Analysis of Farm Data License Agreements: Do Data Agreements Adequately Reflect on Farm Data Practices and Farmers’ Data Rights?

Abstract

Farm data license agreements are legal documents that play an important role in informing farmers about farm data processing practices such as collection, use, safeguarding, and sharing. These legal documents govern the exchange, access, and dissemination of farm data and are expected to provide legal protection against misuse of data. Despite their significant influence on farm data processing and governance, there is limited understanding of the content of farm data license agreements and standards for drafting them. Although online privacy policy content has been extensively studied, farm data agreements’ evaluation and analysis have been overlooked. This study aims to investigate the structure, content, and transparency of farm data licenses. We collected 141 agricultural terms of use agreements and used natural language processing methods such as keyword and keyphrase analysis to perform text feature analysis, Flesch Readability Ease Score and Flesch Grade Level readability analysis, transparency analysis, and content analysis to gain insight into common data practices adopted by the agriculture technology providers. We also manually reviewed these agreements to validate the results and strengthen the observations. The findings show that data agreements are long, complex, and difficult to read and comprehend. The results suggest that 95% of the agreements fall under the difficult-to-read category and close to 75% of the policies require university-level education to understand the content. Furthermore, it is noted that some of the data management practices are not given adequate attention and are not as frequently mentioned in the agreements as expected. Finally, our analysis enabled us to provide recommendations on the content of farm data license agreements and strategies to improve them.

Privacy-Centric AI and IoT Solutions for Smart Rural Farm Monitoring and Control

“…Additionally, contracts with technology providers may include opaque terms and conditions on data usage that farmers cannot fully comprehend, leading them to unintentionally consent to extensive data usage rights. Addressing these privacy concerns requires transparent data governance policies that give farmers more control and knowledge over their data [30,31].…”

How do administrative penalties for digital technologies affect the digitization of agriculture: Evidence from China

“…A sound legal system is an effective way to ensure the sustainable development of agricultural investment (Wan & Chen, 2019), agricultural infrastructure development (Pascaris, 2021), food security (Aubry, 2019), and new technologies in agriculture (Lotz et al, 2018) in China. Laws applicable to agricultural digitization are emerging but highly fragmented (MacPherson et al, 2022), and reliable legal frameworks can safeguard data privacy, data access, and data security in agricultural digitization (Kaur & Dara, 2023;Garske et al, 2021), ensure that the expected bene ts of agrotechnological innovations are realized (Martin, 2021), and expand access to precision agriculture. (Finger et al, 2019).…”