Numerous commenters have observed that Facebook, among many marketers (including political campaigns like U.S. President Barack Obama’s), regularly conducts A-B tests and other research to measure how consumers respond to different products, messages and messengers. So what makes the Facebook-Cornell study different from what goes on all the time in an increasingly data-driven world? After all, the ability to conduct such testing continuously on a large scale is considered one of the special features of big data.
The answer calls for broader judgments than parsing the language of privacy policies or managing compliance with privacy laws and regulations. Existing legal tools such as notice-and-choice and use limitations are simply too narrow to address the array of issues presented and inform the judgment needed. Deciding whether Facebook ought to participate in research like its newsfeed study is not really about what the company can do but what it should do.
As Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky, CIPP/US, point out in an article on Facebook’s research study, “Increasingly, corporate officers find themselves struggling to decipher subtle social norms and make ethical choices that are more befitting of philosophers than business managers or lawyers.” They add, “Going forward, companies will need to create new processes, deploying a toolbox of innovative solutions to engender trust and mitigate normative friction.” Tene and Polonetsky themselves have proposed a number of such tools. In recent comments on Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights legislation filed with the Commerce Department, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) endorsed the use of internal review boards along the lines of those used in academia for human-subject research. The FPF also submitted an initial framework for benefit-risk analysis in the big data context “to understand whether assuming the risk is ethical, fair, legitimate and cost-effective.” Increasingly, companies and other institutions are bringing to bear more holistic review of privacy issues. Conferences and panels on big data research ethics are proliferating.
The expanding variety and complexity of data uses also call for a broader public policy approach. The Obama administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights (of which I was an architect) adapted existing Fair Information Practice Principles to a principles-based approach that is intended not as a formalistic checklist but as a set of principles that work holistically in ways that are “flexible” and “dynamic.” In turn, much of the commentary submitted to the Commerce Department on the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights addressed the question of the relationship between these principles and a “responsible use framework” as discussed in the White House Big Data Report….”
Enchanted Objects
Book by David Rose: “Some believe the future will look like more of the same—more smartphones, tablets, screens embedded in every conceivable surface. David Rose has a different vision: technology that atomizes, combining itself with the objects that make up the very fabric of daily living. Such technology will be woven into the background of our environment, enhancing human relationships and channeling desires for omniscience, long life, and creative expression. The enchanted objects of fairy tales and science fiction will enter real life.
Groundbreaking, timely, and provocative, Enchanted Objects is a blueprint for a better future, where efficient solutions come hand in hand with technology that delights our senses. It is essential reading for designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and anyone who wishes to understand the future and stay relevant in the Internet of Things. Download the prologue here.”
CrowdCriMa – a complete Next Generation Crowsourced Crisis Management Platform
Pitch at ClimateCoLab: “The proposed #CrowdCriMa would be a disaster management platform based on an innovative, interactive and accountable Digital Governance Framework– in which common people, crisis response or disaster response workers, health workers, decision makers would participate actively. This application would be available for mobile phones and other smart devices.
Crowdsourcing Unheard Voices
The main function would be to help collecting voice messages of disaster victims in the forms of phone call, recorded voice, SMS, E-mail and Fax to seek urgent help from the authority and spread those voices via online media, social media, SMS and etc to inform the world about the situation. As still in developing countries, Fax communication is more powerful than SMS or email, we have also included FAX as one of the reporting tools.
People will be able to record their observations, potential crisis, seek helps and appeals for funds for disaster response works, different environment related activities (e.g. project for pollution free environment and etc). To have all functions in the #CrowdCriMa platform, an IVR system, FrontlineSMS-type software will be developed / integrated in the proposed platform.
A cloud-based information management system would be used to sustain the flow of information. This would help not to lose any information if communications infrastructures are not functioning properly during and after the disaster.
Crowdfunding:
Another function of this #CrowdCriMa platform would be the crowdfunding function. When individual donor logs in, they find the list of issues / crisis where fund is needed. An innovative and sustainable approach would be taken to meet the financial need in crisis / disaster and post-crisis financial empowerment work for victims.
Some services are available differently but innovative parts of this proposal is several services to deal disaster would be in platform so people do not need to use different platforms for disaster management work. ..”
