LETTER | MySejahtera’s data should benefit rakyat, not companies

LETTER | Given the huge attention that the MySejahtera data is attracting in the public minds today, the strong stand taken by Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin who, in a public statement on March 27, states his objection to the data in the MySejahtera application being commercialised, is commendable.

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 perverse economic incentives.

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

At best, 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 in the country which are going to face a long uphill recovery battle that could take years.

Proponents could argue that so long the country can balance private and public interests with a proper legal framework - eg the Personal Data Protection Act revised to model after the gold standard of data privacy - the General Data Protection Regulation 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. Eg a simple switching of names in the original data set with an alias or pseudonym can be passed off as adequate anonymisation and this cannot be dealt with any legally enforceable penalties.

If personal data collected using taxpayers’ monies are to be shared, it should only be shared for the purpose of boosting innovation and solving humanitarian problems in the country. Like the Data for Good program initiated by Facebook which aims to solve some of the worst humanitarian crises occurring 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, so they can get a better understanding of how the virus may spread currently.

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

As for data from the MySejahtera app, the government should re-use 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 electronic health surveillance and monitoring system linked to both ProMed - a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases - and the global network of surveillance network set up by the World Health Organization which to date 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 if it is not already done so to date.

Should there be any moves to share and commercialise data, it shall only be restricted to shareable data ie non-personal data - data which never related to natural persons – 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 information - the name and permanent account number of the taxpayer will be anonymised - is critical for researchers and policymakers to measure inequality and understand the generation and distribution of wealth over time.

Data from the Sales Tax collected will help tap the potential income tax base and provide new insights for policymaking too.

In all honesty, it is believed that there are no private companies in Malaysia presently 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 the MySejahtera and make it available to the end-users assuming the app is commercialised.

It’s not that it won’t happen in the future or soon but it is just difficult given the existing capacity and capability of local companies to invest in this.

The setting up of the Multimedia Super Corridor 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 are commercialised for private-sector consumption, it is unlikely that there would be significant spillover benefits for the rakyat and complementary investments in skills and infrastructures needed for the effective re-use of the data.

Lastly, instead of tapping into personal data collected by the government for commercialisation, private companies like Touch ‘n 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 so that it can help policymakers and researchers to frame better policies in areas like traffic management or urban mobility.