Center for Knowledge Infrastructures

Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, Tenth Annual Berkeley Law Privacy Lecture https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/bclt/Video available at Berkeley's Box Channel.Two policy trends in access to data are beginning to clash, raising new challenges for universities and for individual faculty, students, and staff. One trend is for researchers to provide open access to their data as a condition for obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals. The other trend is for universities to accumulate vast amounts of data about the activities of their communities in research, teaching, learning, services, and administration. Many of these data, both research and operational, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities are coming to see the value of these data for learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities, governments, and private individuals also see value in these data; universities are besieged with requests for access. These conflicts pose challenges in balancing obligations for stewardship, trust, privacy, confidentiality – and often academic freedom – with the value of exploiting these data for analytical and commercial purposes. This talk will explore these trends, drawing on the pioneering work of the University of California in privacy and information security, data governance, and cyber risk.