Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Thomas in Fast.AI on “What is the ethical responsibility of data scientists?”…What we’re talking about is a cataclysmic change… What we’re talking about is a major foreign power with sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election and sow conflict and discontent all over this country… You bear this responsibility. You’ve created these platforms. And now they are being misused, Senator Feinstein said this week in a senate hearing. Who has created a cataclysmic change? Who bears this large responsibility? She was talking to executives at tech companies and referring to the work of data scientists.

Data science can have a devastating impact on our world, as illustrated by inflammatory Russian propaganda being shown on Facebook to 126 million Americans leading up to the 2016 election (and the subject of the senate hearing described above) or by lies spread via Facebook that are fueling ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Over half a million Rohinyga have been driven from their homes due to systematic murder, rape, and burning. Data science is foundational to Facebook’s newsfeed, in determining what content is prioritized and who sees what….

The examples of bias in data science are myriad and include:

• Google Photos automatically labeling Black people as “gorillas”
• Software to assesses criminal recidivism risk that is twice as likely to mistakenly predict that Black defendants are high risk
• Google’s popular Word2Vec language library creating sexist analogies such as man→computer programmer :: woman→homemaker.
• Neural networks learning that “hotness” is having light skin
• An app to compare job candidates’ word choice, tone, and facial movements with current employees, which Princeton Professor Arvind Narayanan described as AI whose only conceivable purpose is to perpetuate societal biases
• Google Translate converting gender neutral sentences to “He is a doctor. She is a nurse”…

You can do awesome and meaningful things with data science (such as diagnosing cancer, stopping deforestation, increasing farm yields, and helping patients with Parkinson’s disease), and you can (often unintentionally) enable terrible things with data science, as the examples in this post illustrate. Being a data scientist entails both great opportunity, as well as great responsibility, to use our skills to not make the world a worse place. Ultimately, doing data science is about humans, not just the users of our products, but everyone who will be impacted by our work. (More)”.

Report by Agnes Czibik, Mihaly Fazekas, Monika Bauhr and  Jenny de Fine Licht for Digiwhist: “Transparency is widely promoted as an essential condition for good governance, and as an effective tool against public sector corruption more specifically. Although the empirical evidence on the impact of transparency on corruption is growing, empirical evidence remains mixed. Recent critique holds that a main reason for the lack of robust empirical evidence is that both conceptualization and available measures of government transparency are broad and sometimes imprecise, and that the concepts of transparency are often far removed from the type of information that is relevant to assess government performance.

This paper seeks to develop a more precise conceptualization and measure of transparency that is actionable for the stakeholders of government decisions. The paper uses newly collected data of more than 4 million public procurement contracts between 2006-2015 to investigate the impact of transparency on high-level corruption risks in public procurement across Europe. We find a strong negative impact of overall tender transparency on corruption risks. The results also show that exante transparency, i.e. transparency before the contract is awarded, has a stronger effect on corruption risks than ex-post transparency, i.e. the availability of information after the contract has been awarded to a bidder. This suggest that internal transparency, or transparency first and foremost directed to provide information to the parties involved in the bidding process rather than to outside observers, is the main condition for wider public accountability to emerge. However, the effectiveness of this type of transparency is strengthened in contexts where there is also a wider societal demand for reduced corruption. In sum, our results suggest that transparency can reduce corruption risks if the information is both relevant to inside observers and actionable….(More)”.

Chapter by Stefania Milan and Miren Gutierrez in the book on Networks, Movements and Technopolitics in Latin America: ‘Big data’ offer novel opportunities for civic engagement and foster the emergence of data activism, a form of technopolitics from the ground–up that assumes people’s active engagement with data for empowerment. Proactive data activism, in particular, sees citizens taking advantage of the possibilities offered by data for advocacy and social change. This chapter combines social movement studies and media studies to analyze the emergence of proactive data activism in the Latin American continent. Analyzing the case of InfoAmazonia—a project blending citizen participation and data analysis to generate news about the endangered Amazon region—this chapter adds to our understanding of technopolitics as a way to reinterpret reality, empower people, facilitate collective action, and challenge the establish social norms embedded in our understanding of technology and social change. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of how data can restructure social reality, and in particular civil society action….(More) (Other chapters)”.

