich and poor worlds, and how an alternative paradigm of data governance can help to reduce existing disparities. The North/South World duality, now digital as well as temporal and spatial, has led to the colonisation of data by the data-rich through the commodification and marketisation of personal data and the monopolisation of its processing. Techno-colonialism has turned AI into a tool for political and economic imperialism. However, Digital Self-Determination (DSD), a novel principle of data governance that can run in parallel with hard regulatory regimes, can help to disperse power and establish respectful relationships in safe spaces for negotiating data access and management. DSD views access to data as a fundamental feature of the integrity of the data subject, and recognises that parties who access data have responsibilities including to protect data integrity. DSD is not so much about individual rights as about collective duty. Redirecting the motives for digitalisation towards sustainable data use and mutualised benefit by promoting trusted relationships in safe digital spaces can achieve power dispersal and data access equality, allowing DSD to sit comfortably in societies where sustainability is valued and benefit is socialised.