Big Data Privacy Scenarios

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

E. Bruce, K. Sollins, M. Vernon, and D. Weitzner at D-Space@MIT: “This paper is the first in a series on privacy in Big Data. As an outgrowth of a series of workshops on the topic, the Big Data Privacy Working Group undertook a study of a series of use scenarios to highlight the challenges to privacy that arise in the Big Data arena. This is a report on those scenarios. The deeper question explored by this exercise is what is distinctive about privacy in the context of Big Data. In addition, we discuss an initial list of issues for privacy that derive specifically from the nature of Big Data. These derive from observations across the real world scenarios and use cases explored in this project as well as wider reading and discussions:

* Scale: The sheer size of the datasets leads to challenges in creating, managing and applying privacy policies.

* Diversity: The increased likelihood of more and more diverse participants in Big Data collection, management, and use, leads to differing agendas and objectives. By nature, this is likely to lead to contradictory agendas and objectives.

* Integration: With increased data management technologies (e.g. cloud services, data lakes, and so forth), integration across datasets, with new and often surprising opportunities for cross-product inferences, will also come new information about individuals and their behaviors.

* Impact on secondary participants: Because many pieces of information are reflective of not only the targeted subject, but secondary, often unattended, participants, the inferences and resulting information will increasingly be reflective of other people, not originally considered as the subject of privacy concerns and approaches.

* Need for emergent policies for emergent information: As inferences over merged data sets occur, emergent information or understanding will occur.

Although each unique data set may have existing privacy policies and enforcement mechanisms, it is not clear that it is possible to develop the requisite and appropriate emerged privacy policies and appropriate enforcement of them automatically…(More)”

The multiple meanings of open government data: Understanding different stakeholders and their perspectives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Felipe Gonzalez-Zapata, and Richard Heeks in Government Information Quarterly: “As a field of practice and research that is fast-growing and a locus for much attention and activity, open government data (OGD) has attracted stakeholders from a variety of origins. They bring with them a variety of meanings for OGD. The purpose of this paper is to show how the different stakeholders and their different perspectives on OGD can be analyzed in a given context. Taking Chile as an OGD exemplar, stakeholder analysis is used to identify and categorize stakeholder groups in terms of their relative power and interest as either primary (in this case, politicians, public officials, public sector practitioners, international organizations) or secondary (civil society activists, funding donors, ICT providers, academics). Stakeholder groups sometimes associated with OGD but absent from significant involvement in Chile – such as private sector- and citizen-users – are also identified.

Four different perspectives on open government data – bureaucratic, political, technological, and economic – are identified from a literature review. Template analysis is used to analyze text – OGD-related reports, conference presentations, and interviews in Chile – in terms of those perspectives. This shows bureaucratic and political perspectives to be more dominant than the other two, and also some presence for a politico-economic perspective not identified from the original literature review. The information value chain is used to identify a “missing middle” in current Chilean OGD perspectives: a lack of connection between a reality of data provision and an aspiration of developmental results. This pattern of perspectives can be explained by the capacities and interests of key stakeholders, with those in turn being shaped by Chile’s history, politics, and institutions….(More)”

A matter of public trust: measuring how government performs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gai Brodtmann at the Sydney Morning Herald:”…Getting trust is hard. Losing it is easy. And the work of maintaining trust in our democracy, and the public institutions it rests on, is constant, quiet and careful.

That trust is built on accountability and transparency. It relies on an assurance that government programs are well managed and delivered efficiently and effectively to give the best results for Australians.

And it demands impartial adjudicators to provide that assurance.

The first is getting the metrics, the key performance indicators, right. The indicators should be a fundamental way of judging whether a program is being implemented effectively and achieving its aims. If significant variations from expected performance are observed, it’s a sure sign that closer examination of the program is needed.

A lot of effort has gone into indicators in recent years. Progress has been made, but everyone recognises the issue is complex. Establishing meaningful indicators, which are aligned across and up and down agencies, and become business as usual, is not easy. And it cannot be done independently of other public sector reform.

Cultural change is inevitably at the heart of all these discussions and two aspects of that strike me. The first is risk-aversion. The second is the silo problem.

A crucial challenge in overcoming a too-timid approach to doing business is that we do not, on the whole, have incentives in the system that encourage taking risks. In fact, many of the incentives do the opposite….

But a more balanced risk-management culture will only germinate if both the government and the Parliament – including its committees – change their ways to recognise that innovative policy design and complex program implementation needs to embrace risk to be successful.

