Visualizar18: Personal Data

The forthcoming edition of Visualizar'18 (21 September-5 October) has chosen Personal Data as its theme. This theme is by no means unrelated to previous editions of Visualizar, as back in 2015 we dealt with data commons and in 2017, because of the migration - of data -, the result of the Tráckula project was an addon for Firefox that displays the entities that track our activity on the web when we visit almost every page - including this one.

In recent weeks, we have been inundated with emails advising us of the new conditions of the electronic services that third parties provide to us, thanks to the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, which has laid on the table the conditions that we establish, albeit unwittingly, unwillingly, and unconsciously, with entities whose services we use on a daily basis.

In this context, the scandal about Cambridge Analytica placed us in the context of the use made of our data by Facebook, who also have handed data over to large corporations such as Samsung, Microsoft or Apple; Edward Snowden continues in Moscow due to his having denounced the mass surveillance policy of the US and its National Security Agency, the NSA; Julian Assange is still confined in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London; major data leaks have allowed The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to lead the Panama Papers (2017 Pulitzer Prize); city councils, such as that of Barcelona, placed technological sovereignty in the centre of the debate on personal data when it committed to a different way of using technology in its relationship with the public.

Technological sovereignty connects concern about personal data with open data, free software and hardware, and in general with open technologies, but as Gemma Galdón tells us:

Sovereignty allows the expression of individual options that, once they have been added, determine future policies. In the world of data and in the individual relationship between citizens and devices that capture information, this capacity for decision ignores the collective dimension of the rights that are at stake, such as privacy, and opens the door to terribly harmful data relationships. Gemma Galdón, http://lab.cccb.org/es/soberania-tecnologica-democracia-datos-y-gobernanza-en-la-era-digital/

The debate is served, and if you have a look at the related projects or the articles we link to, this is not something new nor is it going to be "solved" immediately given that, no matter what perspective you look at it from, it implies taking the public into consideration, a public that in general terms is either not informed or not part of the debate.

If you have an idea, if you want to develop a project, or if you want to share it with others and you can do so from 21 September to 5 October, sign up for the call for ideas/projects/proposals for Visualizar'18: Personal Data. until 26 august.

What are personal data?

According to European Commission, personal data are those data that relate to, identify or allow the identification of living people. In other words, certain data that do not make sense separately but which, when combined with other data may lead to the identification of a particular person, are also considered personal data. Also, people's data that have been isolated, encrypted or pseudo-anonymised but can also be used to once again identify a person. If these personal data have been adequately anonymised in such a way that individuals may not be identifiable, they are no longer considered personal data. In this regard, for data to be really anonymised, the anonymisation process must be irreversible. The law protects personal data regardless of the technology used to process such data, no matter whether they are processed manually or automatically. Nor does it matter how the data are stored, whether in a complex system, under electronic surveillance or in a document. In any case, personal data are subject to the protection that is specified in the GDPR.

Examples of personal data

A name and surname(s);
An address;
An email such as this name.surname@entity.domain
An official identification such as an identity card or a passport.
Location data, such as for example, the location function of a mobile phone.
An IP address;
The identifier of a cookie.
The advertising identifier of your telephone.
Medical data stored by the health system in any of their facilities.

Examples of data not considered personal:

A company registration number.
An email such as this info@company.es
Anonymised data

Team

Ignasi Alcalde MyData.org, speaker.
Adolfo Antón Bravo, manager of DataLab, curator.
Mertxe Bilbao, tourism and mediation professional.
Gemma Galdón Clavell, Éticas Foundation, speaker.
Alba G. Corral, visual artist, mentoring.
Samuel Granados, visual storytelling, mentoring.
gvSIG, free geomatics, mentoring.
HackMadrid %27, mentoring.
Martín Nadal, data artist, mentoring.
Julián Pérez, visual artist, mediation.
Gabriela Rodríguez, Tactical Tech, mentoring.
Ana Serrano Tellería, UCLM, speaker.
Marta Verde Baqueiro, interactive artist, mentoring.
Alejandro Zappala, cartographer, mentoring.

A few related articles

A little bit of the history of Visualizar

Visualizar is an international workshop that develops data visualisation projects that was set up in 2007 by José Luis de Vicente. It investigates the social, cultural and artistic implications of data culture, and it puts forward methodologies to make them more understandable and to open up avenues for participation and criticism. Thanks to the power of visualisation, we can analyse and understand complex issues, learning as we work collaboratively in the workshop, in order to understand new challenges.

It has been curated by Adolfo Antón Bravo since 2015, and since 2016 it is part of the Datalab Data Laboratory.

Tipo de post

Blog

Publication date

27/06/2018

Autor

adolfo_anton

Programa

Visualizar18: Personal Data

Temas