Balancing Act: Innovation vs. Privacy in the Age of Data Portability


Thursday, July 12, 2018 @ 2 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY 11201

RSVP here.

The ability of people to move or copy data about themselves from one service to another — data portability — has been hailed as a way of increasing competition and driving innovation. In many areas, such as through the Open Banking initiative in the United Kingdom, the practice of data portability is fully underway and propagating. The launch of GDPR in Europe has also elevated the issue among companies and individuals alike. But recent online security breaches and other experiences of personal data being transferred surreptitiously from private companies, (e.g., Cambridge Analytica’s appropriation of Facebook data), highlight how data portability can also undermine people’s privacy.

The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering is pleased to present Jeni Tennison, CEO of the Open Data Institute, for its next Ideas Lunch, where she will discuss how data portability has been regulated in the UK and Europe, and what governments, businesses and people need to do to strike the balance between its risks and benefits.

Jeni Tennison is the CEO of the Open Data Institute. She gained her PhD from the University of Nottingham then worked as an independent consultant, specialising in open data publishing and consumption, before joining the ODI in 2012. Jeni was awarded an OBE for services to technology and open data in the 2014 New Year Honours.

Before joining the ODI, Jeni was the technical architect and lead developer for legislation.gov.uk. She worked on the early linked data work on data.gov.uk, including helping to engineer new standards for publishing statistics as linked data. She continues her work within the UK’s public sector as a member of the Open Standards Board.

Jeni also works on international web standards. She was appointed to serve on the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group from 2011 to 2015 and in 2014 she started to co-chair the W3C’s CSV on the Web Working Group. She also sits on the Advisory Boards for Open Contracting Partnership and the Data Transparency Lab.

Twitter handle: @JeniT