Privacy by design in big data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

An overview of privacy enhancing technologies in the era of big data analytics by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) : “The extensive collection and further processing of personal information in the context of big data analytics has given rise to serious privacy concerns, especially relating to wide scale electronic surveillance, profiling, and disclosure of private data. In order to allow for all the benefits of analytics without invading individuals’ private sphere, it is of utmost importance to draw the limits of big data processing and integrate the appropriate data protection safeguards in the core of the analytics value chain. ENISA, with the current report, aims at supporting this approach, taking the position that, with respect to the underlying legal obligations, the challenges of technology (for big data) should be addressed by the opportunities of technology (for privacy). To this end, in the present study we first explain the need to shift the discussion from “big data versus privacy” to “big data with privacy”, adopting the privacy and data protection principles as an essential value of big data, not only for the benefit of the individuals, but also for the very prosperity of big data analytics. In this respect, the concept of privacy by design is key in identifying the privacy requirements early at the big data analytics value chain and in subsequently implementing the necessary technical and organizational measures. Therefore, after an analysis of the proposed privacy by design strategies in the different phases of the big data value chain, we provide an overview of specific identified privacy enhancing technologies that we find of special interest for the current and future big data landscape. In particular, we discuss anonymization, the “traditional” analytics technique, the emerging area of encrypted search and privacy preserving computations, granular access control mechanisms, policy enforcement and accountability, as well as data provenance issues. Moreover, new transparency and access tools in big data are explored, together with techniques for user empowerment and control. Following the aforementioned work, one immediate conclusion that can be derived is that achieving “big data with privacy” is not an easy task and a lot of research and implementation is still needed. Yet, we find that this task can be possible, as long as all the involved stakeholders take the necessary steps to integrate privacy and data protection safeguards in the heart of big data, by design and by default. To this end, ENISA makes the following recommendations:

  • Privacy by design applied …
  • Decentralised versus centralised data analytics …
  • Support and automation of policy enforcement
  • Transparency and control….
  • User awareness and promotion of PETs …
  • A coherent approach towards privacy and big data ….(More)”

Big and Open Linked Data (BOLD) in government: A challenge to transparency and privacy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Marijn Janssen and Jeroen van den Hoven in Government Information Quarterly: “Big and Open Linked Data (BOLD) results in new opportunities and have the potential to transform government and its interactions with the public. BOLD provides the opportunity to analyze the behavior of individuals, increase control, and reduce privacy. At the same time BOLD can be used to create an open and transparent government. Transparency and privacy are considered as important societal and democratic values that are needed to inform citizens and let them participate in democratic processes. Practices in these areas are changing with the rise of BOLD. Although intuitively appealing, the concepts of transparency and privacy have many interpretations and are difficult to conceptualize, which makes it often hard to implement them. Transparency and privacy should be conceptualized as complex, non-dichotomous constructs interrelated with other factors. Only by conceptualizing these values in this way, the nature and impact of BOLD on privacy and transparency can be understood, and their levels can be balanced with security, safety, openness and other socially-desirable values….(More)”

 

What Citizens Can Teach Civil Servants About Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 and  in Governing: “An open government is one that is transparent, participatory and collaborative. But moving from traditional government operating behind closed doors to more open institutions, where civil servants work together with citizens to create policies and solve problems, demands new skills and sensibilities.

As more and more American public-sector leaders embrace the concept of openness as a positive force for governmental effectiveness, they would do well to look toward Brazil’s largest city, where an unusual experiment was just launched: an effort to use a variation on crowdsourcing to retrain Sao Paulo’s 150,000 civil servants. It’s described as the world’s largest open-government training program.

The program, known as Agents of Open Government – part of a wider city initiative called “Sao Paulo Aberta” (Open Sao Paulo) — aims to teach through peer-to-peer learning, where government employees learn from citizens. Twenty-four citizen-led courses that began last month are aimed not only at government employees and elected community representatives but also at social activists and the general population.

Sao Paolo is betting on the radical notion that learning can happen outside of formal civil-service training colleges. This initiative reflects a growing global trend toward recognizing that institutions can become smarter — more effective and efficient — by making use of the skills and experience of those outside of government.

