Curated findings and actionable knowledge at the intersection of technology, innovation, and governance
Report by Karen Yeung: “This study was commissioned by the Council of Europe’s Committee of experts on
Its methodological approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on concepts and academic scholarship from the humanities, the social sciences and, to a more limited extent, from computer science. It concludes that, if we are to take human rights seriously in a
This paper addresses the empirical gap by gathering rich data in an institutional context of district governments in Uganda, which is typical of the local state in poor countries. The paper measures traits such as the integrity, altruism, personality, and public service motivation of bureaucrats and politicians. It finds robust evidence that higher integrity among locally elected politicians is associated with substantively better delivery of public health services by district bureaucracies. Together with the theory, this evidence suggests that
Paper by F.M. Welle Donker and B. van Loenen: “Much research has
In general, it can be concluded that the societal benefits of (linked) open data are higher than the costs. The case studies show that there are differences between the datasets. In many cases, costs for open data are an integral part of general data management costs and hardly lead to additional costs. In certain cases, however, the costs to anonymize /aggregate the data are high compared to the potential value of an open data version of the dataset.
M. Chatwin, G. Arku and E. Cleave in Policy Sciences: “What is
Book by Cass R. Sunstein and Lucia A. Reisch: “Many “nudges” aim to make life simpler, safer, or easier for people to navigate, but what do members of the public really think about these policies? Drawing on surveys from numerous nations around the world, Sunstein and Reisch explore whether citizens approve of nudge policies. Their most important finding is simple and striking. In diverse countries, both democratic and nondemocratic, strong majorities approve of nudges designed to promote health, safety, and environmental protection—and their approval cuts across political divisions.
In recent years, many governments have implemented behaviorally informed policies, focusing on nudges—understood as interventions that preserve freedom of choice, but that also steer people in certain directions. In some circles, nudges have become controversial, with questions raised about whether they amount to forms of manipulation. This fascinating book carefully considers these criticisms and answers important questions. What do citizens actually think about behaviorally informed policies? Do citizens have identifiable principles in mind when they approve or disapprove of the policies? Do citizens of different nations agree with each other?
From the answers to these questions, the authors identify six principles of legitimacy—a “bill of rights” for nudging that
Michael Twidale and Preben Hansen at First Monday: “Most of us struggle when starting a new research project, even if we have considerable prior experience. It is a new topic and we are unsure about what to do, how to do it and what it all means. We may not have reflected much on our research process.
In the light of these confusions, fears, doubts and mismatches with what you experience while doing research and what you think is the right and proper way as alluded to in all the papers you read, we want to explore ideas around a title, or at least a provocative metaphor of “agile research”. We want to ask the question: “how might we take the ideas, the methods and the underlying philosophy behind agile software development and explore how these might be applied in the context of doing research?” This paper is not about sharing a set of methods that we have developed but more about provoking a discussion about the issue: What might agile research be like? How might it work? When might it be useful? When might it be problematic? Is it worth trying? Are people doing it already?
We are not claiming that this idea is wholly new. Many people have been using small scale rapid iterative methods within the research process for a long time. Rather we think that it can be useful to consider all these and other possible methods in the light of the successful deployment of agile software development processes, and to contrast them with more conventional research processes that rely more on careful advance planning. That is not to say that the latter methods are bad, just that other methods that might be characterized as more agile can be useful in particular circumstances.
We believe that it is worth exploring this idea as a way of addressing the problems that arise in trying to do a new research project, especially where an exploratory approach is useful. This could be in a domain that is new to the researcher, or where the domain is new in some way, such as involving new use contexts, new ways of interacting, new technologies, novel technology combinations, or new appropriations of existing technologies. We suspect this may be especially useful in helping new researchers such as PhD students get a better understanding of the research process in a less daunting manner. This work builds on prior thinking about how agile may be applied in university teaching and administration (Twidale and Nichols, 2013)
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Natasha Singer in The New York Times: “The Weather Channel app deceptively collected, shared and profited from the location information of millions of American consumers, the city attorney of Los Angeles said in a lawsuit filed on Thursday.
One of the most popular online weather services in the United States, the Weather Channel app has been downloaded more than 100 million times and has 45 million active users monthly.
The government said the Weather Company, the business behind the app, unfairly manipulated users into turning on location tracking by implying that the information would be used only to localize weather reports. Yet the company, which is owned by IBM, also used the data for unrelated commercial purposes, like targeted marketing and analysis for hedge funds, according to the lawsuit…
In the complaint, the city attorney excoriated the Weather Company, saying it unfairly took advantage of its app’s popularity and the fact that consumers were likely to give their location data to get local weather alerts. The city said that the company failed to sufficiently disclose its data practices when it got users’ permission to track their location and that it obscured other tracking details in its privacy policy.
“These issues certainly aren’t limited to our state,” Mr. Feuer said. “Ideally this litigation will be the catalyst for other action — either litigation or legislative activity — to protect consumers’ ability to assure their private information remains just that, unless they speak clearly in advance.”…(More)”.
