DURING the time of President Benigno Aquino III, I attended a forum where the speaker talked about open data in the Philippines, and how the government of President Aquino was supporting it.
At that time, I wondered how an open data framework was possible, in the absence of an enabling law that would allow the freedom of information.
To the credit of the current administration, President Rodrigo Duterte signed an Executive Order (EO) to would allow the freedom of information, even if only in the Executive Branch. That should be a sufficient signal to pass an enabling law, so that it could cover all the Branches of government, in effect the whole country.
As far as I know, there is neither an EO nor a law that would either allow or promote an open data framework in the Philippines. If at all, the only legal basis that could be cited is the fact that the Philippines is one of the founding states of the Open Government Partnership, but that is about it.
On the basis of that membership however, the Aquino Administration found the reasons to promote open governance during their time. Among their other initiatives, they launched www.data.gov.ph for the purpose of making national government data searchable, accessible and useful. That was a good initiative on their part, but I still wonder why they did not push for an enabling law for open data along with freedom of information.
Just to put this discussion in the right perspective, the open data advocacy only requires “some” data to be open, in other words not all data. That is somehow similar to the provisions of the FOI EO that also provides some exceptions as to what information is not required to be given.
In the case of open data however, it is not clear what “some” data means, and what is the boundary that would tell us what are included and what are not. For practical reasons however, we could just surmise that anything that violates personal privacy and anything that threatens national security should be included.
As I have personally defined it, data is raw and information is processed data. If you would go along with my definition, all the raw data sources of the processed data that are not excluded by the FOI EO should be considered as part of open data, without any question.
It goes without saying that all the information that are excluded in the FOI EO could still not be considered as part of open data, not unless the data owners or all those who are tasked to protect it would say otherwise. Perhaps as a general rule, only the owners of the personal data could authorize whether or not their details should be excluded from the FOI EO or not.
As I see it, the most practical way to do this is to allow the National Privacy Commission to first define what should not be included in the open data framework. With that done and after the exclusions from the FOI EO also defined, then we will all know what could be freely published and what could not be.
As we all know, this is all about conflicts between the right to information and the right to privacy. Beyond that however is the economic angle, because it is a common fact that having an open data framework is a stimulus towards economic development. All told, what we need is equilibrium between the two rights.
Whenever the issue of freedom of information is discussed, it is unavoidable that the issue of a National ID System (NIDS) is also discussed. For about twenty years that I have been involved in the debates behind this issue, I have always expressed my apprehension that not unless there are controls in a system that could access personal information in government databases, it could be subject to abuse.
I recall that having access to two or more government databases for the purpose of comparing the data should be subject to a court order, not unless we could allow citizens to sign waivers that would give permission to openly access their private information.
Looking up ahead, there is reason to say that the future NIDS should have a biometric system, most likely a Facial Recognition System (FRS). In theory, plastic ID cards will no longer be necessary if FRS is used.
Of course, an Automated Fingerprint Information System (AFIS) could still be useful, but nothing beats the accuracy of FRS.
Whatever system is chosen, all the government agencies should adopt one standard system, instead of each of them having their own systems. No need to mention names, but as it is now, several law enforcement agencies have their own AFIS that do not talk to each other. So much for open data./PN
