ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the regulatory environment for privacy in the open data environment in the United Kingdom, and civil society work on privacy in the same context. The temporal coverage of the chapter is 2011, when the open data movement began to accelerate in the UK, to 2019. The chapter begins by acknowledging the political nature of data, framing the discussion in terms of data politics and notions of open societies and environments. Next, it surveys the privacy laws, regulations, policies, and resources issued by the state (“privacy from above”) before looking at the resources and campaigns for privacy coming out of civil society (“privacy from below”). The authors suggest that civil society action is less concerned with data release than with methods of data collection and sharing between public and private sector actors.
