Data specialists Gartner predict data volumes will sky-rocket by 800 per cent over the next five years and up to 80 per cent of it will be unstructured. That means a vast collection of web pages, legal documents, medical records, images and the like churned out by individuals, institutions and businesses every second that nobody ever bothers to look at. IDC estimates that less than 1 per cent of the world’s data is ever analysed.

In the big data universe of the future, the biggest threat to traditional democratic values is the collapse of truthful political discourse says Futurologist, Dr James Bellini.

And herein lies the danger: as French law professor Jean-Sylvestre Bergé puts it, the DataSphere is offered up as a benign, politically neutral “holistic comprehension of all the information existing on Earth”. But it is nothing of the sort; it is a new space that invades every corner of daily life, poses challenges to good governance and increasingly conflicts with public administration. It is the world’s newest frontier, without formal controls, management or regulation: Big Brother meets the Wild West.

Online tools which track user behaviour for advertisers have been found on a swathe of EU public health websites, including NHS and Gov.uk pages.

These trackers could compromise sensitive data about people, according to researchers at data protection compliance service Cookiebot.

The researchers also discovered trackers on 89% of EU government websites. Most of the trackers were developed by Google.

They were designed to “associate web activity with the identities of real people” Cookiebot said.

Of all the 28 EU member states, only Spanish, German and Dutch government websites were tracker-free.

“We of course expect everyone to fully comply with EU data protection rules and it is the responsibility of EU data protection authorities to ensure compliance,” a spokeswoman for the European Commission said.

But the public health website trackers presented additional risks, said Cookiebot.

“Over 100 advertising technology companies are systemically and invisibly tracking EU citizens when they visit their governments online, or when they access public health service resources about sensitive issues, such as pregnancy, sexual health, cancer or mental illness,” it explained.

This blog from Catherine Wright (director of knowledge and innovation at the Environment Agency) provides an update on Defra’s data programme – and in particular its themes and focus.

Catherine joined Defra’s Data Programme Board meeting – chaired by Emily Miles – with colleagues from across Defra group for its second meeting on 19 October. I also met Sophia Oliver, who heads up the Data Programme.

The vision for the group’s data is simple: ‘In future, we will have better data, better used’. There are three guiding principles: that we will be data-driven; that our data will be valued and shared; and that it will be open by design. It is the role of the Data Programme Board to deliver this vision.

The technology revolution is a data revolution, and our challenge is to harness that data, enabling us to work more effectively with communities and customers to support innovation in the UK economy.

Defra’s data holdings are incredibly rich: from long terms datasets on species and environmental quality through to data updated daily such as on animal and waste movements; to data captured in real time on the operations of assets; to harnessing new sources of data, such as from satellites; to data on our staffing resources that enables us to be paid every month.

The vision is simple, delivering it will require focus and effort from us all. That is where the data governance board comes in: to enable Defra group to realise the value of its data.