Privacy and Freedom of Expression In the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joint Paper by Privacy International and ARTICLE 19: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of our daily lives. This technology shapes how people access information, interact with devices, share personal information, and even understand foreign languages. It also transforms how individuals and groups can be tracked and identified, and dramatically alters what kinds of information can be gleaned about people from their data. AI has the potential to revolutionise societies in positive ways. However, as with any scientific or technological advancement, there is a real risk that the use of new tools by states or corporations will have a negative impact on human rights. While AI impacts a plethora of rights, ARTICLE 19 and Privacy International are particularly concerned about the impact it will have on the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression and information. This scoping paper focuses on applications of ‘artificial narrow intelligence’: in particular, machine learning and its implications for human rights.

The aim of the paper is fourfold:

1. Present key technical definitions to clarify the debate;

2. Examine key ways in which AI impacts the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy and outline key challenges;

3. Review the current landscape of AI governance, including various existing legal, technical, and corporate frameworks and industry-led AI initiatives that are relevant to freedom of expression and privacy; and

4. Provide initial suggestions for rights-based solutions which can be pursued by civil society organisations and other stakeholders in AI advocacy activities….(More)”.

China asserts firm grip on research data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ScienceMag: “In a move few scientists anticipated, the Chinese government has decreed that all scientific data generated in China must be submitted to government-sanctioned data centers before appearing in publications. At the same time, the regulations, posted last week, call for open access and data sharing.

The possibly conflicting directives puzzle researchers, who note that the yet-to-be-established data centers will have latitude in interpreting the rules. Scientists in China can still share results with overseas collaborators, says Xie Xuemei, who specializes in innovation economics at Shanghai University. Xie also believes that the new requirements to register data with authorities before submitting papers to journals will not affect most research areas. Gaining approval could mean publishing delays, Xie says, but “it will not have a serious impact on scientific research.”

The new rules, issued by the powerful State Council, apply to all groups and individuals generating research data in China. The creation of a national data center will apparently fall to the science ministry, though other ministries and local governments are expected to create their own centers as well. Exempted from the call for open access and sharing are data involving state and business secrets, national security, “public interest,” and individual privacy… (More)”

Accountability in modern government: what are the issues?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Discussion Paper by Benoit Guerin, Julian McCrae and Marcus Shepheard: “…Accountability lies at the heart of democratic government. It enables people to know how the Government is doing and how to gain redress when things go wrong. It ensures ministers and civil servants are acting in the interests of the people they serve.

Accountability is a part of good governance and it can increase the trustworthiness and legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the public. Every day, 5.4 million public sector workers deliver services ranging from health care to schools to national defence.1 A host of bodies hold them to account – whether the National Audit Office undertaking around 60 value for money inquiries a year,2 Ofsted inspecting more than 5,000 schools per year, or the main Government ombudsman services dealing with nearly 80,000 complaints from the public in 2016/17 alone. More than 21,000 elected officials, ranging from MPs to local councillors, scrutinise these services on behalf of citizens.

When that accountability works properly, it helps the UK’s government to be among the best in the world. For example, public spending is authorised by Parliament and routinely stays within the limits set. The accountability that surrounds this – provided through oversight by the Treasury, audit by the National Audit Office and scrutiny by the Public Accounts Committee – is strong and dates back to the 19th century. However, in areas where that accountability is weak, the risk of failure – whether financial mismanagement, the collapse of services or chronic underperformance – increases. …

There are three factors underpinning the weak accountability that is perpetuating failure. They are: fundamental gaps in accountability in Whitehall; a failure of accountability beyond Whitehall to keep pace with an increasingly complex public sector landscape; and a pervading culture of blame….

This paper suggests potential options for strengthening accountability, based on our analysis. These involve changes to structures, increased transparency and moves to improve the culture. These options are meant to elicit discussion rather than to set the Institute for Government’s position at this stage….(More)”

The Public, the Political System and American Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Research Center: “Most say ‘design and structure’ of government need big changes…At a time of growing stress on democracy around the world, Americans generally agree on democratic ideals and values that are important for the United States. But for the most part, they see the country falling well short in living up to these ideals, according to a new study of opinion on the strengths and weaknesses of key aspects of American democracy and the political system.

The public’s criticisms of the political system run the gamut, from a failure to hold elected officials accountable to a lack of transparency in government. And just a third say the phrase “people agree on basic facts even if they disagree politically” describes this country well today.

The perceived shortcomings encompass some of the core elements of American democracy. An overwhelming share of the public (84%) says it is very important that “the rights and freedoms of all people are respected.” Yet just 47% say this describes the country very or somewhat well; slightly more (53%) say it does not.

