It remains mostly opaque which data is shared with the users based on which decisions. The importance of getting scientific and legal access to data to produce knowledge of public interest has become clear in the light of diverse scandals, such as the case of Cambridge Analytica.
On 24 February 2022, the Meropi Tzanetakis and I organised a roundtable to discuss challenges for public interest research and future research priorities. The public round table was part of the Virtual Winter School "Taming the iMonster: Regulating digital platforms''. Bringing together experts from social sciences, law and operations research, themes and topics relevant for science, policy and civil society were discussed. The roundtable convened experts from different backgrounds: John Albert, policy and advocacy manager at AlgorithmWatch, Wolfie Christl, digital rights activist and investigative researcher at Cracked Labs, Johnathan Gray, associate professor at King’s College London and co-founder of the Public Data Lab, Jürgen Pfeffer, professor of computational social science and big data at the Technical University of Munich, and Theresa Züger, head of the Public Interest AI research group at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society discussed with us their experiences and visions for research in the public interest.
A blog post with a summary of the discussion can be found here.
The recording of the session is on one of the platforms that we discussed.
