“My book isn’t about data, not really,” says Elizabeth M Renieris, author of ‘Beyond Data’. “It’s about how our historical obsession with data in the context of technology governance has been problematic, and why we need a materially different approach: one less focused on data and more focused on people.” Subtitled ‘Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse’, her book’s central argument is encapsulated in the opening sentence of the first chapter: “For more than fifty years, we have been so busy protecting data that we have largely forgotten to protect people.”
Senior research associate at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, Renieris’ position on the current state of data legislation is that, “so long as we continue to focus on data as a pillar of technology governance, our laws will continue to fail us. We aren’t in the 1970s anymore, and we don’t live in a world of neat binaries and clearly delineated...