Know your audience: How can public sector organizations ethically collect data on and about their publics?

Abstract

Data collection is becoming a bigger part of people’s and organization’s everyday lives. Organizations are trying to find ways to better understand their publics by collecting data on them and making informed decisions through using this information, and public sector organizations are no different. As the race to collect and analyze data only expands, public sector organizations are trying to sort out how they too can collect and use this type of information to better serve their publics. Through a series of in-depth interviews with subject-matter experts and a general public survey, this capstone study examined how and to what extent public sector organizations can ethically collect data from their publics. This study puts forth a framework for ethical data collection that includes the entirety of the data lifecycle span and focuses on informed consent and transparency between organization and publics, data collection methods and a plan for the data once it is collected. Further research on educating publics and obtaining informed consent is recommended in order to build trust to advance data collection and usage practices.