Federalism and Municipal Innovation: Lessons from the Fight Against Vacant Properties
New Paper by Benton Martin: “Cities possess a far greater ability to be trailblazers on a national scale than local officials may imagine. Realizing this, city advocates continue to call for renewed recognition by state and federal officials of the benefits of creative local problem-solving. The goal is admirable but warrants caution. The key to successful local initiatives lies not in woolgathering about cooperation with other levels of government but in identifying potential conflicts and using hard work and political savvy to build constituencies and head off objections. To demonstrate that point, this Article examines the legal status of local governments and recent efforts to regulate vacant property through land banking and registration ordinances.”
Just how well has the 'nudge unit' done?
Broadcast at BBC News: “Nudging – concept of changing people’s behaviour without recourse to the law but to psychology – has been one of the big policy ideas of the last few years
The coalition government set up a “nudge unit”, officially called the Behavioural Insights Team, in 2010. But just how successful has it been?
David Halpern, who heads the unit, told the Today programme’s Evan Davis that it has enjoyed a wide range of successes. He said that by adding the line “‘most people pay their tax on time’ to a letter you get a significant increase in the number of people who pay their tax on time and you get a reduction in complaints.
“It turns out it’s a nicer way, to encourage people than to threaten them.”
But Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, told the programme that he did not “object against nudging per se but against the philosophy underlying it, namely that basically that people are born more or less stupid.”
There is, he said, a real alternative to nudging, that of educating people to become “risk-savvy citizens: to invest in to making people competent”.
4 things you didn't know about civic crowdfunding
That’s worth, very roughly, $1.2 billion a year worldwide per year. Within that subset, I’ve been looking at civic projects, people who are producing shared goods for a community or broader public. These projects build on histories of community fundraising and resource pooling that long predate the Internet; what’s changed is that we’ve created a scalable, portable platform model to carry out these existing practices.
So how is civic crowdfunding doing? When I started this project very few people were using that term. No one had done any aggregated data collection and published it. So I decided to take on that task. I collected data on 1224 projects between 2010 and March 2014, which raised $10.74 million in just over three years. I focused on seven platforms: Catarse (Brazil), Citizinvestor (US), Goteo (Spain), IOBY (US), Kickstarter (US), Neighbor.ly (US), and Spacehive (UK). I didn’t collect everything. There’s a new crowdfunding site every week that may or may not have a few civic projects on it. If you’re interested in my methodology, check out Chapter 2. I don’t pretend to have captured every civic project that has ever existed, but I’m working with a representative sample.
Here are four things I found out about civic crowdfunding.
- Civic crowdfunding is small-scale but relatively successful, and it has big ambitions. …
- Civic crowdfunding started as a hobby for green space projects by local non-profits, but larger organizations are getting involved. …
- Civic crowdfunding is concentrated in cities (especially those where platforms are based). …
- Civic crowdfunding has the same highly unequal distributional tendencies as other crowd markets. …”
Detroit and Big Data Take on Blight
Susan Crawford in Bloomberg View: “The urban blight that has been plaguing Detroit was, until very recently, made worse by a dearth of information about the problem. No one could tell how many buildings needed fixing or demolition, or how effectively city services were being delivered to them (or not). Today, thanks to the combined efforts of a scrappy small business, tech-savvy city leadership and substantial philanthropic support, the extent of the problem is clear.
The question now is whether Detroit has the heart to use the information to make hard choices about its future.
In the past, when the city foreclosed on properties for failure to pay back taxes, it had no sense of where those properties were clustered. The city would auction off the houses for the bargain-basement price of $500 each, but the auction was entirely undocumented, so neighbors were unaware of investment opportunities, big buyers were gaming the system, and, as often as not, arsonists would then burn the properties down. The result of this blind spot was lost population, lost revenue and even more blight.
Then along came Jerry Paffendorf, a San Francisco transplant, who saw what was needed. His company, Loveland Technologies, started mapping all the tax-foreclosed and auctioned properties. Impressed with Paffendorf’s zeal, the city’s Blight Task Force, established by President Barack Obama and funded by foundations and the state Housing Development Authority, hired his team to visit every property in the city. That led to MotorCityMapping.org, the first user-friendly collection of information about all the attributes of every property in Detroit — including photographs.