Officials hope to have 25,000 participants over the course of the coming year. To encourage public employees’ participation, city workers who attend the courses gain credits in the municipal evaluation system that allow them to get pay raises….(More)”

Privacy in Public Spaces: What Expectations of Privacy Do We Have in Social Media Intelligence?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Edwards, Lilian and Urquhart, Lachlan: “In this paper we give a basic introduction to the transition in contemporary surveillance from top down traditional police surveillance to profiling and “pre-crime” methods. We then review in more detail the rise of open source (OSINT) and social media (SOCMINT) intelligence and its use by law enforcement and security authorities. Following this we consider what if any privacy protection is currently given in UK law to SOCMINT. Given the largely negative response to the above question, we analyse what reasonable expectations of privacy there may be for users of public social media, with reference to existing case law on art 8 of the ECHR. Two factors are in particular argued to be supportive of a reasonable expectation of privacy in open public social media communications: first, the failure of many social network users to perceive the environment where they communicate as “public”; and secondly, the impact of search engines (and other automated analytics) on traditional conceptions of structured dossiers as most problematic for state surveillance. Lastly, we conclude that existing law does not provide adequate protection foropen SOCMINT and that this will be increasingly significant as more and more personal data is disclosed and collected in public without well-defined expectations of privacy….(More)”

To reduce economic inequality, do we need better democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Leighninger at Public Agenda: “When people have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, they will be better off economically as well as politically.

This idea has intrigued community development experts, foundation executives, public officials and academic researchers for many years. It has also animated some of the work people and governments are undertaking to address inequality, both in the United States and (especially) in the Global South.

But can a participatory democracy lead to greater economic opportunity? We are just beginning to amass evidence that this idea is true, understand how and why it works, and figure out how to make it happen better and faster.

Over the last two decades we have witnessed a quiet revolution in how governments and other institutions engage the public. Public officials, technologists, engagement practitioners, community organizers and other leaders have developed hundreds of projects, processes, tools and apps that boost engagement.

While they differ in many ways, these strategies and resources have one common thread: they treat citizens like adults rather than the clients (or children) of the state. They give people chances to connect, learn, deliberate, make recommendations, vote on budget or policy decisions, take action to solve public problems or all of the above. The principles behind these practices embody and enable greater political equality.

This wave of experimentation has produced inspiring outcomes in cities all over the world, but it has been particularly productive in Brazil and other parts of the Global South, where engagement has been built into the way that many cities operate. In these places, it is increasingly clear that when people have a legitimate voice in the institutions that govern their communities, and when they have support through various kinds of social and political networks, their economic fortunes improve.

The best-documented cases come from cities in Brazil, where Participatory Budgeting and other forms of engagement have been built into a much more robust “civic infrastructure” than we have in most American cities. In other words, people in these places have a wider variety of ways to participate on a broader range of issues and decisions. Their chances for engagement include online opportunities as well as face-to-face meetings. Many are social events as much as political ones: people participate because they get to see their neighbors and feel like they are part of a community, in addition to being able to weigh in on a public decision.

In these cities, the gap between rich and poor has narrowed, much more so than in similar cities without vibrant local democracies. In addition, governments are more likely to complete planned projects; public finances are better managed and less prone to corruption; people exhibit increased trust in public institutions and are more likely to pay their taxes; public expenditures are more likely to benefit low-income people; public health outcomes, such as the rate of infant mortality, have improved; and poverty has been reduced.

The connection between democratic innovation and greater economic equity raises many questions ripe for research:….(More)”

Danish city uses sensor system to understand Christmas shoppers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “The success of a Christmas market or winterfete doesn’t always translate to money spent, it may simply increase foot traffic or visitor dwell time. Now, the Danish city of Aalborg is measuring exactly those quantities during its busy Christmas shopping period, using Bliptrack, the sensor system that detects devices that are using wifi.

aalborg-1-bliptrack-wifi-retail-smartcities

We have already seen Bliptrack used in JFK airport to let passengers know their wait times. Now, Aalborg City Business Association has installed the system in the city centre to track visitor behavior.

