Paper by Matteo Nebbiai: “This paper enlightens an understudied aspect of the application of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Right to Data Portability (RtDP), introducing a framework to analyse empirically the voluntary data portability standards adopted by various data controllers. The first section explains how the RtDP wording creates some “grey areas” that allow data controllers a broad interpretation of the right. Secondly, the paper shows why the regulatory initiatives affecting the interpretation of these “grey areas” can be framed as “regulatory standard-setting (RSS) schemes”, which are voluntary standards of behaviour settled either by private, public, or non-governmental actors. The empirical section reveals that in the EU, between 2000 and 2020, the number of such schemes increased every year and most of them were governed by private actors. Finally, the historical analysis highlights that the RtDP was introduced when many private-run RSS schemes were already operating, and no evidence suggests that the GDPR impacted significantly on their spread…(More)”.
Orientation Failure? Why Directionality Matters in Innovation Policy and Implementation
Blog by Mariam Tabatadze and Benjamin Kumpf: “…In the essay “The Moon and the Ghetto” from 1977, Richard Nelson brought renewed attention to the question of directionality of innovation. He asked why societies that are wealthy and technologically advanced are not able to deal effectively with social problems such as poverty or inequities in education. Nelson believed that politics are only a small part of the problem. The main challenge, according to him, was further advancing scientific and technological breakthroughs.
Since the late seventies, humanity has laid claim to many more significant technological and scientific achievements. However, challenges such as poverty, social inequalities and of course environmental degradation persist. This begs the question: is the main problem a lack of directionality?
The COVID-19 pandemic sparked renewed interest in mission-driven innovation in industrial and socio-economic policy (see below for a framing of missions and mission-oriented innovation). The focus is a continuation of a “normative turn” in national and supranational science, technology and innovation (STI) policies over the last 15 years.
The directionality of STI policies shifted from pursuing predominantly growth and competitiveness-related objectives to addressing societal challenges. It brings together elements of innovation policy – focused on economic growth – and transition policy, which seeks beneficial change for society at large. This is important as we are seeing increasingly more evidence on the negative effects of innovation in countries across the globe, from exacerbated inequalities between places to greater inequalities between income groups…(More)”.
Facial Recognition Goes to War
Kashmir Hill at the New York Times: “In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine and images of the devastation wrought there flooded the news, Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive of the facial recognition company Clearview AI, began thinking about how he could get involved.
He believed his company’s technology could offer clarity in complex situations in the war.
“I remember seeing videos of captured Russian soldiers and Russia claiming they were actors,” Mr. Ton-That said. “I thought if Ukrainians could use Clearview, they could get more information to verify their identities.”
In early March, he reached out to people who might help him contact the Ukrainian government. One of Clearview’s advisory board members, Lee Wolosky, a lawyer who has worked for the Biden administration, was meeting with Ukrainian officials and offered to deliver a message.
Mr. Ton-That drafted a letter explaining that his app “can instantly identify someone just from a photo” and that the police and federal agencies in the United States used it to solve crimes. That feature has brought Clearview scrutiny over concerns about privacy and questions about racism and other biases within artificial-intelligence systems.
The tool, which can identify a suspect caught on surveillance video, could be valuable to a country under attack, Mr. Ton-That wrote. He said the tool could identify people who might be spies, as well as deceased people, by comparing their faces against Clearview’s database of 20 billion faces from the public web, including from “Russian social sites such as VKontakte.”
Mr. Ton-That decided to offer Clearview’s services to Ukraine for free, as reported earlier by Reuters. Now, less than a month later, the New York-based Clearview has created more than 200 accounts for users at five Ukrainian government agencies, which have conducted more than 5,000 searches. Clearview has also translated its app into Ukrainian.
“It’s been an honor to help Ukraine,” said Mr. Ton-That, who provided emails from officials from three agencies in Ukraine, confirming that they had used the tool. It has identified dead soldiers and prisoners of war, as well as travelers in the country, confirming the names on their official IDs. The fear of spies and saboteurs in the country has led to heightened paranoia.