Despite these criticisms, most Americans say democracy is working well in the United States – though relatively few say it is working very well. At the same time, there is broad support for making sweeping changes to the political system: 61% say “significant changes” are needed in the fundamental “design and structure” of American government to make it work for current times.

The public sends mixed signals about how the American political system should be changed, and no proposals attract bipartisan support. Yet in views of how many of the specific aspects of the political system are working, both Republicans and Democrats express dissatisfaction.

To be sure, there are some positives. A sizable majority of Americans (74%) say the military leadership in the U.S. does not publicly support one party over another, and nearly as many (73%) say the phrase “people are free to peacefully protest” describes this country very or somewhat well.

In general, however, there is a striking mismatch between the public’s goals for American democracy and its views of whether they are being fulfilled. On 23 specific measures assessing democracy, the political system and elections in the United States – each widely regarded by the public as very important – there are only eight on which majorities say the country is doing even somewhat well….(More)”.

Improving online disclosures with behavioural insights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “This report looks at how behavioural insights can be used to improve online information disclosures for consumers. The report is the latest contribution to work by the OECD’s Committee on Consumer Policy on improving consumer policy with behavioural insights. Behavioural insights incorporate findings from economics, psychology, neuroscience and marketing to better understand how individuals and businesses actually behave in the marketplace. While the role of information disclosure policies is clear in empowering consumers to make informed decisions when shopping online, findings from behavioural insights raise questions about the usefulness of certain forms of information disclosure. This report looks at these concerns and the subsequent policy implications….(More)”.

Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Woodrow Hartzog: “Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves—even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.

In Privacy’s Blueprint, Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust….(More)”.

Data for Public Benefit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carnegie Trust: “Public services are essential to our lives. Collecting, using and sharing data better could help deliver these services more effectively. But as well as delivering many public benefits the sharing of personal data can also involve risks.

‘Data for Public Benefit’ is a joint initiative with Involve and Understanding Patient Data. The report presents new research from across six local authority areas in England and has found that there are big differences in how public services currently define and weigh up public benefits and risks of data sharing.

We’ve developed a framework to help organisations make better decisions about when data should and shouldn’t be shared. This framework will help professionals weigh up the purpose of sharing data against the potential for harm and help public service providers have conversations with the public about data sharing….(More)“.

5 Tips for Launching (and Sustaining) a City Behavioral Design Team

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Playbook by ideas42: “…To pave the way for other municipalities to start a Behavioral Design Team, we distilled years of rigorously tested results and real-world best practices into an open-source playbook for public servants at all levels of government. The playbook introduces readers to core concepts of behavioral design, indicates why and where a BDT can be effective, lays out the fundamental competencies and structures governments will need to set up a BDT, and provides guidance on how to successfully run one. It also includes several applicable examples from our New York and Chicago teams to illustrate the tangible impact behavioral science can have on citizens and outcomes.

Thinking about starting a BDT? Here are five tips for launching (and sustaining) a city behavioral design team. For more insights, read the full playbook.

Compose your team with care

While there is no exact formula, a well-staffed BDT needs expertise in three key areas: behavioral science, research and evaluation, and public policies and programs. You’ll rarely find all three in one person—hence the need to gather a team of people with complementary skills. Some key things to look for as you assemble your team: background in behavioral economics or social psychology, formal training in impact evaluation and statistics, and experience working in government positions or nonprofits that implement government programs.

Choose an anchor agency

To more quickly build momentum, consider identifying an “anchor” agency. A high profile partner can help you establish credibility and can facilitate interactions with different departments across your government. Having an anchor agency legitimizes the BDT and helps reduce any apprehension among other agencies. The initial projects with the anchor agency will help others understand both what it means to work with the BDT and what kinds of outcomes to expect.

Establish your criteria for selecting projects

Once you get people bought-in and excited about innovating with behavioral science, the possible problems to tackle can seem limitless. Before selecting projects, set up clear criteria for prioritizing which problems need attention the most and which ones are best suited to behavioral solutions. While it is natural for the exact criteria to vary from place to place, in the playbook we share the criteria the New York and Chicago BDTs use to prioritize and determine the viability of potential undertakings that other teams can use as a starting place.

Build buy-in with a mix of project types

If you run only RCTs, which require implementation and data collection, it may be challenging to generate the buy-in and enthusiasm a BDT needs to thrive in its early days. That’s why incorporating some shorter engagements, including projects that are design-only, or pre-post evaluations can help sustain momentum by quickly generating evidence—and demonstrate that your BDT gets results.

