New blog on Data Autonomy: The art of making choices

Policy is rarely a very popular topic in academic environments. Policy guidelines are preferably considered as suggestions, not as restrictions. Who needs rules and guidelines, when academic freedom is the highest of all values?

We can and should think long and hard about data autonomy from an academic perspective, but we need policy to start putting our choices into practice. Currently our choices are being made for us. We have little say in what happens to our data or even where our data is. We are governed by rules we do not know exist. We cannot see these rules due to untransparent policies and algorithms of the Big Tech companies that facilitate our applications and software.

Our academic freedom as a university is challenged by this lack of transparency, unless we start making our own rules, making our own choices, writing our own policies. Let's start at the beginning!

Eva van der Woude works as an IT Policy Advisor at the Center for Information Technology of the University of Groningen.