Paper by Alberto Alemanno and Sébastien Fassiaux: “This paper examines whether – and on what basis – the EU may harmonise the right of access to information across the Union. It does by examining the available legal basis established by relevant international obligations, such as those stemming from the Council of Europe, and EU primary law. Its demonstrates that neither the Council of Europe – through the European Convention of Human Rights and the more recent Trømso Convention – nor the EU – through Article 41 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights – do require the EU to enact minimum standards of access to information. That Charter’s provision combined with Articles 10 and 11 TEU do require instead only the EU institutions – not the EU Member States – to ensure public access to documents, including legislative texts and meeting minutes. Regulation 1049/2001 was adopted (originally Art. 255 TEC) on such a legal basis and should be revised accordingly. The paper demonstrates that the most promising legal basis enabling the EU to proceed towards the harmonisation of access to information within the EU is offered by Article 114 TFEU. It argues hat the harmonisation of the conditions governing access to information across Member States would facilitate cross-border activities and trade, thus enhancing the internal market. Moreover, this would ensure equal access to information for all EU citizens and residents, irrespective of their location within the EU. Therefore, the question is not whether but how the EU may – under Article 114 TFEU – act to harmonise access to information. If the EU enjoys wide legislative discretion under Article 114(1) TFEU, this is not absolute but is subject to limits derived from fundamental rights and principles such as proportionality, equality, and subsidiarity. Hence, the need to design the type of harmonisation capable of preserving existing national FOIAs while enhancing the weakest ones. The only type of harmonisation fit for purpose would therefore be minimal, as opposed to maximal, by merely defining the minimum conditions required on each Member State’s national legislation governing the access to information…(More)”.
Digital Media and Grassroots Anti-Corruption
Open access book edited by Alice Mattoni: “Delving into a burgeoning field of research, this enlightening book utilises case studies from across the globe to explore how digital media is used at the grassroots level to combat corruption. Bringing together an impressive range of experts, Alice Mattoni deftly assesses the design, creation and use of a wide range of anti-corruption technologies…(More)”.
Private Thought and Public Speech
Essay by David Bromwich: “The past decade has witnessed a notable rise in the deployment of outrageous speech and censorship: opposite tendencies, on the face of things, which actually strengthen each other’s claim. My aim in this essay is to defend the traditional civil libertarian argument against censorship, without defending outrageous speech. By outrageous, I should add, I don’t mean angry or indignant or accusing speech, of the sort its opponents call “extreme” (often because it expresses an opinion shared by a small minority). Spoken words of this sort may give an impetus to thought, and their existence is preferable to anything that could be done to silence them. Outrageous speech, by contrast, is speech that means only to enrage, and not to convey any information or argument, in however primitive a form. No intelligent person wishes there were more of it. But, for the survival of a free society, censorship is far more dangerous.
Let me try for a closer description of these rival tendencies. On the one hand, there is the unembarrassed publication of the degrading epithet, the intemperate accusation, the outlandish verbal assault against a person thought to be an erring member of one’s own milieu; and on the other hand, the bureaucratized penalizing of inappropriate speech (often classified as such quite recently) which has become common in the academic, media, professional, and corporate workplace. …(More)”.
The not-so-silent type: Vulnerabilities across keyboard apps reveal keystrokes to network eavesdroppers
Report by Jeffrey Knockel, Mona Wang, and Zoë Reichert: “Typing logographic languages such as Chinese is more difficult than typing alphabetic languages, where each letter can be represented by one key. There is no way to fit the tens of thousands of Chinese characters that exist onto a single keyboard. Despite this obvious challenge, technologies have developed which make typing in Chinese possible. To enable the input of Chinese characters, a writer will generally use a keyboard app with an “Input Method Editor” (IME). IMEs offer a variety of approaches to inputting Chinese characters, including via handwriting, voice, and optical character recognition (OCR). One popular phonetic input method is Zhuyin, and shape or stroke-based input methods such as Cangjie or Wubi are commonly used as well. However, used by nearly 76% of mainland Chinese keyboard users, the most popular way of typing in Chinese is the pinyin method, which is based on the pinyin romanization of Chinese characters.
