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While data is being heralded as the new oil, there are serious questions about who actually owns it. Particularly from communities that have every reason to fear the misuse or abuse of this increasingly valuable resource.

Consider that First Nations’ communities decided they had to assert control over their data as far back as 1998. That’s when the OCAP principles (Ownership, control, access and possession) were established to govern how their data should be “collected, protected, used, or shared.”

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“We’re not going to advise you on what you should be doing with your data. We’re going to tell you what we’re going to do with our data,” said Gwen Philipps, a citizen of the Ktunaxa Nations in a 2017 paper released by Open North, in collaboration with the British Columbia First Nations Data Governance Initiative.

It was part of a project called Decolonizing Data, which invited input from First Nations’ communities towards the creation of 10 key principles around data sovereignty to help inform discussions with the federal government.