Dissertation

Access, Accountability, and Ownership in Government Use of Proprietary Systems

Young, Meg

2020

Overview

When firms contract with public agencies to provide services, they regularly assert that some subset of their work is proprietary. For instance, companies may stake a claim over how information they produce is managed and shared. At the same time, governments in the state of Washington are subject to a strongly transparent state Public Records Act, under which members of the public can request access to government information, some of which is transacted or shared between government agencies and private firms. In this dissertation, I analyze two cases of contracting relationships between the public and private sectors in which data ownership is contested: (i) the contract between the transportation agencies behind One Regional Card for All (ORCA) fare card in the Puget Sound region and their vendor Vix Technology and (ii) the would-be contract between King County Metro and Lyft Incorporated in support of a subsidized expansion of transit hub access. I report on data sharing as a site of competing claims over data control with a focus on the technical, legal, and policy factors that enabled and constrained access to it. In both cases, I situate specific dataset access requests in the context of public agencies’ objectives to advance accountability, equity, and oversight. Meanwhile, firms asserted intellectual property protections like trade secret in an attempt to prevent data access. My data collection draws on my firsthand experience as a research assistant on a project to support cross-sector data sharing at the University of Washington called the Transportation Data Collaborative, as well as additional interviews I conducted and documents I requested under the Washington Public Records Act. In its high-transparency and permissive data access construction, the Washington Public Records Act emerged as a key factor in both of my case studies, as it both afforded and constrained data sharing in moments when firms contested access on the basis of trade secret. I locate my descriptive case studies of these data flows within a broader scholarship of ambiguity and political struggle in the demarcation between “public” and “private.” Building on theory that understands these terms as always making normative (rather than descriptive) claims about the world, I explore how ownership emerged as a dominant rationale in assertions about how data should be accessed or shared. Across both cases, I observe that while data ownership is locally understood to be a means of asserting data control, in practice it is not dispositive of outcomes with respect to its access and sharing. In the conclusion, I highlight how data ownership fails as a data governance strategy and connect this finding to broader information policy debates.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Information science / Public policy
• ISBN: 9798569997459