Christopher Nelson, Anita Chandra & Carolyn Miller in Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Our ability to track and report all sorts of things is growing by the day, resulting in a proliferation of measures—the percentage of children attending preschool, the cost of housing, access to mental health services, to name just a few. It’s time that organizations begin to focus just as much effort on understanding how those measures can be more effectively used to change complex social systems….

It is often said that “what gets measured gets done.” This common phrase implicitly frames measurement not just as a tool for capturing information about systems but also as an intervention itself. This belief in the transformative power of measurement may partially explain the huge sums of money spent each year by governmental, nongovernmental, and private sector organizations in developing, maintaining, and publicizing measures….(More)”

Paul M. Schwartz and Karl-Nikolaus Peifer in Georgetown Law Journal: “International flows of personal information are more significant than ever, but differences in transatlantic data privacy law imperil this data trade. The resulting policy debate has led the EU to set strict limits on transfers of personal data to any non-EU country—including the United States—that lacks sufficient privacy protections. Bridging the transatlantic data divide is therefore a matter of the greatest significance.

In exploring this issue, this Article analyzes the respective legal identities constructed around data privacy in the EU and the United States. It identifies profound differences in the two systems’ images of the individual as bearer of legal interests. The EU has created a privacy culture around “rights talk” that protects its “datasubjects.” In the EU, moreover, rights talk forms a critical part of the postwar European project of creating the identity of a European citizen. In the United States, in contrast, the focus is on a “marketplace discourse” about personal information and the safeguarding of “privacy consumers.” In the United States, data privacy law focuses on protecting consumers in a data marketplace.

This Article uses its models of rights talk and marketplace discourse to analyze how the EU and United States protect their respective data subjects and privacy consumers. Although the differences are great, there is still a path forward. A new set of institutions and processes can play a central role in developing mutually acceptable standards of data privacy. The key documents in this regard are the General Data Protection Regulation, an EU-wide standard that becomes binding in 2018, and the Privacy Shield, an EU–U.S. treaty signed in 2016. These legal standards require regular interactions between the EU and United States and create numerous points for harmonization, coordination, and cooperation. The GDPR and Privacy Shield also establish new kinds of governmental networks to resolve conflicts. The future of international data privacy law rests on the development of new understandings of privacy within these innovative structures….(More)”.

Paper by Edward Castronova: “The rapid expansion of virtual reality (VR) technology in the years 2016-2021 awakens a significant constitutional issue. In a liberal democratic order, rule is by consent of the governed. In the medium-term future, many of the governed will be immersed fully within VR environments, environments which, we are told, will provide entertainment of extraordinary power. These people will be happy. Happy people do not demand change. Yet there surely will be a change as VR takes hold: The quality of life will erode. People fully immersed in VR will come to be isolated, sedentary, and unhealthy. Objectively speaking, this is nothing to be desired. Subjectively, however, it will seem to be wonderful. The people themselves will be happy, and they will resist interference. At the moment this matter concerns only a few thousand nerds, but trends in technology and entertainment point to a future in which many people will be happily living awful, VR-dominated lives. How then will the liberal democratic order promote human well-being while remaining a liberal and democratic order?…(More)”

plainlanguage.gov: “The Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN) is a group of federal employees from different agencies and specialties who support the use of clear communication in government writing. Originally called the Plain English Network, PLAIN has been meeting informally since the mid 1990s.

Our goal is to promote the use of plain language for all government communications. We believe that using plain language will save federal agencies time and money and provide better service to the American public.

To promote plain language, we:

• develop and maintain the content of this site
• manage the plain language community of practice
• offer free half-day training sessions to federal agencies
• sponsor occasional seminars about plain language…(More)”

Saadia Madsbjerg in the New York Times: “Our data is valuable. Each year, it generates hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of economic activity, mostly between and within corporations — all on the back of information about each of us.

It’s this transaction — between you, the user, giving up details of yourself to a company in exchange for a product like a photo app or email, or a whole ecosystem like Facebook — that’s worth by some estimates $1,000 per person per year, a number that is quickly rising.

