This article is written by Jonas Racine, Policy advisor at the justice and home department in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland.

A few weeks ago Joel Burke wrote a piece on success factors for digital government initiatives.

He identified trust, long term thinking and public-private partnerships as key factors. While I agree with most of Joel’s points, I stumbled over some of his reasoning regarding trust in government. He meets scepticism over e-government and privacy concerns with a question:

“Do you really think that the security services of your country couldn’t get any sort of information on you if they really wanted it?”

The reasoning behind that question is that we should not bother about privacy because security services can get access to any kind of personal data if they want to. Consequently, we should start to build that Estonia-style digitized government and ignore privacy concerns because we all trust the government. This way, it costs much less.

Efficiency vs privacy

While I personally trust government — after all, I work for it — I still don't want that super efficient e-government at the expense of my personal data being used at the free will of that government.

It is important that data protection is part of digital transformation because, ultimately, data protection efforts enhance trust in government

In my view, it's not about the security services, either. While they probably do get access to any personal data if they want to, there is still a case for strong data protection. After all, personal data of normal citizens are not of huge interest to security services. It's about reducing the mass storage of the same personal data in every government department silo. It's not the security services having access to my health data that I'm worried about — I don't want that health data within the hands of ordinary government agencies (except maybe for those within the health sector who actually need them).

This said, I would still argue that government has to digitize its services. Transforming its services and improving its data management systems can even enhance the protection of personal data compared to a paper-based or semi paper-based system. Why? Because the old systems inevitably lead to countless excel-sheets and other guerilla data collections across different departments without any control whatsoever. But it is important that data protection is part of that digital transformation because ultimately, data protection efforts enhance trust in government.

Building the right barriers

Furthermore, I disagree with Joel's argument/question on another level. It disincentivizes doing the right thing. You could also ask: “why do anything about climate change, if it is going to happen anyway?”

In my view, it is important that we care about data protection (just as much as we care about climate change), even if it means the creation of a super-efficient e-government is more difficult and expensive and even though security services access our personal data, if they want to.

Many governments have a long way to go on building that trust with its citizens

I would even go so far to say that not even Estonia relies solely on trust in its government. As an EU member state Estonia falls under the scope of the GDPR — a strong legal data protection framework. Estonia, as far as I know the case, has implemented strong technical barriers to personal data access and even allows its citizens to control the use of their data themselves. That enables trust, too.

Enabling people to control the usage of their data by government and implementing strong technical barriers for government departments to only access personal data they really need to get access to seem like the way to go forward on the data protection level.

Many governments have a long way to go on building that trust with its citizens. A strong data protection framework will do more than asking people to trust governments. — Jonas Racine

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