The Origins of Personal Data and its Implications for Governance

Abstract

Legacy privacy governance regimes are based on a presumption that data is primarily being collected from the individual with some level of their awareness. Increasingly, data is not collected directly from the individual but, rather, at a distance without the individual’s awareness of its origination and subsequent uses. To understand the implication, this paper proposes a taxonomy based on the manner in which data originates. The data categories include: provided, observed, derived, and inferred.

Keywords: data origins, data taxonomy, data collection, privacy governance, personal data, privacy