A Premature Eulogy for Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Review Article by Evan Selinger: “Every so often a sound critical thinker and superb writer asks the wrong questions of a wheel-spinning topic like privacy and then draws the wrong conclusions. This is the case with Firmin DeBrabander in his Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society. Professor of Philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art, DeBrabander has a gift for clearly expressing complex ideas and explaining why underappreciated moments in the history of ideas have contemporary relevance. In this book, he aims “to understand the prospects and future of democracy without privacy, or very little of it.” That attempt necessarily leads him both to undervalue privacy and make a case for accepting a severely weakened democracy.

To be sure, DeBrabander doesn’t dismiss privacy with any sort of enthusiasm. On the contrary, he loves his privacy, depicting himself as someone who has to block his “beloved” but overly disclosive students on Facebook. “If I had my druthers, my personal data would be sacrosanct,” he writes. But he is convinced privacy is a lost cause. He makes what are essentially six claims about privacy — some of them seemingly obvious and others more startling — to buttress his eulogy.

Prosecuting Privacy

It’s worth listing DeBrabander’s six propositions here before then rebutting or at least complicating their veracity. The first privacy proposition repeats what has become a seeming truism: we’re living in a “confessional culture” that normalizes oversharing. His second has two components, both much discussed in the last several years: companies participating in the “surveillance economy” have an insatiable appetite for our personal information, and consumers don’t fully comprehend just how much value these companies are able to extract from it through data analytics. He emphasizes Charles Duhigg’s much-discussed 2012 New York Times article about Target using predictive analytics on big data to identify pregnant customers and present them with relevant coupons. Consumers, he contends, will continue giving away massive amounts of personal information to make their cars, homes, cities, and even bodies smarter; it’s likely they won’t be any more equipped in the future to assess tradeoffs and determine when they’re being exploited….(More)”.

Re-use of smart city data: The need to acquire a social license through data assemblies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Written Testimony by Stefaan G. Verhulst before the New York City Council Committee on Technology: “…In crises such as these, calls for the city to harness technology and data to help policy-makers find solutions grow louder and stronger. Many have spoken about accelerating already ongoing work to turn New York into “a smart city” — using digital technology to connect, protect, and improve the lives of its residents. Some of this proposed work could involve the use of sensors to collect data on how people live and work across New York City. Other work could involve expanding the city’s relationships with private organizations through data collaboratives. Data collaboratives, which are central to our work at the GovLab, are a new form of collaboration that extends beyond the conventional public-private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors exchange their data to create public value. The city already operates one such data collaborative in the form of the NYC Recovery Data Partnership, a partnership that allows New York-based private and civic organizations to provide their data to analysts at city agencies to inform the COVID-19 pandemic response. I have the privilege of serving as an advisor to that initiative.

Data collaboration takes place widely through a variety of institutional, contractual and technical structures and instruments. Borrowing in language and inspiration from the open data movement, the emerging data collaborative movement has proven its value and possible positive impact. Data reuse has the potential to improve disease treatment, identify better ways to source supplies, monitor adherence to non-pharmaceutical restrictions, and provide a range of other public benefits. Whether it is informing decision-making or shaping the development of new tools and techniques, it is clear that data has tremendous potential to mitigate the worst effects of this pandemic.

However, as promising and attractive as reusing data might seem, it is important to keep in mind that there also exist widespread concerns and challenges….

My colleagues and I at The GovLab believe the Data Assembly methodology offers the city a new way forward on the issues under discussion today, as they relate to smart cities. In our view, oversight cannot just be a reactive process of responding to complaints but a proactive one, inviting city residents, data holders, and advocacy groups to the table to determine what is and is not acceptable. Amid rapidly changing circumstances, the city needs ways to collect and synthesize actionable and diverse public input to identify concerns, expectations, and opportunities. We encourage the city to explore assembling mini-publics of its own or, failing that, commission legitimate partners to lead such efforts.

New York faces many challenges in 2021 but I do not doubt the capacity of its people to overcome these struggles. Through people-led innovation and processes, the city can ensure that data re-use conducted as part of the smart city is deemed legitimate and more effective and targeted. It can also support the city in ensuring work across the city is more open, collaborative, and legitimate…(More)”.

Child Data Citizen

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by on “How Tech Companies Are Profiling Us from before Birth…Our families are being turned into data, as the digital traces we leave are shared, sold, and commodified. Children are datafied even before birth, with pregnancy apps and social media postings, and then tracked through childhood with learning apps, smart home devices, and medical records. In Child Data Citizen, Veronica Barassi examines the construction of children into data subjects, describing how their personal information is collected, archived, sold, and aggregated into unique profiles that can follow them across a lifetime. Children today are the very first generation of citizens to be datafied from before birth, and Barassi points to critical implications for our democratic futures.

