IT is commendable of the health minister to take a strong stand against the commercialisation of   MySejahtera data.

Events over the last few days appear to indicate new thinking in public management by the government where the focus is exclusively on revenue management supported by economic incentives.

The government should be reminded that it is not the owner but a trustee of the public datasets that it holds. It has a duty to leverage the public data for socio-economic equity and not for profit.

If the government were to charge fees for re-use of the data, it should also make the data available at no cost for certain categories of re-use, such as non commercial re-use or re-use by SMEs, which are facing a long uphill recovery battle that could take years.

Proponents could argue that so long as the country can balance private and public interests with a proper legal framework – e.g. the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) revised to model after the gold standard of data privacy, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforced in Europe, which is to hold all those handling citizen data to account – commercialisation should be allowed to spur economic activity around data. 

Again, proponents arguing for personal data to be included claimed if the data are anonymised, it will protect the identity of the individuals concerned. But if the original data sets are not anonymised, there is a risk and a possibility of harm to the personal data within it. E.g a simple switching of names in the original data set with aliases or pseudonyms can be passed off as adequate anonymisation and this cannot be dealt with any legal enforceable penalties.

If personal data collected using taxpayer money are to be shared, it should only be shared for the purpose of boosting innovation and solving humanitarian problems in the country, such as the Data for Good program initiated by Facebook, which aims to solve some of the worst humanitarian crises today. By sharing anonymous data from their users, Facebook created a population density map, in collaboration with The World Bank and Columbia University, and a disaster map to prevent natural disasters, in collaboration with The Red Cross, Unicef and the World Food programme.

FaceBook is also working on flattening the Covid-19 curve by offering maps on population movements to researchers and non-profits for a better understanding of how the virus spreads.

Another initiative saw Telefonica, a mobile network operator in Colombia sharing call data with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to measure the movements of people in Colombia due to climate change.

As for data from the MySejahtera apps, the government should re-used the data to assess health care system efficiencies and its performance and to support and reduce the costs of conducting health-related research activities by enabling collaboration among researchers across disciplines.

The MySejahtera app, if it is maintained and assuming the government proceeds with using it, can also be expanded to become an electronic health surveillance and monitoring system linked to both ProMed – a programme of the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) – and the global network of surveillance network set up by the WHO, includes 110 collaborating laboratories in 82 countries that constantly monitor locally isolated influenza viruses and provide real-time streams of data on the emergence and spread of different strains throughout the world.

Should there be any move to share and commercialise data, it shall only be restricted to shareable data i.e. non-personal data for private organisations to tap the economic, social, and public value of such data. 

Income tax data is an example of shareable data. Access to this anonymised information is critical for researchers and policy makers to measure inequality and understanding of the generation and distribution of wealth over time.

Sales tax data will help tap the potential income tax base and provide new insights for policymaking too.

It is believed that there are currently no private companies in Malaysia that has sufficient capacity and capability in AI, ML and the hardware infrastructure necessary to run the algorithms to be able to tap into understanding and commercialise the huge amounts of data generated by MySejahatera and make it available to the end users, assuming the MySejahtera app is commercialised. 

It’s not that it won’t happen but it is just difficult given the lack of capacity and capability of local companies to invest in this. The setting up of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) and the passing of the Bills of Guarantee was to set up an ecosystem where we create new knowledge, innovative companies, scale them up, create wealth and then that wealth gets invested back into research. If it was properly implemented and administered, today, it would have been possible for the private sector to develop and have the aforementioned capacity and capability. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.
 
If the MySejahtera data were commercialised for private sector consumption, it is unlikely that there would be significant spillover benefits for the rakyat. Complementary investments in skills and infrastructures are needed for the effective re-use of the data.

Lastly, instead of tapping into personal data collected by the government for commercialisation, private companies such as Touch&Go, Grab, petrol loyalty programmes, logistic companies for e-commerce – where each uses the community data generated on their platforms to improve their services – should share their anonymised data with the government to help policymakers and researchers to frame better policies for traffic management or urban mobility. – March 31, 2022.

FLK reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.