All of the keyboard apps we analyze in this report fall into the category of input method editors (IMEs) that offer pinyin input. These keyboard apps are particularly interesting because they have grown to accommodate the challenge of allowing users to type Chinese characters quickly and easily. While many keyboard apps operate locally, solely within a user’s device, IME-based keyboard apps often have cloud features which enhance their functionality. Because of the complexities of predicting which characters a user may want to type next, especially in logographic languages like Chinese, IMEs often offer “cloud-based” prediction services which reach out over the network. Enabling “cloud-based” features in these apps means that longer strings of syllables that users type will be transmitted to servers elsewhere. As many have previously pointed out, “cloud-based” keyboards and input methods can function as vectors for surveillance and essentially behave as keyloggers. While the content of what users type is traveling from their device to the cloud, it is additionally vulnerable to network attackers if not properly secured. This report is not about how operators of cloud-based IMEs read users’ keystrokes, which is a phenomenon that has already been extensively studied and documented. This report is primarily concerned with the issue of protecting this sensitive data from network eavesdroppers…(More)”.
Digitalization in Practice
Book edited by Jessamy Perriam and Katrine Meldgaard Kjær: “..shows that as welfare is increasingly digitalized, an investigation of the social implications of this digitalization becomes increasingly pertinent. The book offers chapters on how the state operates, from the day-to-day practices of governance to keeping registers of businesses, from overarching and sometimes contradictory policies to considering how to best include citizens in digitalized processes. Moreover, the book takes a citizen perspective on key issues of access, identification and social harm to consider the social implications of digitalization in the everyday. The diversity of topics in Digitalization in Practice reflects how digitalization as an ongoing process and practice fundamentally impacts and often reshapes the relationship between states and citizens.
- Provides much needed critical perspectives on digital states in practice.
- Opens up provocative questions for further studies and research topics in digital states.
- Showcases empirical studies of situations where digital states are enacted…(More)”.
More Questions Than Flags: Reality Check on DSA’s Trusted Flaggers
Article by Ramsha Jahangir, Elodie Vialle and Dylan Moses: “It’s been 100 days since the Digital Services Act (DSA) came into effect, and many of us are still wondering how the Trusted Flagger mechanism is taking shape, particularly for civil society organizations (CSOs) that could be potential applicants.
With an emphasis on accountability and transparency, the DSA requires national coordinators to appoint Trusted Flaggers, who are designated entities whose requests to flag illegal content must be prioritized. “Notices submitted by Trusted Flaggers acting within their designated area of expertise . . . are given priority and are processed and decided upon without undue delay,” according to the DSA. Trusted flaggers can include non-governmental organizations, industry associations, private or semi-public bodies, and law enforcement agencies. For instance, a private company that focuses on finding CSAM or terrorist-type content, or tracking groups that traffic in that content, could be eligible for Trusted Flagger status under the DSA. To be appointed, entities need to meet certain criteria, including being independent, accurate, and objective.
Trusted escalation channels are a key mechanism for civil society organizations (CSOs) supporting vulnerable users, such as human rights defenders and journalists targeted by online attacks on social media, particularly in electoral contexts. However, existing channels could be much more efficient. The DSA is a unique opportunity to redesign these mechanisms for reporting illegal or harmful content at scale. They need to be rethought for CSOs that hope to become Trusted Flaggers. Platforms often require, for instance, content to be translated into English and context to be understood by English-speaking audiences (due mainly to the fact that the key decision-makers are based in the US), which creates an added burden for CSOs that are resource-strapped. The lack of transparency in the reporting process can be distressing for the victims for whom those CSOs advocate. The lack of timely response can lead to dramatic consequences for human rights defenders and information integrity. Several CSOs we spoke with were not even aware of these escalation channels – and platforms are not incentivized to promote mechanisms given the inability to vet, prioritize and resolve all potential issues sent to them….(More)”.
