Paper by Imanol Arrieta Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez Hernández and Jaron Lanier: “In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capital created by corporations observing willing individuals. This neglects users’ role in creating data, reducing incentives for users, distributing the gains from the data economy unequally and stoking fears of automation. Instead treating data (at least partially) as labor could help resolve these issues and restore a functioning market for user contributions, but may run against the near-term interests of dominant data monopsonists who have benefited from data being treated as ‘free’. Countervailing power, in the form of competition, a data labor movement and/or thoughtful regulation could help restore balance….(More)”.
Artificial intelligence and privacy
Report by the The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (DPA): “…If people cannot trust that information about them is being handled properly, it may limit their willingness to share information – for example with their doctor, or on social media. If we find ourselves in a situation in which sections of the population refuse to share information because they feel that their personal integrity is being violated, we will be faced with major challenges to our freedom of speech and to people’s trust in the authorities.
A refusal to share personal information will also represent a considerable challenge with regard to the commercial use of such data in sectors such as the media, retail trade and finance services.
About the report
This report elaborates on the legal opinions and the technologies described in the 2014 report «Big Data – privacy principles under pressure». In this report we will provide greater technical detail in describing artificial intelligence (AI), while also taking a closer look at four relevant AI challenges associated with the data protection principles embodied in the GDPR:
- Fairness and discrimination
- Purpose limitation
- Data minimisation
- Transparency and the right to information
This represents a selection of data protection concerns that in our opinion are most relevance for the use of AI today.
The target group for this report consists of people who work with, or who for other reasons are interested in, artificial intelligence. We hope that engineers, social scientists, lawyers and other specialists will find this report useful….(More) (Download Report)”.
Behavioral Analysis of International Law: On Lawmaking and Nudging
Article by Doron Teichman and Eyal Zamir: “… examines the application of insights from behavioral economics to the area of international law. It reviews the unique challenges facing such application and demonstrates the contribution of behavioral findings to the understanding of lawmaking, the use of nudges, and states’ practices in the international arena.
In the sphere of lawmaking, the article first highlights the contribution of experimental game theory to understanding international customary law. It then analyzes the psychological mechanisms underpinning the advancement of treaty law through the use of deadlines, grandfather provisions, deferred implementation, and temporary arrangements. More generally, it provides insight into the processes through which international soft law evolves into hard law.
The article then argues that in the absence of a central legislative body or strong enforcement mechanisms, nudges (that is, low-cost, choice-preserving, behaviorally informed regulatory tools) can play a particularly important role in influencing the behavior of states and other entities. The article describes the current use of nudges, such as opt-in and opt-out arrangements in multilateral treaties, goal settings, and international rankings—and calls for further employment of such means.
Finally, the article suggests that the extent to which states comply with international norms may be explained by phenomena such as loss aversion and the identifiability effect; and that further insight into states’ (non)compliance may be gained from the emerging research in behavioral ethics…(More)”
And Yet They Thrive!—Regaining the Relevance of a Transparency System
Paper by Pontus Hedlin in Development Policy Review: “Over the past decade, a host of donor organizations implemented transparency systems to make international development aid more transparent to the public. These initiatives have met with little public interest, but their proliferation and development show no sign of diminishing. This article shows how internal importance to the political system, fueled by formal rankings and the exhibition of transparency systems as a flagship initiative, can replace relevance to the public as a driving force for sustainable development. The article concludes by discussing the possibility of a future development where transparency systems finally do connect with user groups, such as citizens of both donor and recipient countries, and gain a relevance even beyond original intentions….(More)”.
The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life
Book byLee Humphreys: “Social critiques argue that social media have made us narcissistic, that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are all vehicles for me-promotion. In The Qualified Self, Lee Humphreys offers a different view. She shows that sharing the mundane details of our lives—what we ate for lunch, where we went on vacation, who dropped in for a visit—didn’t begin with mobile devices and social media. People have used media to catalog and share their lives for several centuries. Pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books are the predigital precursors of today’s digital and mobile platforms for posting text and images. The ability to take selfies has not turned us into needy narcissists; it’s part of a longer story about how people account for everyday life.
Humphreys refers to diaries in which eighteenth-century daily life is documented with the brevity and precision of a tweet, and cites a nineteenth-century travel diary in which a young woman complains that her breakfast didn’t agree with her. Diaries, Humphreys explains, were often written to be shared with family and friends. Pocket diaries were as mobile as smartphones, allowing the diarist to record life in real time. Humphreys calls this chronicling, in both digital and nondigital forms, media accounting. The sense of self that emerges from media accounting is not the purely statistics-driven “quantified self,” but the more well-rounded qualified self. We come to understand ourselves in a new way through the representations of ourselves that we create to be consumed….(More)”.
Data As Infrastructure
Report by Peter Kawalek and Ali Bayat: “In the 21st Century, data is infrastructure. This is because the managed and built environments increasingly depend upon data in real-time. Moreover, the sources of this data are potentially multiple, not necessarily arising from within the control of traditional institutions, and yet this data can be complex in form. It follows from this that data is a critical component and needs to be understood as a key part of 21st infrastructure but that it presents new challenges to those institutions concerned with the safe and effective management of infrastructure.
