As governments around the world become increasingly datafied, debates are emerging about the best ways to attend to the complex socio-political implications of big data and the datafication of the state. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with senior executives and data experts within Australian government agencies, high-level privacy experts, and other experts in public sector data integration, this article examines how a sociotechnical imaginary about data-driven, democratic government acts within and alongside routinely bureaucratised forms of techno-legal risk management to inform the work of Australia’s data integration experts. Notably, these techno-legal experts recognised the limitations of techno-legal data management, and mobilised notions of the social license when seeking to (re)orient the trajectories of data integration towards the democratic, data-driven government they envisage. Contributing to debates about the datafication of the state, we argue that while a social license will not be a panacea to all the complexities of datafication, a social license with institutional roots is essential to deepen accountability towards publics, and to help ensure that datafication can be co-produced by, and reflective of, the sociotechnical futures envisaged by a broader range of publics.