The second aspect of cultural change is the problem of too many silos. Perhaps, in some simpler past, public service agencies could generally operate with exclusive rights and functions within their own well-defined boundaries. But as social and economic challenges become more complex, this isn’t feasible.

Modern government in Australia is still coming to grips with this new imperative. Programs often involve multi-agency collaboration across jurisdictions, where the boundaries are well and truly crossed both within jurisdictions and across them. Unsurprisingly, ensuring a consistent approach and assessing outcomes has been difficult to achieve.

Collaboration between different entities is not strange to the private sector. One lesson we can draw is that, in collaborations, it is important to have a clear line of authority and control….(More)”

New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Alex Nicholls, Julie Simon, Madeleine Gabriel: “Interest in social innovation continues to rise, from governments setting up social innovation ‘labs’ to large corporations developing social innovation strategies. Yet theory lags behind practice, and this hampers our ability to understand social innovation and make the most of its potential. This collection brings together work by leading social innovation researchers globally, exploring the practice and process of researching social innovation, its nature and effects. Combining theoretical chapters and empirical studies, it shows how social innovation is blurring traditional boundaries between the market, the state and civil society, thereby developing new forms of services, relationships and collaborations. It takes a critical perspective, analyzing potential downsides of social innovation that often remain unexplored or are glossed over, yet concludes with a powerful vision of the potential for social innovation to transform society. It aims to be a valuable resource for students and researchers, as well as policymakers and others supporting and leading social innovation….(More)”

Would you use Yelp if you couldn’t see other people’s comments?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Renee Ho at Feedback Labs: “Earlier this year, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a leading humanitarian organization, launched a feedback tool IRC Service Info for the over 1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. According to IRC, “Service Info is designed to be used by service providers to coordinate and increase responsiveness, and by service users to find and provide feedback on the services relevant to them.”

At first glance, it looked as though IRC Service Info would function a lot like Yelp, a commercial website that allows users to comment and leave feedback on small businesses—restaurants, hair salons, cafes— and now, even on US federal government agencies.

People can use IRC Service Info using a computer or mobile device. The website is in English, French, and Arabic. For individuals without online access or who prefer using a phone, they can also call to provide feedback to particular services.

Photo Credit: IRC Service Info

This could be an exciting platform to increase the role of constituent feedback in humanitarian aid.

After spending some time on the website (toggling between the different languages), I noticed something that made it very different from Yelp. I didn’t see any user reviews despite this being an explicit goal of the project….(More)”

Uber wants you to change the world without leaving home

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney at the Financial Times: “Another day, another petition. The latest pinging into my email is from Uber, the minicab app…..To their supporters, online petitions are like Uber itself, harnessing the disruptive power of technology to shake up public life. In 2011, the campaign group 38 Degrees (motto: “People, Power, Change”) helped derail UK government plans to sell off national forests with a petition of over 500,000 names. In 2013, a 36,000-strong call to get portraits of women on to British banknotes resulted in Jane Austen’s ascendancy to a forthcoming £10 note.

But e-petitions have become victims of their own success. The numbers they generate are so large that they have created a kind of arms race of popularity…..Despite their high-tech trappings, e-petitions are an essentially feudal mechanism for raising popular grievances. They are an act of supplication, an entreaty made to a higher authority. In a modern democracy, the true megaphone for expressing the popular will is the vote. Yet the way votes are cast in the UK is locked in a bizarre time warp.

Although we spend increasing amounts of our lives online, the idea of emailing or texting our votes is mired in specious fears of electoral fraud. Meanwhile, one-third of eligible voters do not take part in general elections and almost two-thirds ignore local elections….(More)”

 

 

Digital Research Confidential

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Eszter Hargittai and Christian Sandvig: “The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected. Digital Research Confidentialoffers scholars a chance to learn from their fellow researchers’ mistakes—and their successes.

