CONCEPT
CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance
Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics—framework asserting indigenous communities' right to govern their own data.
The CARE Principles establish that indigenous data belongs to the communities that produced it and must serve their collective benefit. Developed through international indigenous consultation and formalized by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance, the principles hold that communities have authority to control how their data is collected, stored, used, and shared; that data handlers bear responsibility to respect community governance; and that data use must align with indigenous ethical frameworks including cultural protocols and values. Applied to AI, CARE challenges the industry's standard practice of treating all available data as training material, asserting instead that indigenous knowledge requires indigenous consent and governance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The CARE Principles emerged from decades of indigenous activism against exploitative research practices. Historically, researchers extracted knowledge from indigenous communities—collecting specimens, recording languages, documenting practices—and returned little or no benefit while often violating cultural protocols governing what knowledge could be shared and how. The resulting publications, museum collections, and databases became resources for Western institutions while the source communities remained impoverished. The biopiracy debates of the 1990s—when pharmaceutical