Keep learning and growing

Applying behavioral design within government programs is still relatively novel. This open-source playbook provides guidance for starting a BDT, but constant learning and iterating should be expected! As BDTs mature and evolve, they must also become more ambitious in their scope, particularly when the low-hanging-fruit or other more obvious problems that can be helpful for building buy-in and establishing proof-of-concept have been addressed. The long-term goal of any successful BDT is to tackle the most challenging and impactful problems in government programs and policies head-on and use the solutions to help the people who need it most…(More)”

New study improves ‘crowd wisdom’ estimates

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Santa Fe Institute: “In 1907, a statistician named Francis Galton recorded the entries from a weight-judging competition as people guessed the weight of an ox. Galton analyzed hundreds of estimates and found that while individual guesses varied wildly, the median of the entries was surprisingly accurate and within one percent of the ox’s real weight. When Galton published his results, he ushered the theory of collective intelligence, or the “wisdom of crowds,” into the public conscience.

Collective wisdom has its limits, though. In a new study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, researchers Albert Kao (Harvard University), Andrew Berdahl (Santa Fe Institute), and their colleagues examined just how accurate our collective intelligence is and how individual bias and information sharing skew aggregate estimates. Using their findings, they developed a mathematical correction that takes into account bias and social information to generate an improved crowd estimate. In the study, their corrected measures were more accurate than the mean, median, and other traditional statistics.

“There is growing evidence that the wisdom of crowds can be really powerful,” Kao says. “A lot of studies show that you can calculate the average of estimates and that average can be surprisingly good.”

“However,” adds Berdahl, “there is a great deal of evidence that people have strong biases in estimation and decision tasks.”

The researchers recruited over 800 volunteers to participate in the study and asked each participant to guess the number of gumballs in a jar, which ranged over several orders of magnitude from 54 to more than 27,000. Additionally, they quantified how individuals incorporate social information into their own opinion. To do so, the researchers offered participants fake details about other people’s guesses and allowed them to change their estimate in light of that information.

Kao’s team found that while estimates varied considerably, they were highly predictable. People tended to guess numbers smaller than the actual value and guessed a wider range of numbers for larger jars. Social information also plays a role in collective wisdom. For example, the simulated social information revealed that peer advice more strongly influenced an individual if the knowledge suggested the actual number of items was higher than the guesser’s initial estimate. Smaller guesses, even if more accurate, appear to be more frequently discounted…(More)”

See: “Counteracting estimation bias and social influence to improve the wisdom of crowds” in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface (April 18, 2018)

The digital economy is disrupting our old models

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Diane Coyle at The Financial Times: “One of the many episodes of culture shock I experienced as a British student in the US came when I first visited the university health centre. They gave me my medical notes to take away. Once I was over the surprise, I concluded this was entirely proper. After all, the true data was me, my body. I was reminded of this moment from the early 1980s when reflecting on the debate about Facebook and data, one of the collective conclusions of which seems to be that personal data are personal property so there need to be stronger rights of ownership. If I do not like what Facebook is doing with my data, I should be able to withdraw them. Yet this fix for the problem is not straightforward.

“My” data are inextricably linked with that of other people, who are in my photographs or in my network. Once the patterns and correlations have been extracted from it, withdrawing my underlying data is neither here nor there, for the value lies in the patterns. The social character of information can be seen from the recent example of Strava accidentally publishing maps of secret American military bases because the aggregated route data revealed all the service personnel were running around the edge of their camps. One or two withdrawals of personal data would have made no difference. To put it in economic jargon, we are in the territory of externalities and public goods. Information once shared cannot be unshared.
The digital economy is one of externalities and public goods to a far greater degree than in the past. We have not begun to get to grips with how to analyse it, still less to develop policies for the common good. There are two questions at the heart of the challenge: what norms and laws about property rights over intangibles such as data or ideas or algorithms are going to be needed? And what will the best balance between collective and individual actions be or, to put it another way, between government and market?
Tussles about rights over intangible or intellectual property have been going on for a while: patent trolls on the one hand, open source creators on the other. However, the issue is far from settled. Do we really want to accept, for example, that John Deere, in selling an expensive tractor to a farmer, is only in fact renting it out because it claims property rights over the installed software?

…

Free digital goods of the open source kind are being cross-subsidised by their creators’ other sources of income. Free digital goods of the social media kind are being funded by various advertising services — and that turns out to be an ugly solution. Yet the network effects are so strong, the benefits they provide so great, that if Facebook and Google were shut down by antitrust action tomorrow, replacement digital groups could well emerge before too long. China seems to be in effect nationalising its big digital platforms but many in the west will find that even less appealing than a private data market. In short, neither “market” nor “state” looks like the right model for ownership and governance in an information economy pervaded by externalities and public goods. Finding alternative models for the creation and sharing of value in the digital world, when these are inherently collective and non-rival activities, is an urgent challenge….(More).