Big dienstverlening in het sociaal domein

Dutch municipalities are increasingly experimenting with ‘big data’ as an instrument for social policy. This movement pertains to the design of municipal data warehouses, dashboards and predictive analytics, the latter mostly to identify risk of fraud. This transition to data-driven social policy almost completely takes place out of political and social view, and escapes democratic decision making. In this article I show in detail how these three emerging practices are based on disputable quality of data and analytic models, and how they tend to transgress the recent EU GPDR about privacy and data protection. I also assess that key stakeholders in this data movement, i.e. the citizens whose data are used and the benefit officers who take this data in, are not actively informed let alone invited to participate. As a result, a practice of top-down monitoring, containment and control is evolving, despite the desire of civil servants in this domain to do ‘good’ with data. In the conclusion, I explore several data and policy alternatives, to prevent ‘big data’ become another ‘fatal remedy’ in social policy.