Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Djaka Marwasta and Farid Suprianto: “In the era of Industrial Revolution 4.0, technology became a factor that could contribute significantly to improving the quality of life and welfare of the people of a nation. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) penetration through Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) which are disruptively, has led to fundamental advances in civilization. The expansion of Industrial Revolution 4.0 has also changed the pattern of government and citizen relations which has implications for the needs of policy governance and internal government transformation. One of them is a change in social welfare development policies, where government officials are required to be responsive to social dynamics that have consequences for increasing demands for public accountability and transparency.
This paper aims to elaborate on the e-Warong program as one of the breakthroughs to reduce poverty by utilizing digital technology. E-Warong (electronic mutual cooperation shop) is an Indonesian government program based on the empowerment of the poor Grass Root Innovation (GRI) with an approach to building group awareness in encouraging the independence of the poor to develop joint ventures through mutual cooperation with utilizing ICT advantages. This program is an implementation of the Smart City concept, especially Smart Economy, within the Sustainable Development Goals framework….(More)”.
Essay by Shoshana Zuboff in The New York Times: “…Only repeated crises have taught us that these platforms are not bulletin boards but hyper-velocity global bloodstreams into which anyone may introduce a dangerous virus without a vaccine. This is how Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, could legally refuse to remove a faked video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and later double down on this decision, announcing that political advertising would not be subject to fact-checking.
All of these delusions rest on the most treacherous hallucination of them all: the belief that privacy is private. We have imagined that we can choose our degree of privacy with an individual calculation in which a bit of personal information is traded for valued services — a reasonable quid pro quo.For example, when Delta Air Lines piloted a biometric data system at the Atlanta airport, the company reported that of nearly 25,000 customers who traveled there each week, 98 percent opted into the process, noting that “the facial recognition option is saving an average of two seconds for each customer at boarding, or nine minutes when boarding a wide body aircraft.”
In fact the rapid development of facial recognition systems reveals the public consequences of this supposedly private choice. Surveillance capitalists have demanded the right to take our faces wherever they appear — on a city street or a Facebook page. The Financial Times reported that a Microsoft facial recognition training database of 10 million images plucked from the internet without anyone’s knowledge and supposedly limited to academic research was employed by companies like IBM and state agencies that included the United States and Chinese military. Among these were two Chinese suppliers of equipment to officials in Xinjiang, where members of the Uighur community live in open-air prisons under perpetual surveillance by facial recognition systems.
Privacy is not private, because the effectiveness of these and other private or public surveillance and control systems depends upon the pieces of ourselves that we give up — or that are secretly stolen from us.
Our digital century was to have been democracy’s Golden Age. Instead, we enter its third decade marked by a stark new form of social inequality best understood as “epistemic inequality.” It recalls a pre-Gutenberg era of extreme asymmetries of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge, as the tech giants seize control of information and learning itself. The delusion of “privacy as private” was crafted to breed and feed this unanticipated social divide. Surveillance capitalists exploit the widening inequity of knowledge for the sake of profits. They manipulate the economy, our society and even our lives with impunity, endangering not just individual privacy but democracy itself. Distracted by our delusions, we failed to notice this bloodless coup from above….(More)”.
Eric Niiler at Wired: “On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors’ exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31.
BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan.
Speed matters during an outbreak, and tight-lipped Chinese officials do not have a good track record of sharing information about diseases, air pollution, or natural disasters. But public health officials at WHO and the CDC have to rely on these very same health officials for their own disease monitoring. So maybe an AI can get there faster. “We know that governments may not be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion,” says Kamran Khan, BlueDot’s founder and CEO. “We can pick up news of possible outbreaks, little murmurs or forums or blogs of indications of some kind of unusual events going on.”…
The firm isn’t the first to look for an end-run around public health officials, but they are hoping to do better than Google Flu Trends, which was euthanized after underestimating the severity of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent. BlueDot successfully predicted the location of the Zika outbreak in South Florida in a publication in the British medical journal The Lancet….(More)”.
