Stefaan Verhulst
Interim Report by the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (UK): The use of algorithms has the potential to improve the quality of decision- making by increasing the speed and accuracy with which decisions are made. If designed well, they can reduce human bias in decision-making processes. However, as the volume and variety of data used to inform decisions increases, and the algorithms used to interpret the data become more complex, concerns are growing that without proper oversight, algorithms risk entrenching and potentially worsening bias.
The way in which decisions are made, the potential biases which they are subject to and the impact these decisions have on individuals are highly context dependent. Our Review focuses on exploring bias in four key sectors: policing, financial services, recruitment and local government. These have been selected because they all involve significant decisions being made about individuals, there is evidence of the growing uptake of machine learning algorithms in the sectors and there is evidence of historic bias in decision-making within these sectors. This Review seeks to answer three sets of questions:
- Data: Do organisations and regulators have access to the data they require to adequately identify and mitigate bias?
- Tools and techniques: What statistical and technical solutions are available now or will be required in future to identify and mitigate bias and which represent best practice?
- Governance: Who should be responsible for governing, auditing and assuring these algorithmic decision-making systems?
Our work to date has led to some emerging insights that respond to these three sets of questions and will guide our subsequent work….(More)”.
Book by Valesca Lima: “This book discusses the issues of citizen rights, governance and political crisis in Brazil. The project has a focus on “citizenship in times of crisis,” i.e., seeking to understand how citizenship rights have changed since the Brazilian political and economic crisis that started in 2014. Building on theories of citizenship and governance, the author examines policy-based evidence on the retractions of participatory rights, which are consequence of a stagnant economic scenario and the re-organization of conservative sectors. This work will appeal to scholarly audiences interested in citizenship, Brazilian politics, and Latin American policy and governance….(More)”.
Katherine R. Knobloch at Democratic Audit: “Both scholars and citizens have begun to believe that democracy is in decline. Authoritarian power grabs, polarising rhetoric, and increasing inequality can all claim responsibility for democratic systems that feel broken. Democracy depends on a polity who believe that their engagement matters, but evidence suggests democratic institutions have become unresponsive to the will of the public. How can we restore faith in self-government when both research and personal experience tell us that the public is losing power, not gaining it?
Deliberative public engagement
Deliberative democracy offers one solution, and it’s slowly shifting how the public engages in political decision-making. In Oregon, the Citizens’ Initiative Review(CIR) asks a group of randomly selected voters to carefully study public issues and then make policy recommendations based on their collective experience and insight. In Ireland, Citizens’ Assemblies are being used to amend the country’s constitution to better reflect changing cultural norms. In communities across the world, Participatory Budgeting is giving the public control over local government spending. Far from squashing democratic power, these deliberative institutions bolster it. They exemplify a new wave in democratic government, one that aims to bring community members together across political and cultural divides to make decisions about how to govern themselves.
Though the contours of deliberative events vary, most share key characteristics. A diverse body of community members gather together to learn from experts and one another, think through the short- and long-term implications of different policy positions, and discuss how issues affect not only themselves but their wider communities. At the end of those conversations, they make decisions that are representative of the diversity of participants and their ideas and which have been tested through collective reasoning….(More)”.
Introduction to Special Issue of International Organization by
Judith G. Kelley and Beth A. Simmons: “In recent decades, IGOs, NGOs, private firms and even states have begun to regularly package and distribute information on the relative performance of states. From the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index to the Financial Action Task Force blacklist, global performance indicators (GPIs) are increasingly deployed to influence governance globally. We argue that GPIs derive influence from their ability to frame issues, extend the authority of the creator, and — most importantly — to invoke recurrent comparison that stimulates governments’ concerns for their own and their country’s reputation. Their public and ongoing ratings and rankings of states are particularly adept at capturing attention not only at elite policy levels but also among other domestic and transnational actors. GPIs thus raise new questions for research on politics and governance globally. What are the social and political effects of this form of information on discourse, policies and behavior? What types of actors can effectively wield GPIs and on what types of issues? In this symposium introduction, we define GPIs, describe their rise, and theorize and discuss these questions in light of the findings of the symposium contributions…(More)”.
M. P. J. Ashby in Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences: “The study of spatial and temporal crime patterns is important for both academic understanding of crime-generating processes and for policies aimed at reducing crime. However, studying crime and place is often made more difficult by restrictions on access to appropriate crime data. This means understanding of many spatio-temporal crime patterns are limited to data from a single geographic setting, and there are few attempts at replication. This article introduces the Crime Open Database (code), a database of 16 million offenses from 10 of the largest United States cities over 11 years and more than 60 offense types. Open crime data were obtained from each city, having been published in multiple incompatible formats. The data were processed to harmonize geographic co-ordinates, dates and times, offense categories and location types, as well as adding census and other geographic identifiers. The resulting database allows the wider study of spatio-temporal patterns of crime across multiple US cities, allowing greater understanding of variations in the relationships between crime and place across different settings, as well as facilitating replication of research….(More)”.
Paper by Teresa Scassa and Merlynda Vilain: “The collection of vast quantities of personal data from embedded sensors is increasingly an aspect of urban life. This type of data collection is a feature of so-called smart cities, and it raises important questions about data governance. This is particularly the case where the data may be made available for reuse by others and for a variety of purposes.
This paper focuses on the governance of data captured through “smart” technologies and uses Ontario’s smart metering program as a case study. Ontario rolled out mandatory smart metering for electrical consumption in the early 2000s largely to meet energy conservation goals. In doing so, it designed a centralized data governance system overseen by the Smart Metering Entity to manage smart meter data and to protect consumer privacy. As interest in access to the data grew among third parties, and as new potential applications for the data emerged, the regulator sought to develop a model for data sharing that would protect privacy in relation to these new uses and that would avoid uses that might harm the public interest…(More)”.