Barassi draws on a three-year research project with parents in London and Los Angeles, which included the collection of fifty in-depth interviews, a digital ethnography of “sharenting” activities on social media by eight families over the course of eight months, and a two-year exploration of the datafication of her own family. She complements her ethnographic findings with a platform analysis of four social media platforms, ten health tracking apps, four home hubs, and four educational platforms, investigating the privacy policies, business models, and patent applications that enable the mining of children’s data. Barassi considers the implications of building a society where data traces are made to speak for and about citizens across a lifetime. What should we do when we realize that the narratives that algorithms construct about individuals are inaccurate and biased?…(More)”.

Rational policymaking during a pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Perspective by Loïc Berger et al: “Policymaking during a pandemic can be extremely challenging. As COVID-19 is a new disease and its global impacts are unprecedented, decisions are taken in a highly uncertain, complex, and rapidly changing environment. In such a context, in which human lives and the economy are at stake, we argue that using ideas and constructs from modern decision theory, even informally, will make policymaking a more responsible and transparent process….

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes decision problems faced by governments and international organizations. Policymakers are charged with taking actions to protect their population from the disease while lacking reliable information on the virus and its transmission mechanisms and on the effectiveness of possible measures and their (direct and indirect) health and socioeconomic consequences. The rational policy decision would combine the best available scientific evidence—typically provided by expert opinions and modeling studies. However, in an uncertain and rapidly changing environment, the pertinent evidence is highly fluid, making it challenging to produce scientifically grounded predictions of the outcomes of alternative courses of action….(More)”.

The Rise of Urban Commons

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blogpost by Alessandra Quarta and Antonio Vercellone: “In the last ten years, the concept of the commons became popular in social studies and political activism and in some countries domestic lawyers have shared the interest for this notion. Even if an (existing or proposed) statutory definition of the commons is still very rare, lawyers get familiar with the concept of the commons through the filter of property law, where such a concept has been quite discredited. In fact, approaching property law, many students of different legal traditions learn the origins of property rights revolving on the “tragedy of the commons”, the “parable” made famous by Garrett Hardin in the late nineteen-sixties. According to this widespread narrative, the impossibility to avoid the over-exploitation of those resources managed through an open-access regime determines the necessity of allocating private property rights. In this classic argument, the commons appear in a negative light: they represent the impossibility for a community to manage shared resources without concentrating all the decision-making powers in the hand of a single owner or of a central government. Moreover, they represent the wasteful inefficiency of the Feudal World.

This vision has dominated social and economic studies until 1998, when Elinor Ostrom published her famous book Governing the commons, offering the results of her research on resources managed by communities in different parts of the world. Ostrom, awarded with the Nobel Prize in 2009, demonstrated that the commons are not necessarily a tragedy and a place of no-law. In fact, local communities generally define principles for their government and sharing in a resilient way avoiding the tragedy to occur. Moreover, Ostrom defined a set of principles for checking if the commons are managed efficiently and can compete with both private and public arrangements of resource management.

Later on, under an institutional perspective, the commons became the tool of contestation of political and economic mainstream dogmas, including the unquestionable efficiency of both the market and private property in the allocation of resources. The research of new tools for managing resources has been carried out in several experimentations that generally occurs at the local and urban level: scholars and practitioners define these experiences as ‘urban commons’….(More)”.

5 Domains of Government That Are Ripe for Transformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by William Eggers: “…in a Deloitte report entitled Creating the Government of the Future my colleagues and I identified five principal domains of government activity that are ripe for technological transformation:…

Service delivery: In Estonia, taxpayers can file taxes online simply by approving forms auto-populated with their income data. This ease represents the future of service delivery: focused on the user, automated for no-touch government that serves people without them having to fill out long forms. (Think hospital data of a birth triggering a birth certificate, Social Security card and health-care record for the child and family allowance payment to qualifying parents.)

Services will more and more tailor to such anticipated life events. Ideally, a single login omnichannel experience provides access to tasks as varied as collecting unemployment benefits to registering to run for office. With once-only government, citizens and businesses need only provide their data once, and it’s then shared across departments with appropriate privacy protections.

Operations: Government operations should take a cue from the private sector, where technologies like data analytics and cognitive automation converge to create serious efficiencies. Operations from HR to procurement can combine in an integrated center office, creating insights from shared, analyzed data about what to expect and how to improve. “As-a-service” acquisition allows contractors to provide basic infrastructure, such as cloud services, leading to faster scaling. To transform operations, strike teams of specialists and subject-matter experts meet in digital factories, using agile processes without traditional bureaucracies.

Policy- and decision-making: Evidence-based policymaking can identify what approaches produce the best results. With artificial-intelligence-based scenario analysis, machine learning can test the relationship between factors in systemic problems. Potentially, understanding these relationships could allow policy to be self-correcting. Likewise, increasingly sophisticated statistical models will allow government by simulation — a cheap way to A/B test systems like traffic management, disaster response and city planning. Meanwhile, mass-communication tools enable crowdsourced and distributed policymaking, in which ordinary citizens contribute their expertise.

