Privacy and the limits of open data in South Africa

Even though open data has a number of benefits, the biggest challenge facing open data is privacy. Opening access to such data involves trading off privacy for utility or vice versa. Releasing the raw data allows for better engagement with the data; however, this creates privacy risks. Protecting the data limits the usefulness of the data. Therefore a balance between privacy and utility must be maintained. It therefore becomes challenging to release data while ensuring that it is useful. This paper aims to understand the limits of open data in terms of privacy. Given national regulatory requirements in South Africa to ensure data privacy such as the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act, appropriate measures for mitigating privacy violation are particularly relevant for the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA), a government funded enterprise to manage and provide access to research data repositories. This paper investigates the currently existing South African open data repositories to identify privacy risks that currently exist in terms of the data fields that are released in the datasets. The repositories are aligned towards the POPI act and privacy mitigation techniques to preserve the data while ensuring utility are recommended.