Report by Centre for Humanitarian Data: “The goal of this report is to increase awareness of the data available for humanitarian response activities and to highlight what is missing, as measured through OCHA’s Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform. We want to recognize the valuable and long-standing contributions of data-sharing organizations. We also want to be more targeted in our outreach on what data is required to understand crises so that new actors might be compelled to join the platform. Data is not an end in itself but a critical ingredient to the analysis that informs decision making. With nearly 168 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in 2020 — the highest figure in decades — there is no time, or data, to lose…(More)”.
Introduction to Special Issue of Internet Policy Review by Colin J. Bennett and David Lyon: “There is a pervasive assumption that elections can be won and lost on the basis of which candidate or party has the better data on the preferences and behaviour of the electorate. But there are myths and realities about data-driven elections. I
t is time to assess the actual implications of data-driven elections in the light of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, and to reconsider the broader terms of the international debate. Political micro-targeting, and the voter analytics upon which it is based, are essentially forms of surveillance. We know a lot about how surveillance harms democratic values. We know a lot less, however, about how surveillance spreads as a result of democratic practices – by the agents and organisations that encourage us to vote (or not vote).
The articles in this collection, developed out of a workshop hosted by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia in April 2019, address the most central issues about data-driven elections, and particularly the impact of US social media platforms on local political institutions and cultures. The balance between rights to privacy, and the rights of political actors to communicate with the electorate, is struck in different ways in different jurisdictions depending on a complex interplay of various legal, political, and cultural factors. Collectively, the articles in this collection signal the necessary questions for academics and regulators in the years ahead….(More)”.
Introduction to Special Forum by Rainer Bauböck: “Since the first decade of the millennium – for the first time in human history – more people are living in urban areas than in rural ones. According to UN projections, in 2050 the share of urban populations could rise to more than two thirds of the world population. Will this demographic change also lead to a decline of nation-states and a rise of cities as the dominant arenas of politics, democracy and citizenship? My response will be ambivalent.
Yes, cities should play a greater role in addressing global problems, such as the climate crisis or international refugee protection, where sovereign states have failed dismally precisely because their sovereignty hampers cooperative solutions. Yes, cities should experiment vigorously with democratic innovations that could diminish the severe legitimacy crisis experienced by representative democracy in many countries around the world. Yes, cities should determine who their citizens are independently of how states do this.
No, contrary to the catchy title of the late Ben Barber’s book (2013), mayors should not rule the world. No, cities cannot replace nation-states and supranational institutions as political arenas that need to be filled with democratic life and to whom citizens can feel to belong. No, national citizenship should not be based on the same principle of membership as urban citizenship.
We need a new citizenship narrative
There are two reasons for my ambivalence. The first is my belief that the global problems that the international system of sovereign states is unable to address require a multilevel political architecture, in which supranational, regional and local political authorities play different but complementary roles. The European Union, in spite of its many structural weaknesses and policy failures, shows how state sovereignty can be pooled. Multilevel democracy beyond the nation-state is a European idea that is worth promoting in other world regions. Yet multilevel democracy requires also that citizenships at various territorial levels must be complementary and not substitutive.
The second reason has to do with the ‘democratic recession’ (Diamond 2015) and the rise of populism. According to many diagnoses these threats result from new political cleavages that cut across the traditional one between left and right (Kriesi et al. 2008). The new divisions are between attitudes in favour of more open or more closed states and societies; between those embracing cultural and gender diversity and those asserting conservative national and religious values; between those who worry about the climate crisis and those who worry about their traditional ways of life. The former are overwhelmingly concentrated in metropolitan regions and university towns, the latter are more widely dispersed across rural areas and declining industrial towns as well as working class neighbourhoods of larger cities. This divide is also closely associated with patterns of increasing geographic mobility among younger urban populations that disconnects their spaces of opportunity and imagined identities from those of sedentary majority populations whose life worlds remain predominantly local and national ones.
