A linked democracy approach for regulating public health data

This article addresses the problem of constructing a public space to build sustainable data ecosystems for the biomedical field. It outlines three models of democracy —deliberative, epistemic, and linked— where privacy and data protection can be explored in connection with the existing ethical frameworks for Public Health Data, and the Theory of Justice. For the construction of a sustainable public space, it suggests exploring the analytical dimension of Linked Democracy, and the need for building new tools to regulate ‘Linked Open Data’, based on rule of law and the analytical dimension of the meta-rule of law. The construction of ‘intermediate’ or ‘anchoring’ institutions would help in embedding the protections of the rule of law into specific ecosystems (including direct, indirect and tactic modelling of privacy by design).