The Simple Macroeconomics of AI
Paper by Daron Acemoglu: “This paper evaluates claims about large macroeconomic implications of new advances in AI. It starts from a task-based model of AI’s effects, working through automation and task complementarities. So long as AI’s microeconomic effects are driven by cost savings/productivity improvements at the task level, its macroeconomic consequences will be given by a version of Hulten’s theorem: GDP and aggregate productivity gains can be estimated by what fraction of tasks are impacted and average task-level cost savings. Using existing estimates on exposure to AI and productivity improvements at the task level, these macroeconomic effects appear nontrivial but modest—no more than a 0.66% increase in total factor productivity (TFP) over 10 years. The paper then argues that even these estimates could be exaggerated, because early evidence is from easy-to-learn tasks, whereas some of the future effects will come from hard-to-learn tasks, where there are many context-dependent factors affecting decision-making and no objective outcome measures from which to learn successful performance. Consequently, predicted TFP gains over the next 10 years are even more modest and are predicted to be less than 0.53%. I also explore AI’s wage and inequality effects. I show theoretically that even when AI improves the productivity of low-skill workers in certain tasks (without creating new tasks for them), this may increase rather than reduce inequality. Empirically, I find that AI advances are unlikely to increase inequality as much as previous automation technologies because their impact is more equally distributed across demographic groups, but there is also no evidence that AI will reduce labor income inequality. Instead, AI is predicted to widen the gap between capital and labor income. Finally, some of the new tasks created by AI may have negative social value (such as design of algorithms for online manipulation), and I discuss how to incorporate the macroeconomic effects of new tasks that may have negative social value…(More)”.
The citizen’s panel on AI issues its report
Belgian presidency of the European Union: “Randomly select 60 citizens from all four corners of Belgium. Give them an exciting topic to explore. Add a few local players. Season with participation experts. Bake for three weekends at the Egmont Palace conference centre. And you’ll end up with the rich and ambitious views of citizens on the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in the European Union.
This is the recipe that has been in progress since February 2024, led by the Belgian presidency of the European Union, with the ambition of involving citizens in this strategic field and enriching the debate on AI, which has been particularly lively in recent months as part of the drafting of the AI Act recently adopted by the European Parliament.
And the initiative really cut the mustard, as the 60 citizens worked enthusiastically, overcoming their apprehensions about a subject as complex as AI. In a spirit of collective intelligence, they dove right into the subject, listening to speakers from academia, government, civil society and the private sector, and sharing their experiences and knowledge. Some of them were just discovering AI, while others were already using it. They turned this diversity into a richness, enabling them to write a report on citizens’ views that reflects the various aspirations of the Belgian population.
At the end of the three weekends, the citizens almost unanimously adopted a precise and ambitious report containing nine key messages focusing on the need for a responsible, ambitious and beneficial approach to AI, ensuring that it serves the interests of all and leaves no one behind…(More)”
Determinants of behaviour and their efficacy as targets of behavioural change interventions
Paper with Dolores Albarracín, Bita Fayaz-Farkhad & Javier A. Granados Samayoa: “Unprecedented social, environmental, political and economic challenges — such as pandemics and epidemics, environmental degradation and community violence — require taking stock of how to promote behaviours that benefit individuals and society at large. In this Review, we synthesize multidisciplinary meta-analyses of the individual and social-structural determinants of behaviour (for example, beliefs and norms, respectively) and the efficacy of behavioural change interventions that target them. We find that, across domains, interventions designed to change individual determinants can be ordered by increasing impact as those targeting knowledge, general skills, general attitudes, beliefs, emotions, behavioural skills, behavioural attitudes and habits. Interventions designed to change social-structural determinants can be ordered by increasing impact as legal and administrative sanctions; programmes that increase institutional trustworthiness; interventions to change injunctive norms; monitors and reminders; descriptive norm interventions; material incentives; social support provision; and policies that increase access to a particular behaviour. We find similar patterns for health and environmental behavioural change specifically. Thus, policymakers should focus on interventions that enable individuals to circumvent obstacles to enacting desirable behaviours rather than targeting salient but ineffective determinants of behaviour such as knowledge and beliefs…(More)”.
Quantum Policy
A Primer by Jane Bambauer: “Quantum technologies have received billions in private and public
investments and have caused at least some ambient angst about how they will disrupt an already fast-moving economy and uncertain social order. Some consulting firms are already offering “quantum readiness” services, even though the potential applications for quantum computing, networking, and sensing technologies are still somewhat speculative, in part because the impact of these technologies may be mysterious and profound. Law and policy experts have begun to offer advice about how the development of quantum technologies should be regulated through ethical norms or laws. This report builds on the available work by providing a brief summary of the applications that seem potentially viable
to researchers and companies and cataloging the effects—both positive and negative—that these applications may have on industry, consumers, and society at large.
As the report will show, quantum technologies (like many information technologies that have come before) will produce benefits and risks and will inevitably require developers and regulators to make trade-offs between several legitimate but conflicting goals. Some of these policy decisions can be made in advance, but some will have to be reactive in nature, as unexpected risks and benefits will emerge…(More)”.