Privacy-Preserved Data Sharing for Evidence-Based Policy Decisions: A Demonstration Project Using Human Services Administrative Records for Evidence-Building Activities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the Bipartisan Policy Center: “Emerging privacy-preserving technologies and approaches hold considerable promise for improving data privacy and confidentiality in the 21st century. At the same time, more information is becoming accessible to support evidence-based policymaking.

In 2017, the U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking unanimously recommended that further attention be given to the deployment of privacy-preserving data-sharing applications. If these types of applications can be tested and scaled in the near-term, they could vastly improve insights about important policy problems by using disparate datasets. At the same time, the approaches could promote substantial gains in privacy for the American public.

There are numerous ways to engage in privacy-preserving data sharing. This paper primarily focuses on secure computation, which allows information to be accessed securely, guarantees privacy, and permits analysis without making private information available. Three key issues motivated the launch of a domestic secure computation demonstration project using real government-collected data:

  • Using new privacy-preserving approaches addresses pressing needs in society. Current widely accepted approaches to managing privacy risks—like preventing the identification of individuals or organizations in public datasets—will become less effective over time. While there are many practices currently in use to keep government-collected data confidential, they do not often incorporate modern developments in computer science, mathematics, and statistics in a timely way. New approaches can enable researchers to combine datasets to improve the capability for insights, without being impeded by traditional concerns about bringing large, identifiable datasets together. In fact, if successful, traditional approaches to combining data for analysis may not be as necessary.
  • There are emerging technical applications to deploy certain privacy-preserving approaches in targeted settings. These emerging procedures are increasingly enabling larger-scale testing of privacy-preserving approaches across a variety of policy domains, governmental jurisdictions, and agency settings to demonstrate the privacy guarantees that accompany data access and use.
  • Widespread adoption and use by public administrators will only follow meaningful and successful demonstration projects. For example, secure computation approaches are complex and can be difficult to understand for those unfamiliar with their potential. Implementing new privacy-preserving approaches will require thoughtful attention to public policy implications, public opinions, legal restrictions, and other administrative limitations that vary by agency and governmental entity.

This project used real-world government data to illustrate the applicability of secure computation compared to the classic data infrastructure available to some local governments. The project took place in a domestic, non-intelligence setting to increase the salience of potential lessons for public agencies….(More)”.

Fearful of fake news blitz, U.S. Census enlists help of tech giants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nick Brown at Reuters: “The U.S. Census Bureau has asked tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter to help it fend off “fake news” campaigns it fears could disrupt the upcoming 2020 count, according to Census officials and multiple sources briefed on the matter.

The push, the details of which have not been previously reported, follows warnings from data and cybersecurity experts dating back to 2016 that right-wing groups and foreign actors may borrow the “fake news” playbook from the last presidential election to dissuade immigrants from participating in the decennial count, the officials and sources told Reuters.

The sources, who asked not to be named, said evidence included increasing chatter on platforms like “4chan” by domestic and foreign networks keen to undermine the survey. The census, they said, is a powerful target because it shapes U.S. election districts and the allocation of more than $800 billion a year in federal spending.

Ron Jarmin, the Deputy Director of the Census Bureau, confirmed the bureau was anticipating disinformation campaigns, and was enlisting the help of big tech companies to fend off the threat.

“We expect that (the census) will be a target for those sorts of efforts in 2020,” he said.

Census Bureau officials have held multiple meetings with tech companies since 2017 to discuss ways they could help, including as recently as last week, Jarmin said.

So far, the bureau has gotten initial commitments from Alphabet Inc’s Google, Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc to help quash disinformation campaigns online, according to documents summarizing some of those meetings reviewed by Reuters.

But neither Census nor the companies have said how advanced any of the efforts are….(More)”.

Negotiating with the future: incorporating imaginary future generations into negotiations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Yoshio Kamijo et al: “People to be born in the future have no direct
influence on current affairs. Given the disconnect between people who are currently living and those who will inherit the planet left for them, individuals who are currently alive tend to be more oriented toward the present, posing a fundamental problem related to sustainability.

In this study, we propose a new framework for reconciling the disconnect between the present and the future whereby some individuals in the current generation serve as an imaginary future generation that negotiates with individuals in the real-world present. Through a laboratory-controlled intergenerational sustainability dilemma game (ISDG), we show how the presence of negotiators for a future generation increases the benefits of future generations. More specifically, we found that when faced with members of an imaginary future generation, 60% of participants selected
an option that promoted sustainability. In contrast, when the imaginary future generation was not salient, only 28% of participants chose the sustainable option…(More)”.

