Data rights in the age of AI
Determining human rights obligations of States in the area of data governance
Although the performance of Artificial Intelligence depends on the combination of data, algorithms and programming skills, this is data that ultimately determines the quality of the result. For this reason, the project aimed at defining States’ obligations in the area of data governance derived from Article 15(1)b of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (right of everyone to benefit from scientific progress and its applications).
Key highlights
Using the method of corpus linguistics, I carried out an analysis of the terms 'data' and 'information', the meaning of which evolves with technology and is key to defining obligations derived from treaties. The analysis was based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the largest corpora of English language.
I proposed draft criteria for monitoring States’ obligations based on the methodology developed by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the context of other human rights, such as the right to education, the right to health or the right to water and sanitation. They include the following:
- data availability (developing the infrastructure to produce and make available data; conducting research as part of official statistics; and ensuring data literacy);
- data accessibility (balancing the protection of data producers with the interests of researchers and the public in their reprocessing; data quality (ensuring the quality of public sector data, and establishment of participatory mechanisms for the representatives of concerned groups);
- data quality (ensuring the quality of public sector data, and establishment of participatory mechanisms for the representatives of concerned groups);
- data acceptability (ensuring the flow of information between researchers and society, as well as ensuring protection against misuse of data analytics).
During the project, I conducted a 3,5-month research stay at the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law (University of Vienna).
Summary:
- Title: The role of science and data in the age of Artificial Intelligence - States' obligations in data governance in the context of Article 15(1)(b) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
- Project Team: Łukasz Szoszkiewicz (Principal Investigator), prof. Zdzisław (Dzidek) Kędzia (supervisor)
- Funding: National Science Centre (Preludium, no. 2018/31/N/HS5/01592)
- Timeframe: July 2019 – July 2022