According to one email, Ukraine’s national police obtained two photos of dead Russian soldiers, which have been viewed by The New York Times, on March 21. One dead man had identifying patches on his uniform, but the other did not, so the ministry ran his face through Clearview’s app…(More)”.
The rise of the data steward
Article by Sarah Wray: “As data use and collaboration become more advanced, there is a need for a new profession within the public and private sectors, says Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer at New York University’s The GovLab. He calls this role the ‘data steward’ and is also seeking to expand existing definitions of the term.
While many cities, government organisations, and private sector companies have chief data officers and chief privacy officers, Verhulst says this new function is broader and necessary as more organisations begin to explore data collaborations which bring together data from various sources to solve problems for the public good.
Many cities, for instance, want to get more value and innovation from the open data they share, and are also increasingly partnering to benefit from private sector data on mobility, spending, and more.
Several examples highlight the challenges, though. There have been disputes about data-sharing and privacy, such as between Uber and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, while other initiatives have failed to gain traction. Copenhagen’s City Data Exchange facilitated the exchange of public and private data but was disbanded after it struggled to get enough data providers and users on the platform and to become financially sustainable.
Verhulst says that beyond ensuring the security and integrity of data, new skills required by data stewards include the ability to secure partnerships, adequately vet data partners and set up data-sharing agreements, as well as the capacity to steward data-sharing initiatives internally and obtain legal and executive buy-in. Data stewards should also develop financial models for data-sharing to ensure partnerships are sustainable over time.
“That’s quite often ignored,” says Verhulst. “It’s assumed that these things will pay for themselves. Well surprise, surprise, there are costs.”
In addition, there’s an important role for retaining an active focus on insights from data and problems to be solved. Many early open data efforts have taken a ‘build it and they will come’ approach, and usage at scale hasn’t always materialised.
A dynamic regulatory environment is also driving demand for new skills, says Verhulst, noting that the proposed EU Data Act indicates a mandate “to knock on the doors of the private sector [for data] in emergency contexts”.
“The question is: how do you go about that?” Verhulst comments. “Many organisations are going to have to figure this out.”
The GovLab is now running the third cohort of its training for data stewards, and the first focused in the Eastern Hemisphere.
The Developing a Data Reuse Strategy for Public Problems course is part of The GovLab’s Open Data Policy Lab, which is supported by Microsoft..(More)”.
Building Data Infrastructure in Development Contexts: Lessons from the Data4COVID19 Africa Challenge
Report by Stefaan Verhulst, Andrew Young, Andrew J. Zahuranec, Peter Martey Addo: “COVID-19 and other societal threats hamper the ability of development practitioners and stakeholders to address The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a number of unprecedented societal threats. While the effects of the crisis know no borders, the pandemic’s consequences have been felt in a particularly acute way in developing economies across the Global South. Indeed, while estimates of excess mortality show that many developing economies compare favorably to other parts of the world, the pandemic has still overburdened health systems and disrupted food supplies, increasing the risk of malnutrition. Economic estimates suggest that COVID-19 will reduce the GDP of African economies by 1.4 percent, with smaller economies facing contractions of up to 7.8 percent (Gondwe 2020).
Given that development agencies have limited resources to fight the effects of the pandemic, data can play an important role in bolstering decision-making processes. When data is available and used responsibly, it can generate important insights about what is happening, help organizations understand cause and effect, improve forecasting, and assess the impact of efforts (Verhulst et al. 2021). However, the major limiting factors are the amount of data and the expertise available in the ecosystem. These limitations are especially severe in least-developed countries, such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, datadriven challenges—short-term exercises where data and expertise is brought to bear on some pressing social challenge—can be useful tools for overcoming these limiting factors by, attracting data holders and practitioners to engage in rapid action to advance development goals…(More)”
Health Data Governance Principles
Principles prepared by Transform health: “Data-driven approaches are increasingly the norm or aspiration in the operation of health systems. The collection, processing, storage, analysis, use, sharing and disposal of health data has grown in complexity. This exponential increase in data use necessitates robust and equitable governance of health data. Countries and regions around the world are instituting health data governance policies and legislation. However, there is not yet a comprehensive, global set of principles to guide the governance of health data across public health systems and policies. The Health Data Governance Principles respond to that need.
