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| 13 Mar 2026 | |
| Written by J.B. Wogan | |
| Data For the People (Podcast) |
On the latest episode of Data for the People!, Claire McKay Bowen discusses the role federal statistics play in our daily lives, strategies for communicating the value of government data, and her vision for the future of data sharing and data privacy.
Bowen is a data privacy expert who is currently a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, an adjunct professor at Stonehill College, and a board member with the Association of Public Data Users (APDU). Last year, she co-authored a series of blogs for APDU about the manifold ways federal statistics inform routine decisions for Americans, how federal data is like the “forgotten egg” used to bake a cake, and what educators can do to teach K-12 students the origins and importance of U.S. federal data.
The Data Foundation is currently reviewing submissions for the People’s Data 100, an initiative to recognize federal datasets providing the greatest value to Americans. The conversation with Bowen is part of our broader effort throughout 2026 to spotlight the strategic data infrastructure that powers daily life in the U.S., from protecting public health to enabling scientific discovery to safeguarding taxpayer-funded benefit programs.
In one of the APDU blogs, Bowen and her co-author Aaron Williams compare federal data to eggs in a cake. “Everybody sees the cake, but they don't think about what ingredients are inside it unless you tell them,” she says on the episode.
For example, when you use Google Maps in the U.S. to chart a course from your location to somewhere else, you’re relying on an app made possible by an underlying layer of geographic spatial data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Not every country’s government provides those data to private companies. On the podcast, Bowen recalls a visit to South Korea where she plugged in her mother’s home address, but couldn’t generate turn-by-turn directions because the app didn’t have access to public geographic spatial data.
“Having to navigate without it was a real revelation,” she says.
The APDU blogs are one way Bowen has tried to raise awareness about the unseen role of federal data in people’s lives, but she also makes it a part of her students’ coursework. Graduate students at Stonehill College can take a summer class with her to learn about the security, privacy, and ethics of data. She requires students to learn about the complete lifecycle of data. Typically, it’s the first time those students need to think about how the data that enable so much of daily life get collected and managed.
In one homework assignment, students have to find a federal dataset that helps their community. “Some of them really struggle,” she says, in part because private data products don't have an incentive to credit government data sources in a clear and prominent way.
Bowen argues that K-12 schools should teach students how data are collected, who collects them, and how they’re shared and used. Educators who want to introduce the concept to their students can use free resources available from the U.S. Census Bureau, the American Statistical Association, The New York Times, and the Urban Institute.
With the increased use of artificial intelligence tools that rely on high quality data, Bowen says data literacy is more important than ever for Americans: ”We need as a society to think about [...] our federal data and private data and how it's being used for these algorithms.”
On the podcast, Bowen also discusses a recent article for the Journal of Economic Perspectives titled "Government Data of the People, by the People, for the People: Navigating Citizen and Privacy Concerns." Bowen explains how she wanted to frame the public’s relationship with government data.
"This data is of the people because it's your information being collected. You're part of this data because we need to know who is in what place if we need to go rescue them in case of emergency evacuations…It's by the people because it's your taxpayer dollars that funds these datasets…It's for the people. It's for you. It's for our communities — to ensure we can rescue people in emergencies, to make sure we have green spaces, hospitals, police stations, and other services provided for our communities. That's what federal public datasets are for, and they ripple down to local communities. It's essential.”
As a data privacy expert, Bowen draws a connection between deepening people’s understanding of their relationship to public data and building public support for stronger privacy protections. At a recent event, she shared how her use of different digital technologies results in private companies having a large volume of information about her, her habits, and even major life events. An audience member asked if she thought data privacy was dead.
“We need to not focus on it being dead. We need to figure out what we can do going forward,” McKay says.
McKay says better data privacy involves people, tools, and regulations. More people must be recruited and trained to use privacy enhancing technologies as well as traditional techniques for protecting individuals’ personal information, such as data suppression.
New laws and regulations remain important because “it doesn't matter how strong people are at coding things up and making those tools if our data privacy laws don't speak to each other,” she says. “People, tools, and regulations all have to come together to govern our information in a way that we feel our data is being used responsibly.”
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