Heta Tarkkala: Reflections on making welfare state data a profitable resource in Finland

This lecture with the full title ”From gold mine to a well-oiled machine: Reflections on making welfare state data a profitable resource in Finland” took place on 18 February 2022 as part of the DigiGov Virtual Winter School ”Taming the iMonster: Regulating digital platforms”.

Speaker: Heta Tarkkala (University of Helsinki)

Moderation: Rasmus Kvaal Wardemann (University of Vienna)

Abstract: If data is the new oil, nations may be sitting on goldmines. Long before the Big Data hype, states started producing data on their populations, particularly within health. When few had heard of artificial intelligence, and a neural network was just something in your brain, the logic behind this data was to benefit or manage the public. But with increasing interest and belief in the private sector’s ability to turn data into value, nations are now looking to profit from their population data. In this new landscape, what values are seen as the most important? Public health, or private wealth? In this presentation we’ll take a closer look at the new landscape of data at the intersection of markets and publics. Speaker Heta Tarkkala’s work on the Nordic welfare states reveals a tension between old paradigms of data governance and the emerging platform economy.

Organisation: Research Platform Governance of Digital Practices (University of Vienna)

Text from Research Platform Governance of Digital Practices YouTube page.