Liberals and democrats may hope that the growth of urban populations and the persistence of more open attitudes among younger cohorts will eventually swing the political pendulum towards greater openness (Lutz 2012). However, current electoral systems often give greater weight to voters outside the big cities (Rodden 2019), enabling political victories of illiberal populists who can wreak havoc by destroying democratic institutions and the capacity of states to tackle the global challenges of our time. The response cannot be just to politically mobilise those who are already in favour of more open societies – although it is certainly very important to do so. Radical democrats (Mouffe 2005) emphasize the need for partisan mobilisation and radical urbanists (Bookchin 1987; Harvey 2008) pitch the city as a site of struggle against neoliberal capitalism or a laboratory for emancipatory democracy and ecological utopias against the nation-state. Beyond mobilisation that articulates and deepens the new cleavages, there is, however, an urgent need for new narratives that can bridge them.
Such narratives have been successfully told in the past when democracies faced new challenges. And they focused on the idea of a common citizenship – as a status and bond that is able to support a sense of equality and unity in difference. After World War Two the British sociologist T. H. Marshall (1949/1965) justified the effort to build a welfare state in response to intolerable inequalities of social class, the acceptance of which had been undermined by the sacrifices of ordinary British people during the war. His story was that after the emergence of universal civil rights in the 18th century and political rights in the 19th, 20th century democracy needed social citizenship, i.e. a floor of social equality provided through public services and redistribution that could provide legitimacy for the inequality of social outcomes in capitalist markets….(More)”.
Article by Griffin McCutcheon, John Malloy, Caitlyn Hall, and Nivedita Mahesh: “From the esoteric worlds of predictive health care and cybersecurity to Google’s e-mail completion and translation apps, the impacts of AI are increasingly being felt in our everyday lived experience. The way it has crepted into our lives in such diverse ways and its proficiency in low-level knowledge shows that AI is here to stay. But like any helpful new tool, there are notable flaws and consequences to blindly adapting it.
AI is a tool—not a cure-all to modern problems….
Connecterra is trying to use TensorFlow to address global hunger through AI-enabled efficient farming and sustainable food development. The company uses AI-equipped sensors to track cattle health, helping farmers look for signs of illness early on. But, this only benefits one type of farmer: those rearing cattle who are able to afford a device to outfit their entire herd. Applied this way, AI can only improve the productivity of specific resource-intensive dairy farms and is unlikely to meet Connecterra’s goal of ending world hunger.
This solution, and others like it, ignores the wider social context of AI’s application. The belief that AI is a cure-all tool that will magically deliver solutions if only you can collect enough data is misleading and ultimately dangerous as it prevents other effective solutions from being implemented earlier or even explored. Instead, we need to both build AI responsibly and understand where it can be reasonably applied.
Challenges with AI are exacerbated because these tools often come to the public as a “black boxes”—easy to use but entirely opaque in nature. This shields the user from understanding what biases and risks may be involved, and this lack of public understanding of AI tools and their limitations is a serious problem. We shouldn’t put our complete trust in programs whose workings their creators cannot interpret. These poorly understood conclusions from AI generate risk for individual users, companies or government projects where these tools are used.
With AI’s pervasiveness and the slow change of policy, where do we go from here? We need a more rigorous system in place to evaluate and manage risk for AI tools….(More)”.
Paper by Ben Goldacre and Seb Bacon: “Open data is information made freely available to third parties in structured formats without restrictive licensing conditions, permitting commercial and noncommercial organizations to innovate. In the context of National Health Service (NHS) data, this is intended to improve patient outcomes and efficiency. EBM DataLab is a research group with a focus on online tools which turn our research findings into actionable monthly outputs. We regularly import and process more than 15 different NHS open datasets to deliver OpenPrescribing.net, one of the most high-impact use cases for NHS England’s open data, with over 15,000 unique users each month. In this paper, we have described the many breaches of best practices around NHS open data that we have encountered. Examples include datasets that repeatedly change location without warning or forwarding; datasets that are needlessly behind a “CAPTCHA” and so cannot be automatically downloaded; longitudinal datasets that change their structure without warning or documentation; near-duplicate datasets with unexplained differences; datasets that are impossible to locate, and thus may or may not exist; poor or absent documentation; and withholding of data for dubious reasons. We propose new open ways of working that will support better analytics for all users of the NHS. These include better curation, better documentation, and systems for better dialogue with technical teams….(More)”.