The book—a follow-up to Eszter Hargittai’s widely read Research Confidential—presents behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts stories of digital research projects, written by established and rising scholars. They discuss such challenges as archiving, Web crawling, crowdsourcing, and confidentiality. They do not shrink from specifics, describing such research hiccups as an ethnographic interview so emotionally draining that afterward the researcher retreated to a bathroom to cry, and the seemingly simple research question about Wikipedia that mushroomed into years of work on millions of data points. Digital Research Confidential will be an essential resource for scholars in every field….(More)”

Open collaboration in the public sector: The case of social coding on GitHub

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ines Mergel at Government Information Quarterly: “Open collaboration has evolved as a new form of innovation creation in the public sector. Government organizations are using online platforms to collaborative create or contribute to public sector innovations with the help of external and internal problem solvers. Most recently the U.S. federal government has encouraged agencies to collaboratively create and share open source code on the social coding platform GitHub and allow third parties to share their changes to the code. A community of government employees is using the social coding site GitHub to share open source code for software and website development, distribution of data sets and research results, or to seek input to draft policy documents. Quantitative data extracted from GitHub’s application programming interface is used to analyze the collaboration ties between contributors to government repositories and their reuse of digital products developed on GitHub by other government entities in the U.S. federal government. In addition, qualitative interviews with government contributors in this social coding environment provide insights into new forms of co-development of open source digital products in the public sector….(More)”

Open Data Charter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

International Open Data Charter: “Open data sits at the heart of a global movement with the potential to generate significant social and economic benefits around the world. Through the articulation and adoption of common principles in support of open data, governments can work towards enabling more just, and prosperous societies.

In July 2013, G8 leaders signed the G8 Open Data Charter, which outlined a set of five core open data principles. Many nations and open government advocates welcomed the G8 Charter, but there was a general sense that the principles could be refined and improved to support broader global adoption of open data principles. In the months following, a number of multinational groups initiated their own activities to establish more inclusive and representative open data principles, including the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) Open Data Working Group….

During 2015, open data experts from governments, multilateral organizations, civil society and private sector, worked together to develop an international Open Data Charter, with six principles for the release of data:

  1. Open by Default;
  2. Timely and Comprehensive;
  3. Accessible and Useable;
  4. Comparable and Interoperable;
  5. For Improved Governance and Citizen Engagement; and
  6. For Inclusive Development and Innovation….

Next Steps

  1. Promote adoption of the Charter.
  2. Continue to bring together a diverse, inclusive group of stakeholders to engage in the process of adoption of the international Open Data Charter.
  3. Develop a governance model for the ongoing management of the Charter, setting out the roles and responsibilities of a Charter partnership, and its working groups in the process of developing supporting resources, consultations, promotion, adoption, and oversight.
  4. Continue development of and consultation on supporting Charter guides, documents and tools, which will be brought together in a searchable, online Resource Centre. ..(More)”

 

What we can learn from the failure of Google Flu Trends

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Lazer and Ryan Kennedy at Wired: “….The issue of using big data for the common good is far more general than Google—which deserves credit, after all, for offering the occasional peek at their data. These records exist because of a compact between individual consumers and the corporation. The legalese of that compact is typically obscure (how many people carefully read terms and conditions?), but the essential bargain is that the individual gets some service, and the corporation gets some data.

What is left out that bargain is the public interest. Corporations and consumers are part of a broader society, and many of these big data archives offer insights that could benefit us all. As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has said, “We must remember that technology remains a tool of humanity.” How can we, and corporate giants, then use these big data archives as a tool to serve humanity?

Google’s sequel to GFT, done right, could serve as a model for collaboration around big data for the public good. Google is making flu-related search data available to the CDC as well as select research groups. A key question going forward will be whether Google works with these groups to improve the methodology underlying GFT. Future versions should, for example, continually update the fit of the data to flu prevalence—otherwise, the value of the data stream will rapidly decay.

This is just an example, however, of the general challenge of how to build models of collaboration amongst industry, government, academics, and general do-gooders to use big data archives to produce insights for the public good. This came to the fore with the struggle (and delay) for finding a way to appropriately share mobile phone data in west Africa during the Ebola epidemic (mobile phone data are likely the best tool for understanding human—and thus Ebola—movement). Companies need to develop efforts to share data for the public good in a fashion that respects individual privacy.

There is not going to be a single solution to this issue, but for starters, we are pushing for a “big data” repository in Boston to allow holders of sensitive big data to share those collections with researchers while keeping them totally secure. The UN has its Global Pulse initiative, setting up collaborative data repositories around the world. Flowminder, based in Sweden, is a nonprofit dedicated to gathering mobile phone data that could help in response to disasters. But these are still small, incipient, and fragile efforts.

The question going forward now is how build on and strengthen these efforts, while still guarding the privacy of individuals and the proprietary interests of the holders of big data….(More)”