The value of our personal data is primarily locked up in the revenues of large corporations. Some, like data brokerages, exist solely to buy and sell sets of that data.

Why should companies be the major, and often the only, beneficiaries of this largess? They shouldn’t. Those financial benefits need to be shared, and the best way to do it is to impose a small tax on this revenue and use the proceeds to build a better, more equitable internet and society that benefit us all.

The data tax could be a minor cost, less than 1 percent of the revenue companies earn from selling our personal data, spread out over an entire industry. Individually, no company’s bottom line would substantially suffer; collectively, the tax would pull money back to the public, from an industry profiting from material and labor that is, at its very core, our own.

This idea is not new. It is, essentially, a sales tax, among the oldest taxes that exist, but it hasn’t been done because assigning a fixed monetary value to our data can be very difficult. For a lot of internet businesses, our personal data either primarily flows through the business or remains locked within….(More)”.

Paper by Cynthia Gibson for the Ford Foundation: “…During the past decade, all sectors of society have faced heightened demand for greater accountability and transparency. People have become more distrustful of established institutions, they are demanding more information about issues and decisions afecting them and their families and communities, and they want more voice in decision-making processes. Technological innovation also has created new possibilities — and new pressures — for organizations and institutions to become more democratic by involving the public in their work.

Philanthropy is not immune from these trends. While for decades, philanthropy was seen as endowed foundations set up by the rich, recent years have seen a surge in crowdfunding, giving circles, donor-advised funds, and a panoply of digital giving platforms that allow anyone to be a philanthropist. Alongside these, traditions of giving from within communities that existed long before philanthropy became professionalized have become more prominent.

Philanthropy and other felds also are being reshaped by the attitudes and capacities of a new generation of young people who have grown up with the Internet and embrace its culture of transparency and bottom-up action. Additionally, there is a growing awareness that many public challenges are exceedingly complex and won’t respond to one-shot solutions from experts or institutions working on their own.

These and other trends refect a backlash against the “establishment” occurring in politics, higher education, the media, and other felds in which elite interests are perceived to have drowned out the concerns of ordinary people. Americans of all stripes and political persuasions have come to believe they have little say in guiding public decisions and improving the health and well-being of their communities..

This paper assesses the embrace of participatory approaches to date by philanthropy and other felds. In assessing philanthropy’s record, the paper fnds examples of individual foundations and networks of funders that are experimenting with participatory approaches. It also, however, fnds that there is a great deal of talk about participation in the feld but comparatively little commitment to integrating these practices into foundations’ strategies and activities, and especially their cultures, over the long term…(More)”.

New project by The GovLab: “With rates of trust in government at historic lows, the legitimacy of traditional representative models of lawmaking — often conducted by professional staff and politicians working behind closed doors and distorted by political party agendas–is called into question. New forms of public participation could help to improve both legitimacy and effectiveness by introducing more data and diverse viewpoints at each stage of the lawmaking process.

CrowdLaw is the practice of using technology to tap the intelligence and expertise of the public in order to improve the quality of lawmaking. Around the world, there are already over two dozen examples of local legislatures and national parliaments turning to the Internet to involve the public in legislative drafting and decision-making. These ambitious crowdlaw initiatives show that the public can, in many cases, go beyond contributing opinions and signing petitions online to playing a more substantive role, including: proposing legislation, drafting bills, monitoring implementation, and supplying missing data. Through such processes, the public becomes collaborators and co-creators in the legislative process to the end of improving the quality of legislative outcomes and the effectiveness of governing.

GovLab is supporting legislative bodies in investigating, designing, implementing, and testing crowdlaw initiatives. Our work includes:

• Studying and sharing learnings about CrowdLaw practices in use around the world and convening practitioners to share learnings.
• Synthesizing best practices for the design of CrowdLaw initiatives — including platforms, processes, and policies — through an on-going survey of over 25 public engagement initiatives.
• Cultivating a thriving network of now more than 90 CrowdLaw and public engagement experts and practitioners.
• Crafting a model legal framework to accelerate the integration of public input into the legislative process.
• Advising on the implementation of CrowdLaw practices….(More)”