Regulation and enforcement: The future of this governmental domain is tied to the predictive abilities of AI and analytics. In a form of risk-based regulation, for example, AI can identify factors likely to contribute to a food-borne illness outbreak, helping food inspectors focus energies on restaurants more likely to violate. Modeling systems to identify beneficial behaviors can enable positive enforcement strategies, which reward a business’ focus on the big picture and going beyond the bare minimum. Lastly, countries like New Zealand have experimented with legislation written as software code. The bureaucratic effects of the legislation could be simulated ahead of time.

Talent/workforce: Flexibility will be the hallmark of the future public workforce. NASA and other agencies are trying a talent marketplace model, in which some workers have the ability to move from project to project, even between agencies, based on their documented skills. Talent won’t go to waste in this just-in-time civil service. Such a talent marketplace would cover an open talent spectrum, from freelancers to career employees….(More)”.

From Journalistic Ethics To Fact-Checking Practices: Defining The Standards Of Content Governance In The Fight Against Disinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Paolo Cavaliere: “This article claims that the practices undertaken by digital platforms to counter disinformation, under the EU Action Plan against Disinformation and the Code of Practice, mark a shift in the governance of news media content. While professional journalism standards have been used for long, both within and outside the industry, to assess the accuracy of news content and adjudicate on media conduct, the platforms are now resolving to different fact-checking routines to moderate and curate their content.
The article will demonstrate how fact-checking organisations have different working methods than news operators and ultimately understand and assess ‘accuracy’ in different ways. As a result, this new and enhanced role for platforms and fact-checkers as curators of content impacts on how content is distributed to the audience and, thus, on media freedom. Depending on how the fact-checking standards and working routines will consolidate in the near future, however, this trend offers an actual opportunity to improve the quality of news and the right to receive information…(More)”.

The Hidden Cost of Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Antonios Saravanos: “This work shares unexpected findings obtained from the use of the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform as a source of participants for the study of technology adoption. Expressly, of the 564 participants from the United States, 126 (22.34%) failed at least one of three forms of attention check (logic, honesty, and time). We also examined whether characteristics such as gender, age, education, and income affected participant attention. Amongst all characteristics assessed, only prior experience with the technology being studied was found to be related to attentiveness. We conclude this work by reaffirming the need for multiple forms of attention checks to gauge participant attention. Furthermore, we propose that researchers adjust their budgets accordingly to account for the possibility of having to discard responses from participants determined not to be displaying adequate attention….(More)”.

Sustainable Rescue: data sharing to combat human trafficking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview with Paul Fockens of  Sustainable Rescue: “Human trafficking still takes place on a large scale, and still too often under the radar. That does not make it easy for organisations that want to combat human trafficking. Sharing of data between various sorts of organisations, including the government, the police, but also banks play a crucial role in mapping the networks of criminals involved in human trafficking, including their victims. Data sharing contributes to tackling this criminal business not only reactively, but also proactively….Sustainable Rescue tries to make the largely invisible human trafficking visible. Bundling data and therefore knowledge is crucial in this. Paul: “It’s about combining the routes criminals (and their victims) take from A to B, the financial transactions they make, the websites they visit, the hotels where they check in et cetera. All those signs of human trafficking can be found in the data of various types of organisations: the police, municipalities, the Public Prosecution Service, charities such as the Salvation Army, but also banks and insurance institutions. The problem here is that you need to collect all pieces of the puzzle to get clear insights from them. As long as this relevant data is not combined through data sharing, it is a very difficult job to get these insights. In nine out of ten cases, these authorities are not willing and/or allowed to share their data, mainly because of the privacy sensitivity of this data. However, in order to eliminate human trafficking, that data will have to be bundled. Only then analyses can be made about the patterns of a network of human trafficking.”…(More)”.

Applying behavioural science to the annual electoral canvass in England: Evidence from a large-scale randomised controlled trial

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Martin Sweeney, Peter John, Michael Sanders, Hazel Wright and Lucy Makinson: “Local authorities in Great Britain are required to ensure that their electoral registers are as accurate and complete as possible. To this end, Household Enquiry Forms (HEFs) are mailed to all properties annually to collect updated details from residents, and any eligible unregistered residents will subsequently be invited to register to vote. Unfortunately, HEF nonresponse is pervasive and costly. Using insights from behavioural science, we modified letters and envelopes posted to households as part of the annual canvass, and evaluated their effects using a randomised controlled trial across two local authorities in England (N=226,528 properties). We find that modified materials – particularly redesigned envelopes – significantly increase initial response rates and savings. However, we find no effects on voter registration. While certain behavioural interventions can improve the efficiency of the annual canvass, other approaches or interventions may be needed to increase voter registration rates and update voter information….(More)”.