Mark Latonero at The New York Times: “A standoff between the United Nations World Food Program and Houthi rebels in control of the capital region is threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Yemen.
Alarmed by reports that food is being diverted to support the rebels, the aid program is demanding that Houthi officials allow them to deploy biometric technologies like iris scans and digital fingerprints to monitor suspected fraud during food distribution.
The Houthis have reportedly blocked food delivery, painting the biometric effort as an intelligence operation, and have demanded access to the personal data on beneficiaries of the aid. The impasse led the aid organization to the decision last month to suspend food aid to parts of the starving population — once thought of as a last resort — unless the Houthis allow biometrics.
With program officials saying their staff is prevented from doing its essential jobs, turning to a technological solution is tempting. But biometrics deployed in crises can lead to a form of surveillance humanitarianism that can exacerbate risks to privacy and security.
By surveillance humanitarianism, I mean the enormous data collection systems deployed by aid organizations that inadvertently increase the vulnerability of people in urgent need….(More)”.
Paper by Jane K. Winn: “The governance turn in information privacy law is a turn away from a model of bureaucratic administration of individual control rights and toward a model of collaborative governance of shared interests in information. Collaborative information governance has roots in the American pragmatic philosophy of Peirce, James and Dewey and the 1973 HEW Report that rejected unilateral individual control rights, recognizing instead the essential characteristic of mutuality of shared purposes that are mediated through information governance. America’s current information privacy law regime consists of market mechanisms supplemented by sector-specific, risk-based laws designed to foster a culture of compliance. Prior to the GDPR, data protection law compliance in Europe was more honored in the breach than the observance, so the EU’s strengthening of its bureaucratic individual control rights model reveals more about the EU’s democratic deficit than a commitment to compliance.
The conventional “Europe good, America bad” wisdom about information privacy law obscures a paradox: if the focus shifts from what “law in the books” says to what “law in action” does, it quickly becomes apparent that American businesses lead the world with their efforts to comply with information privacy law, so “America good, Europe bad” might be more accurate. Creating a federal legislative interface through which regulators and voluntary, consensus standards organizations can collaborate could break the current political stalemate triggered by California’s 2018 EU-style information privacy law. Such a pragmatic approach to information governance can safeguard Americans’ continued access to the benefits of innovation and economic growth as well as providing risk-based protection from harm. America can preserve its leadership of the global information economy by rejecting EU-style information privacy laws and building instead a flexible, dynamic framework of information governance capable of addressing both privacy and disclosure issues simultaneously….(More)”.
Paper by Philip Oreopoulos and Uros Petronijevic: “We present results from a five-year effort to design promising online and text-message interventions to improve college achievement through several distinct channels. From a sample of nearly 25,000 students across three different campuses, we find some improvement from coaching-based interventions on mental health and study time, but none of the interventions we evaluate significantly influences academic outcomes (even for those students more at risk of dropping out). We interpret the results with our survey data and a model of student effort. Students study about five to eight hours fewer each week than they plan to, though our interventions do not alter this tendency. The coaching interventions make some students realize that more effort is needed to attain good grades but, rather than working harder, they settle by adjusting grade expectations downwards. Our study time impacts are not large enough for translating into significant academic benefits. More comprehensive but expensive programs appear more promising for helping college students outside the classroom….(More)”
Ben Parker at The New Humanitarian: “Thousands of children between the ages of one and five are due to be fingerprinted in Bangladesh and Tanzania in the largest biometric scheme of its kind ever attempted, the Geneva-based vaccine agency, Gavi, announced recently.
Although the scheme includes data protection safeguards – and its sponsors are cautious not to promise immediate benefits – it is emerging during a widening debate on data protection, technology ethics, and the risks and benefits of biometric ID in development and humanitarian aid.
Gavi, a global vaccine provider, is teaming up with Japanese and British partners in the venture. It is the first time such a trial has been done on this scale, according to Gavi spokesperson James Fulker.
Being able to track a child’s attendance at vaccination centres, and replace “very unreliable” paper-based records, can help target the 20 million children who are estimated to miss key vaccinations, most in poor or remote communities, Fulker said.
Up to 20,000 children will have their fingerprints taken and linked to their records in existing health projects. That collection effort will be managed by Simprints, a UK-based not-for-profit enterprise specialising in biometric technology in international development, according to Christine Kim, the company’s head of strategic partnerships….
Ethics and legal safeguards
Kim said Simprints would apply data protection standards equivalent to the EU’s General Directive on Privacy Regulation (GDPR), even if national legislation did not demand it. Families could opt out without any penalties, and informed consent would apply to any data gathering. She added that the fieldwork would be approved by national governments, and oversight would also come from institutional review boards at universities in the two countries.
Fulker said Gavi had also commissioned a third-party review to verify Simprints’ data protection and security methods.
For critics of biometrics use in humanitarian settings, however, any such plan raises red flags….
Data protection analysts have long been arguing that gathering digital ID and biometric data carries particular risks for vulnerable groups who face conflict or oppression: their data could be shared or leaked to hostile parties who could use it to target them.
In a recent commentary on biometrics and aid, Linda Raftree told The New Humanitarian that “the greatest burden and risk lies with the most vulnerable, whereas the benefits accrue to [aid] agencies.”
And during a panel discussion on “Digital Do No Harm” held last year in Berlin, humanitarian professionals and data experts discussed a range of threats and unintended consequences of new technologies, noting that they are as yet hard to predict….(More)”.