The Principles are intended as a resource for, and have applicability to, a range of stakeholders involved in the collection and use of health data, including governments, the private sector, international organisations, civil society, among others. We encourage all stakeholders to endorse the Principles.
We want to see the Principles adopted by governments, technology companies, and other institutions responsible for collecting and managing health data…(More)”.
Researcher Helps Create Big Data ‘Early Alarm’ for Ukraine Abuses
Article by Chris Carroll: From searing images of civilians targeted by shelling to detailed accounts of sick children and their families fleeing nearby fighting to seek medical care, journalists have created a kaleidoscopic view of the suffering that has engulfed Ukraine since Russia invaded—but the news media can’t be everywhere.
Social media practically can be, however, and a University of Maryland researcher is part of a U.S.-Ukrainian multi-institutional team that’s harvesting data from Twitter and analyzing it with machine-learning algorithms. The result is a real-time system that provides a running account of what people in Ukraine are facing, constructed from their own accounts.
The project, Data for Ukraine, has been running for about three weeks, and has shown itself able to surface important events a few hours ahead of Western or even Ukrainian media sources. It focuses on four areas: humanitarian needs, displaced people, civilian resistance and human rights violations. In addition to simply showing spikes of credible tweets about certain subjects the team is tracking, the system also geolocates tweets—essentially mapping where events take place.
“It’s an early alarm system for human rights abuses,” said Ernesto Calvo, professor of government and politics and director of UMD’s Inter-Disciplinary Lab for Computational Social Science. “For it to work, we need to know two basic things: what is happening or being reported, and who is reporting those things.”
Calvo and his lab focus on the second of those two requirements, and constructed a “community detection” system to identify key nodes of Twitter users from which to use data. Other team members with expertise in Ukrainian society and politics spotted him a list of about 400 verified users who actively tweet on relevant topics. Then Calvo, who honed his approach analyzing social media from political and environmental crises in Latin America, and his team expanded and deepened the collection, drawing on connections and followers of the initial list so that millions of tweets per day now feed the system.
Nearly half of the captured tweets are in Ukrainian, 30% are in English and 20% are in Russian. Knowing who to exclude—accounts started the day before the invasion, for instance, or with few long-term connections—is key, Calvo said…(More)”.
DIGintegrity
A government‘s toolkit to disrupt corruption through data-based technologies.
Blog by Camilo Cetina: “The Lava Jato corruption scandal exposed a number of Brazilian government officers in 2016, including the then president of the Brazilian Chamber of Representatives, and further investigations have implicated other organisations in a way that reveals a worrying phenomenon worldwide: corruption is mutating into complex forms of organized crime.
For corruption networks to thrive and predate public funds, they need to capture government officers. Furthermore, the progressive digitalization of economies and telecommunications increases the potential of corruption networks to operate transnationally, which makes it easier to identify new cooperation mechanisms (for example, mobilizing illicit cash through a church) and accumulate huge profits thanks to transnational operations. This simultaneously increases their ability to reorganize and hide among huge amounts of data underlying the digital platforms used to mobilize money around the world.
However, at the same time, data-based technologies can significantly contribute as a response to the challenges revealed by recent corruption cases such as Lava Jato, Odebrecht, the Panama Papers or the Pandora Papers. The new report DIGIntegrity, the executive summary of which was recently published by CAF — Development Bank of Latin America, highlights how anti-corruption policies can become more effective when they target specific datasets which then are reused through digital platforms to prevent, detect and investigate corruption networks.