Flavie Halais at Wired: “Public transportation is sexist. This may be unintentional or implicit, but it’s also easy to see. Women around the world do more care and domestic work than men, and their resulting mobility habits are hobbled by most transport systems. The demands of running errands and caring for children and other family members mean repeatedly getting on and off the bus, meaning paying more fares. Strollers and shopping bags make travel cumbersome. A 2018 study of New Yorkers found women were harassed on the subway far more frequently than men were, and as a result paid more money to avoid transit in favor of taxis and ride-hail….
What is not measured is not known, and the world of transit data is still largely blind to women and other vulnerable populations. Getting that data, though, isn’t easy. Traditional sources like national censuses and user surveys provide reliable information that serve as the basis for policies and decisionmaking. But surveys are costly to run, and it can take years for a government to go through the process of adding a question to its national census.
Before pouring resources into costly data collection to find answers about women’s transport needs, cities could first turn to the trove of unconventional gender-disaggregated data that’s already produced. They include data exhaust, or the trail of data we leave behind as a result of our interactions with digital products and services like mobile phones, credit cards, and social media. Last year, researchers in Santiago, Chile, released a report based on their parsing of anonymized call detail records of female mobile phone users, to extract location information and analyze their mobility patterns. They found that women tended to travel to fewer locations than men, and within smaller geographical areas. When researchers cross-referenced location information with census data, they found a higher gender gap among lower-income residents, as poorer women made even shorter trips. And when using data from the local transit agency, they saw that living close to a public transit stop increased mobility for both men and women, but didn’t close the gender gap for poorer residents.
To encourage private companies to share such info, Stefaan Verhulst advocates for data collaboratives, flexible partnerships between data providers and researchers. Verhulst is the head of research and development at GovLab, a research center at New York University that contributed to the research in Santiago. And that’s how GovLab and its local research partner, Universidad del Desarollo, got access to the phone records owned by the Chilean phone company, Telefónica. Data collaboratives can enhance access to private data without exposing companies to competition or privacy concerns. “We need to find ways to access data according to different shades of openness,” Verhulst says….(More)”.
Sandra Laville in The Guardian: “Ordinary people from across the UK – potentially including climate deniers – will take part in the first ever citizens’ climate assembly this weekend.
Mirroring the model adopted in France by Emmanuel Macron, 110 people from all walks of life will begin deliberations on Saturday to come up with a plan to tackle global heating and meet the government’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
The assembly was selected to be a representative sample of the population after a mailout to 30,000 people chosen at random. About 2,000 people responded saying they wanted to be considered for the assembly, and the 110 members were picked by computer.
They come from all age brackets and their selection reflects a 2019 Ipsos Mori poll of how concerned the general population is by climate change, where responses ranged from not at all to very concerned. Of the assembly members, three people are not at all concerned, 16 not very concerned, 36 fairly concerned, 54 very concerned, and one did not know, organisers said.
The selection process meant those chosen could include climate deniers or sceptics, according to Sarah Allan, the head of engagement at Involve, which is running the assembly along with the Sortition Foundation and the e-democracy project mySociety.
“It is really important that it is representative of the UK population,” said Allen. “Those people, just because they’re sceptical of climate change, they’re going to be affected by the steps the government takes to get to net zero by 2050 too and they shouldn’t have their voice denied in that.”
The UK climate assembly differs from the French model in that it was commissioned by six select committees, rather than by the prime minister. Their views, which will be produced in a report in the spring, will be considered by the select committees but there is no guarantee any of the proposals will be taken up by government.
Allen said it was rare for members of a citizens’ assembly to get locked into dissent. She pointed to the success of the Irish citizens’ assembly in 2016, which helped break the deadlock in the abortion debate. “This climate assembly is going to come up with recommendations that are going to be really invaluable in highlighting public preferences,” she said….(More)”.