Big Data in the U.S. Consumer Price Index: Experiences & Plans

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Crystal G. Konny, Brendan K. Williams, and David M. Friedman: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has generally relied on its own sample surveys to collect the price and expenditure information necessary to produce the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The burgeoning availability of big data has created a proliferation of information that could lead to methodological improvements and cost savings in the CPI. The BLS has undertaken several pilot projects in an attempt to supplement and/or replace its traditional field collection of price data with alternative sources. In addition to cost reductions, these projects have demonstrated the potential to expand sample size, reduce respondent burden, obtain transaction prices more consistently, and improve price index estimation by incorporating real-time expenditure information—a foundational component of price index theory that has not been practical until now. In CPI, we use the term alternative data to refer to any data not collected through traditional field collection procedures by CPI staff, including third party datasets, corporate data, and data collected through web scraping or retailer API’s. We review how the CPI program is adapting to work with alternative data, followed by discussion of the three main sources of alternative data under consideration by the CPI with a description of research and other steps taken to date for each source. We conclude with some words about future plans… (More)”.

The Dilemmas of Wonderland: Decisions in the Age of Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Yakov Ben-Haim: “Innovations create both opportunities and dilemmas. They provide new and supposedly better opportunities, but — because of their newness — they are often more uncertain and potentially worse than existing options. Recent inventions and discoveries include new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys and new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances and many other discoveries and inventions.

Is it better to use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That dilemma faces just about everybody. The paradigm of the innovation dilemma characterizes many situations, even when a new technology is not actually involved. The dilemma arises from new attitudes, like individual responsibility for the global environment, or new social conceptions, like global allegiance and self-identity transcending nation-states. These dilemmas have far-reaching implications for individuals, organizations, and society at large as they make decisions in the age of innovation. The uncritical belief in outcome-optimization — “more is better, so most is best” — pervades decision-making in all domains, but is often irresponsible when facing the uncertainties of innovation. 

There is a great need for practical conceptual tools for understanding and managing the dilemmas of innovation. This book offers a new direction for a wide audience. It discusses examples from many fields, including e-reading, bipolar disorder and pregnancy, disruptive technology in industry, stock markets, agricultural productivity and world hunger, military hardware, military intelligence, biological conservation, on-line learning, and more….(More)”.

The global South is changing how knowledge is made, shared and used

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert Morrell at The Conversation: “Globalisation and new technology have changed the ways that knowledge is made, disseminated and consumed. At the push of a button, one can find articles or sources from all over the world. Yet the global knowledge economy is still marked by its history.

The former colonial nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the rich countries of Europe and North America which are collectively called the global North (normally considered to include the West and the first world, the North contains a quarter of the world’s population but controls 80% of income earned) – are still central in the knowledge economy. But the story is not one simply of Northern dominance. A process of making knowledge in the South is underway.

European colonisers encountered many sophisticated and complex knowledge systems among the colonised. These had their own intellectual workforces, their own environmental, geographical, historical and medical sciences. They also had their own means of developing knowledge. Sometimes the colonisers tried to obliterate these knowledges.

In other instances colonisers appropriated local knowledge, for instance in agriculture, fisheries and mining. Sometimes they recognised and even honoured other knowledge systems and intellectuals. This was the case among some of the British in India, and was the early form of “Orientalism”, the study of people and cultures from the East.

In the past few decades, there’s been more critique of global knowledge inequalities and the global North’s dominance. There have also been shifts in knowledge production patterns; some newer disciplines have stepped away from old patterns of inequality.

These issues are examined in a new book, Knowledge and Global Power: Making new sciences in the South (published by Wits University Press), which I co-authored with Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell and Joao Maia. The focus is especially on those areas where old patterns are not being replicated, so the study chooses climate change, gender and HIV and AIDS as three new areas of knowledge production in which new voices from the South might be prominent….(More)”.

Beyond opinion classification: Extracting facts, opinions and experiences from health forums

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz et al in PLOS-ONE: “Surveys indicate that patients, particularly those suffering from chronic conditions, strongly benefit from the information found in social networks and online forums. One challenge in accessing online health information is to differentiate between factual and more subjective information. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of exploiting lexical, syntactic, semantic, network-based and emotional properties of texts to automatically classify patient-generated contents into three types: “experiences”, “facts” and “opinions”, using machine learning algorithms. In this context, our goal is to develop automatic methods that will make online health information more easily accessible and useful for patients, professionals and researchers….

We work with a set of 3000 posts to online health forums in breast cancer, morbus crohn and different allergies. Each sentence in a post is manually labeled as “experience”, “fact” or “opinion”. Using this data, we train a support vector machine algorithm to perform classification. The results are evaluated in a 10-fold cross validation procedure.

Overall, we find that it is possible to predict the type of information contained in a forum post with a very high accuracy (over 80 percent) using simple text representations such as word embeddings and bags of words. We also analyze more complex features such as those based on the network properties, the polarity of words and the verbal tense of the sentences and show that, when combined with the previous ones, they can boost the results….(More)”.

