Data privacy: From transparency to fairness

Abstract

In recent years, data privacy has attracted increasing public concerns, especially with public scandals from top Internet companies, emerging over inappropriate data collection, lack of transparency in data usage, and manipulation of users' preferences. This has led to responsive efforts from multiple sectors of society to constrain the violation of individuals’ data privacy. Among these efforts, the regulations like GDPR are the most influential, which are believed to be able to change the foundation of the whole data ecosystem. The main concern of current regulation is data transparency, designed to enable individuals to make rational decisions about their data. However, I argue that transparency cannot mitigate a key issue of data privacy, which is the right of receiving benefits from data. This issue is getting severe with the rapid development of the data economy and will become the essential problem of social welfare and fairness in the AI era. I further point out that the key to solving this issue is to migrate the current centralized data utilization paradigm to a new decentralized paradigm. Based on the recent technical advancements, I propose an applicable pathway to implement such a paradigm. And to realize a fair and sustainable data eco-system, joint efforts should be made within this paradigm.