Paffendorf calls this map a “scan of the genome of the city.” It shows more than 84,000 blighted structures and vacant lots; in eight neighborhoods, crime, fires and other torments have led to the abandonment of more than a third of houses and businesses. To demolish all those houses, as recommended by the Blight Task Force, will cost almost $2 billion. Still more money will then be needed to repurpose the sites….”
Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence’
Report by By Keith Hampton, Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, Maria Dwyer, Inyoung Shin and Kristen Purcell : “A major insight into human behavior from pre-internet era studies of communication is the tendency of people not to speak up about policy issues in public—or among their family, friends, and work colleagues—when they believe their own point of view is not widely shared. This tendency is called the “spiral of silence.”1
Some social media creators and supporters have hoped that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter might produce different enough discussion venues that those with minority views might feel freer to express their opinions, thus broadening public discourse and adding new perspectives to everyday discussion of political issues.
We set out to study this by conducting a survey of 1,801 adults.2 It focused on one important public issue: Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of widespread government surveillance of Americans’ phone and email records. We selected this issue because other surveys by the Pew Research Center at the time we were fielding this poll showed that Americans were divided over whether the NSA contractor’s leaks about surveillance were justified and whether the surveillance policy itself was a good or bad idea. For instance, Pew Research found in one survey that 44% say the release of classified information harms the public interest while 49% said it serves the public interest.
The survey reported in this report sought people’s opinions about the Snowden leaks, their willingness to talk about the revelations in various in-person and online settings, and their perceptions of the views of those around them in a variety of online and off-line contexts.
This survey’s findings produced several major insights:
- People were less willing to discuss the Snowden-NSA story in social media than they were in person. 86% of Americans were willing to have an in-person conversation about the surveillance program, but just 42% of Facebook and Twitter users were willing to post about it on those platforms…”
Open Intellectual Property Casebook
New book by James Boyle & Jennifer Jenkins: “..This book, the first in a series of Duke Open Coursebooks, is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. It can also be purchased in a glossy paperback print edition for $29.99, $130 cheaper than other intellectual property casebooks.
This book is an introduction to intellectual property law, the set of private legal rights that allows individuals and corporations to control intangible creations and marks—from logos to novels to drug formulae—and the exceptions and limitations that define those rights. It focuses on the three main forms of US federal intellectual property—trademark, copyright and patent—but many of the ideas discussed here apply far beyond those legal areas and far beyond the law of the United States.
The book is intended to be a textbook for the basic Intellectual Property class, but because it is an open coursebook, which can be freely edited and customized, it is also suitable for an undergraduate class, or for a business, library studies, communications or other graduate school class. Each chapter contains cases and secondary readings and a set of problems or role-playing exercises involving the material. The problems range from a video of the Napster oral argument to counseling clients about search engines and trademarks, applying the First Amendment to digital rights management and copyright or commenting on the Supreme Court’s new rulings on gene patents.
Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society is current as of August 2014. It includes discussions of such issues as the Redskins trademark cancelations, the Google Books case and the America Invents Act. Its illustrations range from graphs showing the growth in patent litigation to comic book images about copyright. The best way to get some sense of its coverage is to download it. In coming weeks, we will provide a separate fuller webpage with a table of contents and individual downloadable chapters.
The Center has also published an accompanying supplement of statutory and treaty materials that is available for free download and low cost print purchase.”
Assessing Social Value in Open Data Initiatives: A Framework
Paper by Gianluigi Viscusi, Marco Castelli and Carlo Batini in Future Internet Journal: “Open data initiatives are characterized, in several countries, by a great extension of the number of data sets made available for access by public administrations, constituencies, businesses and other actors, such as journalists, international institutions and academics, to mention a few. However, most of the open data sets rely on selection criteria, based on a technology-driven perspective, rather than a focus on the potential public and social value of data to be published. Several experiences and reports confirm this issue, such as those of the Open Data Census. However, there are also relevant best practices. The goal of this paper is to investigate the different dimensions of a framework suitable to support public administrations, as well as constituencies, in assessing and benchmarking the social value of open data initiatives. The framework is tested on three initiatives, referring to three different countries, Italy, the United Kingdom and Tunisia. The countries have been selected to provide a focus on European and Mediterranean countries, considering also the difference in legal frameworks (civic law vs. common law countries)”