Open data can promote social injustice.

"We’re surrounded by data—more and more of it is created every day about every person and every topic. Accompanying this cascade is an open data movement that calls for datasets to be fully accessible. We can see this attitude in what has become an Internet activist catchphrase: 'Information wants to be free.' Even the White House has gotten behind the movement with President Obama’s recent executive order that vows to, by default, make all data and information 'open and machine readable.' The idea is that open data will lead to more transparency, which sounds harmless enough, right? Isn’t free and accessible a good thing? But data isn’t like ore in the ground, waiting to be mined. Nor is it a neutral, objective reflection of reality. Data is constructed by people when information is, among other things: collected, processed, interpreted, stored, retrieved, and communicated. In an excellent new paper titled 'From Open Data to Information Justice,' which was presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, Jeffrey Johnson, a political scientist at Utah Valley University, writes that directing attention toward openness—and the mantra that sunlight is the best disinfectant—can detract from more serious questions about how data is created. 'The constructed nature of data makes it quite possible for injustices to be embedded in the data itself,' he says. 'Whether by design or as unintended consequences, the process of constructing data builds social values and patterns of privilege into the data.' Johnson explores three specific issues that arise from failing to question the ways in which data is constructed: embedded social privileges, different capabilities of users who have access, and the norms that these systems impose on people ..."