The report explains how the growing digitalization accompanied by the globalization of the economy is having a twofold effect on governments’ integrity agendas. On the one hand, globalization and technology provide unprecedented opportunities for corruption to grow, thus facilitating the concealment of illicit flows of money, and hindering jurisdictional capacities for detection and punishment. But, on the other hand, systemic improvements in governance and collective action are being achieved thanks to new technologies that help provide automated services and make public management processes more visible through open data and increasingly public records. There are “integrity dividends” derived from the growing digitization of governments and the increasingly intensive use of data intelligence to prevent corruption….(More).”
Internet poverty: The next frontier in development
Article by Jesús Crespo Cuaresma, Katharina Fenz, Marianne Nari Fisher, Homi Kharas: “…people today also need to access a minimum package of internet services as part of basic human needs. To expand on the traditional method of poverty measurement, researchers at World Data Lab have identified and costed a “minimum internet basket,” which combines measures of quantity, quality, and affordability based on consultations with the Alliance for Affordable Internet, Ookla, and GSMA.
Under this expanded definition (see below image), a person is considered internet poor if s/he cannot afford a minimum quantity (1 GB) and quality (10 Mbps download speed) of internet services without spending more than 10 percent of his or her disposable income on these services. This minimum package of internet services would allow a person to fulfill basic needs, such as accessing emails, reading the news, or using government e-services. The core methodology of internet poverty was initially presented in mid-2021 and has undergone additional enhancements to identify the number of internet poor in almost all countries.
World Data Lab’s just-launched Internet Poverty Index can now adjust the actual cost of internet services in every country to estimate what a standard mobile internet package of 1 GB at 10 MB/second would cost in that country. It then computes how many people in the country could afford such a package. If the cost of the standardized package is above 10 percent of a person’s total spending, the person is considered internet poor. This allows us to create global estimates and share the number of people living in internet poverty globally, with disaggregations available by gender.
As with the $1.90 threshold of extreme poverty, the key value added of the approach is not the threshold itself but its consistent measurement across countries and over time. There can be a legitimate discussion about the minimum package, just as there are now suggestions that higher poverty lines be used in lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries. For now, however, we use the same package in all countries, which would correspond roughly to $6 per month ($0.19/day; 2011 PPP)…(More)”
Democracy Report 2022: Autocratization Changing Nature?
Report by Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem): “This Democracy Report documents several signs that autocratization is changing nature. With five military coups and one self-coup, 2021 featured an increase in coups unprecedented over the past two decades. These coups contributed to driving the uptick in the number of closed autocracies. They also seem to signal a shift toward emboldened actors, given the previous decline in coups during the 21st century.
Polarization and government misinformation are also increasing. These trends are interconnected. Polarized publics are more likely to demonize political opponents and distrust information from diverse sources, and mobilization shifts as a result. The increase in misinformation and polarization further signals what may prove to be a changing nature of autocratization in the world today. We discuss this shift in detail in the third part of the report: “Autocratization Changing Nature?”.
Another sign of emboldened political leaders is the increasing number of countries where critical, formal aspects of democracy are eroding. The autonomy of institutions such as Election Management Bodies (EMBs) are now attacked and undermined in many autocratzing countries alongside the judiciary and the legislature. This year’s Democracy Report documents such changes.
The Democracy Report 2022 is published along with version 12 of the V-Dem dataset. The dataset is produced by the worldwide V-Dem collaboration and is based on assessments by over 3,700 experts from more than 180 countries, resulting in over 30 million data points. The Democracy Report 2022 is authored by a team at the V-Dem Institute, and we alone are accountable for its contents.
The Democracy Report 2022 analyzes the evidence from three perspectives. The first part examines the state of the world in 2021 based on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) and the Regimes of the World (RoW) Index. The second part of the report focuses on countries that are in a process of changing. The third part presents data on coups, polarization, and disinformation, all of which signal that the fundamental dynamics of the current wave of autocratization may be changing.
In summary: The worldwide wave of autocratization is deepening, engulfing more countries, and seems to be changing nature…(More)”.