What you don’t know about your health data will make you sick

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeanette Beebe at Fast Company: “Every time you shuffle through a line at the pharmacy, every time you try to get comfortable in those awkward doctor’s office chairs, every time you scroll through the web while you’re put on hold with a question about your medical bill, take a second to think about the person ahead of you and behind you.

Chances are, at least one of you is being monitored by a third party like data analytics giant Optum, which is owned by UnitedHealth Group, Inc. Since 1993, it’s captured medical data—lab results, diagnoses, prescriptions, and more—from 150 million Americans. That’s almost half of the U.S. population.

“They’re the ones that are tapping the data. They’re in there. I can’t remove them from my own health insurance contracts. So I’m stuck. It’s just part of the system,” says Joel Winston, an attorney who specializes in privacy and data protection law.

Healthcare providers can legally sell their data to a now-dizzyingly vast spread of companies, who can use it to make decisions, from designing new drugs to pricing your insurance rates to developing highly targeted advertising.

It’s written in the fine print: You don’t own your medical records. Well, except if you live in New Hampshire. It’s the only state that mandates its residents own their medical data. In 21 states, the law explicitly says that healthcare providers own these records, not patients. In the rest of the country, it’s up in the air.

Every time you visit a doctor or a pharmacy, your record grows. The details can be colorful: Using sources like Milliman’s IntelliScript and ExamOne’s ScriptCheck, a fuller picture of you emerges. Your interactions with the health are system, your medical payments, your prescription drug purchase history. And the market for the data is surging.

Its buyers and sharers—pharma giants, insurers, credit reporting agencies, and other data-hungry companies or “fourth parties” (like Facebook)—say that these massive health data sets can improve healthcare delivery and fuel advances in so-called “precision medicine.”

Still, this glut of health data has raised alarms among privacy advocates, who say many consumers are in the dark about how much of their health-related info is being gathered and mined….

Gardner predicted that traditional health data systems—electronic health records and electronic medical records—are less than ideal, given the “rigidity of the vendors and the products” and the way our data is owned and secured. Don’t count on them being around much longer, she said, “beyond the next few years.”

The future, Gardner suggested, is a system that runs on blockchain, which she defined for the committee as “basically a secure, visible, irrefutable ledger of transactions and ownership.” Still, a recent analysis of over 150 white papers revealed most healthcare blockchain projects “fall somewhere between half-baked and overly optimistic.”

As larger companies like IBM sign on, the technology may be edging closer to reality. Last year, Proof Work outlined a HIPAA-compliant system that manages patients’ medical histories over time, from acute care in the hospital to preventative checkups. The goal is to give these records to patients on their phones, and to create a “democratized ecosystem” to solve interoperability between patients, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and researchers. Similar proposals from blockchain-focused startups like Health Bank and Humanity.co would help patients store and share their health information securely—and sell it to researchers, too….(More)”.

Technology and political will can create better governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Darshana Narayanan at The Economist: “Current forms of democracy exclude most people from political decision-making. We elect representatives and participate in the occasional referendums, but we mainly remain on the outside. The result is that a handful of people in power dictate what ought to be collective decisions. What we have now is hardly a democracy, or at least, not a democracy that we should settle for.

To design a truer form of democracy—that is, fair representation and an outcome determined by a plurality—we might draw some lessons from the collective behaviour of other social animals: schools of fish, for example. Schooling fish self-organise for the benefit of the group and are rarely in a fracas. Individuals in the group may not be associated and yet they reach consensus. A study in 2011 led by Iain Couzin found that “uninformed” fish—in that case, ones that had not been trained to have a preference to move towards a particular target—can dilute the influence of a powerful minority group which did have such preferences. 

Of course fish are not the same as humans. But that study does suggest a way of thinking about decision-making. Instead of limiting influence to experts and strongly motivated interest groups, we should actively work to broaden participation to ensure that we include people lacking strong preferences or prior knowledge of an issue. In other words, we need to go against the ingrained thinking that non-experts should be excluded from decision-making. Inclusivity might just improve our chances of reaching a real, democratic consensus.

How can our political institutions facilitate this? In my work over the past several years I have tried to apply findings from behavioural science into institutions and into code to create better systems of governance. In the course of my work, I have found some promising experiments taking place around the world that harness new digital tools. They point the way to how democracy can be practiced in the 21st century….(More)”.

The Referendum and Other Essays on Constitutional Politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Matt Qvortrup: “Until recently, referendums were little used. After the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums, they have come to the fore as a mechanism with the potential to disrupt the status quo and radically change political direction. This book looks at the historical development of the referendum, its use in different jurisdictions, and the types of constitutional questions it seeks to address. Written in an engaging style, the book offers a clear, objective overview of this important political and constitutional tool….(More)”.