It is now widely accepted that the digitization of the economy has taken root in a way that means it is not confined to one sector. All sectors are affected in some common ways. Brynjolfsson and McAfee are among those who have described this. The economic drivers behind digitization are successfully isolated and described by Goldfarb & Tucker , and there are important contributions to understanding given by economists including Levin and Nordhaus . It is proportionate to describe the economic and social ramifications within the frame of ‘Creative Destruction’, originally described by Schumpeter in 19425 . In this light, the importance of data can be expected to grow across most or all industry sectors. Its effective management will become ever more critical to the economy and to society more widely….(More)”
Views on Open Data Business from Software Development Companies
Antti Herala, Jussi Kasurinen, and Erno Vanhala in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research: “The main concept of open data and its application is simple; access to the publicly-funded data provides greater returns from the public investment and can generate wealth through the downstream use of outputs, such as traffic information or weather forecast services. However, even though open data and data sharing as concepts are forty years old with the open data initiative reaching ten, the practical actions and applications have tended to stay on the superficial level, and significant progress or success stories are hard to find. The current trend is that the governments and municipalities are opening their data, but the impact and usefulness of raw open data repositories to citizens – and even to businesses – can be questioned Besides the governments, a handful of private organizations are opening their data in an attempt to unlock the economic value of open data, but even they have difficulties finding innovative usage, let alone generate additional profit.
In a previous study it was found that companies are interested in open data and that this mindset spans over different industries, from both publicly available data to the private business-to-business data access. Open data is not only a resource for software companies, but also for traditional engineering industries and even for small, nonfranchised local markets and shops. In our previous study, it was established that there is evidence on recognizing the applicability of open data, and opening the data to the clients by private organizations leads to business opportunities, creating new value.
However, while there is interest towards open data in a wide variety of businesses, the question still remains whether or not open data is actually used to generate income or are there some other sharing methods in use that are more efficient and more profitable.
For this study, four research questions were formulated. The first three are concentrating on the usage of open data as well as the interest towards opening or sharing data and the fourth research question revolves around the different types of openness:
- How do new clients express interest towards open data?
- What kind of open data-based solutions is the existing clientele expecting?
- How does the product portfolio of a software company respond to open data?
- What are the current trends of open initiatives?…(More)”.
Social activism: Engaging millennials in social causes
Michelle I. Seelig at First Monday: “Given that young adults consume and interact with digital technologies not only a daily basis, but extensively throughout the day, it stands to reason they are more actively involved in advocating social change particularly through social media. However, national surveys of civic engagement indicate civic and community engagement drops-off after high school and while millennials attend college. While past research has compiled evidence about young adults’ social media use and some social media behaviors, limited literature has investigated the audience’s perspective of social activism campaigns through social media.
Research also has focused on the adoption of new technologies based on causal linkages between perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, yet few studies have considered how these dynamics relate to millennials engagement with others using social media for social good. This project builds on past research to investigate the relationship between millennials’ online exposure to information about social causes and motives to take part in virtual and face-to-face engagement.
Findings suggest that while digital media environments immerse participants in mediated experiences that merge both the off-line and online worlds, and has a strong effect on person’s influence to do something, unclear is the extent to which social media and social interactions influence millennials willingness to engage both online and in-person. Even so, the results of this study indicate millennials are open to using social media for social causes, and perhaps increasing engagement off-line too….(More)”.
How to Beat Science and Influence People: Policy Makers and Propaganda in Epistemic Networks
Paper by James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O’Connor, and Justin Bruner: “In their recent book Merchants of Doubt [New York:Bloomsbury 2010], Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe the “tobacco strategy”, which was used by the tobacco industry to influence policy makers regarding the health risks of tobacco products. The strategy involved two parts, consisting of (1) promoting and sharing independent research supporting the industry’s preferred position and (2) funding additional research, but selectively publishing the results.
We introduce a model of the Tobacco Strategy, and use it to argue that both prongs of the strategy can be extremely effective–even when policy makers rationally update on all evidence available to them. As we elaborate, this model helps illustrate the conditions under which the Tobacco Strategy is particularly successful. In addition, we show how journalists engaged in “fair” reporting can inadvertently mimic the effects of industry on public belief….(More)”.
Earth Observation Open Science and Innovation
Open Access book edited by Over the past decades, rapid developments in digital and sensing technologies, such as the Cloud, Web and Internet of Things, have dramatically changed the way we live and work. The digital transformation is revolutionizing our ability to monitor our planet and transforming the way we access, process and exploit Earth Observation data from satellites.
This book reviews these megatrends and their implications for the Earth Observation community as well as the wider data economy. It provides insight into new paradigms of Open Science and Innovation applied to space data, which are characterized by openness, access to large volume of complex data, wide availability of new community tools, new techniques for big data analytics such as Artificial Intelligence, unprecedented level of computing power, and new types of collaboration among researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and citizen scientists. In addition, this book aims to provide readers with some reflections on the future of Earth Observation, highlighting through a series of use cases not just the new opportunities created by the New Space revolution, but also the new challenges that must be addressed in order to make the most of the large volume of complex and diverse data delivered by the new generation of satellites….(More)”.