The system consists of a number of sensors placed around the city, which detect nearby wifi devices such as smartphones and tablets. As a pedestrian or car moves around from point to point, they are detected by each sensor. Each device has a unique MAC address, meaning the system is able to track the user’s journey and how long they took to get from one sensor to the next. Aalborg can then use the data collected to understand the impact of events, as well as visitors’ shopping activities. The insights can help them improve business operations such as opening at optimum hours and providing the right amount of staff….(More)”

Guffipedia: a dictionary of business jargon

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times: ” At this time of year, my mind naturally turns to guff. Every December I open the cupboard in which I store the worst examples of the year’s jargon and begin the search for winners of my annual Golden Flannel awards.

This year, as ever, the cupboard is stuffed with ugly words and phrases that people have written or spoken in 2015. To pick a few at random, there is “passionpreneur”. There is delta (to mean gap). There is to solutionize, to mindshare and even to role-model. All are new. All reach new linguisticlows….

To this end we have created Guffipedia, a repository for the terms that I’verailed at over the years. You will find previous years’ Golden Flannel winners with chapter-and-verse from me on why they are so ghastly (in case you are too steeped in the stuff to be able to work it out for yourself)….The point of Guffipedia is not just for you to admire the extent of my guff collection, but to help me curate it going forward, as they say in

The point of Guffipedia is not just for you to admire the extent of my guff collection, but to help me curate it going forward, as they say in Guffish.

I am urging you to submit horrible new words or phrases, to have a stab at translating them into serviceable English, and to state where you found them. You don’t need to name the perpetrator (though it would be nice if you did). “Heard in a lift” is fine — so long as it actually was. And if you get your entries in before the end of the year, they may end up winning a prize in my 2015 Golden Flannel awards, announced the first week inJanuary….See Guffipedia”

 

 

Big Data for Development: A Review of Promises and Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Martin Hilbert in the Development Policy Review: “The article uses a conceptual framework to review empirical evidence and some 180 articles related to the opportunities and threats of Big Data Analytics for international development. The advent of Big Data delivers a cost-effective prospect for improved decision-making in critical development areas such as healthcare, economic productivity and security. At the same time, the well-known caveats of the Big Data debate, such as privacy concerns and human resource scarcity, are aggravated in developing countries by long-standing structural shortages in the areas of infrastructure, economic resources and institutions. The result is a new kind of digital divide: a divide in the use of data-based knowledge to inform intelligent decision-making. The article systematically reviews several available policy options in terms of fostering opportunities and minimising risks…..(More)”

Smarter as the New Urban Agenda

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Gil-Garcia, J. Ramon, Pardo, Theresa A., Nam, Taewoo: “This book will provide one of the first comprehensive approaches to the study of smart city governments with theories and concepts for understanding and researching 21st century city governments innovative methodologies for the analysis and evaluation of smart city initiatives. The term “smart city” is now generally used to represent efforts that in different ways describe a comprehensive vision of a city for the present and future. A smarter city infuses information into its physical infrastructure to improve conveniences, facilitate mobility, add efficiencies, conserve energy, improve the quality of air and water, identify problems and fix them quickly, recover rapidly from disasters, collect data to make better decisions, deploy resources effectively and share data to enable collaboration across entities and domains. These and other similar efforts are expected to make cities more intelligent in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, transparency, and sustainability, among other important aspects. Given this changing social, institutional and technology environment, it seems feasible and likeable to attain smarter cities and by extension, smarter governments: virtually integrated, networked, interconnected, responsive, and efficient. This book will help build the bridge between sound research and practice expertise in the area of smarter cities and will be of interest to researchers and students in the e-government, public administration, political science, communication, information science, administrative sciences and management, sociology, computer science, and information technology. As well as government officials and public managers who will find practical recommendations based on rigorous studies that will contain insights and guidance for the development, management, and evaluation of complex smart cities and smart government initiatives….(More)”

Digilantism: An Analysis of Crowdsourcing and the Boston Marathon Bombings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Johnny Nhan et al: “This paper explores the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing incident and how members of the general public, through the online community Reddit, attempted to provide assistance to law enforcement through conducting their own parallel investigations. As we document through an analysis of user posts, Reddit members shared information about the investigation, searched for information that would identify the perpetrators and, in some cases, drew on their own expert knowledge to uncover clues concerning key aspects of the attack. Although it is the case that the Reddit cyber-sleuths’ did not ultimately solve this case, or provide significant assistance to the police investigation, their actions suggest the potential role the public could play within security networks….(More)”