Jeffrey Mervis at Science: “The U.S. Census Bureau is making waves among social scientists with what it calls a “sea change” in how it plans to safeguard the confidentiality of data it releases from the decennial census.
The agency announced in September 2018 that it will apply a mathematical concept called differential privacy to its release of 2020 census data after conducting experiments that suggest current approaches can’t assure confidentiality. But critics of the new policy believe the Census Bureau is moving too quickly to fix a system that isn’t broken. They also fear the changes will degrade the quality of the information used by thousands of researchers, businesses, and government agencies.
The move has implications that extend far beyond the research community. Proponents of differential privacy say a fierce, ongoing legal battle over plans to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census has only underscored the need to assure people that the government will protect their privacy
Differential privacy, first described in 2006, isn’t a substitute for swapping and other ways to perturb the data. Rather, it allows someone—in this case, the Census Bureau—to measure the likelihood that enough information will “leak” from a public
“Any time you release a statistic, you’re leaking something,” explains Jerry Reiter, a professor of statistics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who has worked on differential privacy as a consultant with the Census Bureau. “The only way to absolutely ensure confidentiality is to release no data. So the question is, how much risk is OK? Differential privacy allows you to put a boundary” on that risk
In the case of census data, however, the agency has already decided what information it will release, and the number of queries is unlimited. So its challenge is to calculate how much the data must be perturbed to prevent
A professor of labor economics at Cornell University, Abowd first learned that traditional procedures to limit disclosure were vulnerable—and that algorithms existed to quantify the risk—at a 2005 conference on privacy attended mainly by cryptographers and computer scientists. “We were speaking different languages, and there was no Rosetta Stone,” he says.
He took on the challenge of finding common ground. In 2008, building on a long relationship with the Census Bureau, he and a team at Cornell created the first application of differential privacy to a census product. It is a web-based tool, called OnTheMap, that shows where people work and live….
The three-step process required substantial computing power. First, the researchers reconstructed records for individuals—say, a 55-year-old Hispanic woman—by mining the aggregated census tables. Then, they tried to match the reconstructed individuals to even more detailed census block records (that still lacked names or addresses); they found “putative matches” about half the time.
Finally, they compared the putative matches to commercially available credit databases in hopes of attaching a name to a particular record. Even if they could, however, the team didn’t know whether they had actually found the right person.
Abowd won’t say what proportion of the putative matches appeared to be correct. (He says a forthcoming paper will contain the ratio, which he calls “the amount of uncertainty an attacker would have once they claim to have reidentified a person from the public data.”) Although one of Abowd’s recent papers notes that “the risk of re-identification is small,” he believes the experiment proved reidentification “can be done.” And that, he says, “is a strong motivation for moving to differential privacy.”…
Such arguments haven’t convinced Ruggles and other social scientists opposed to applying differential privacy on the 2020 census. They are circulating manuscripts that question the significance of the census reconstruction exercise and that call on the agency to delay and change its
Ruggles, meanwhile, has spent a lot of time thinking about the kinds of problems differential privacy might create. His Minnesota
There are also questions of capacity and accessibility. The centers require users to do all their work onsite, so researchers would have to travel, and the centers offer fewer than 300 workstations in total
Abowd has said, “The deployment of differential privacy within the Census Bureau marks a sea change for the way that official statistics are produced and published.” And Ruggles agrees. But he says the agency hasn’t done enough to equip researchers with the maps and tools needed to navigate the uncharted waters….(More)”.
Stacy Wood in KULA: knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation studies: “This paper considers the history and politics of ‘police data.’ Police data, I contend, is a category of endangered data reliant on voluntary and inconsistent reporting by law enforcement agencies; it is also inconsistently described and routinely housed in systems that were not designed with long-term strategies for data preservation, curation or management in mind. Moreover, whereas US law enforcement agencies have, for over a century, produced and published a great deal of data about crime, data about the ways in which police officers spend their time and make decisions about resources—as well as information about patterns of individual officer behavior, use of force, and in-custody deaths—is difficult to find. This presents a paradoxical situation wherein vast stores of extant data are completely inaccessible to the public. This paradoxical state is not new, but the continuation of a long history co-constituted by technologies, epistemologies
Report by the World Economic Forum: “Development of comprehensive data policy necessarily involves trade-offs. Cross-border data flows are crucial to the digital economy. The use of data is critical to innovation and technology. However, to engender trust, we need to have appropriate levels of protection in place to ensure privacy, security and safety. Over 120 laws in effect across the globe today provide differing levels of protection for data but few anticipated
Data Policy in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Insights on personal data, a paper by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the Ministry of Cabinet Affairs and the Future, United Arab Emirates, examines the relationship between risk and benefit, recognizing the impact of culture, values and social norms This work is a start toward developing a comprehensive data policy toolkit and knowledge repository of case studies for