Ethical questions in data journalism and the power of online discussion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Craig, Stan Ketterer and Mohammad Yousuf at Data Driven Journalism: “One common element uniting data journalism projects, across different stories and locations, is the ethical challenges they present.

As scholars and practitioners of data journalism have pointed out, main issues include flawed data, misrepresentation from a lack of context, and privacy concerns. Contributors have discussed the ethics of data journalism on this site in posts about topics such as the use of pervasive data, transparency about editorial processes in computational journalism, and best practices for doing data journalism ethically.

Our research project looked at similar ethical challenges by examining journalists’ discussion of the controversial handling of publicly accessible gun permit data in two communities in the United States. The cases are not new now, but the issues they raise persist and point to opportunities – both to learn from online discussion of ethical issues and to ask a wide range of ethical questions about data journalism

The cases

Less than two weeks after the 2012 shooting deaths of 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a journalist at The Journal News in White Plains, New York, wrote a story about the possible expansion of publicly accessible gun permit data. The article was accompanied by three online maps with the locations of gun permit holders. The clickable maps of a two-county area in the New York suburbs also included the names and addresses of the gun permit holders. The detailed maps with personal information prompted a public outcry both locally and nationally, mainly involving privacy and safety concerns, and were subsequently taken down.

Although the 2012 case prompted the greatest attention, another New York newspaper reporter’s Freedom of Information request for a gun permit database for three counties sparked an earlier public outcry in 2008. The Glen Falls Post-Star’s editor published an editorial in response. “We here at The Post-Star find ourselves in the unusual position of responding to the concerns of our readers about something that has not even been published in our newspaper or Web site,” the editorial began. The editor said the request “drew great concern from members of gun clubs and people with gun permits in general, a concern we totally understand.”

Both of these cases prompted discussion among journalists, including participants in NICAR-L, the listserv of the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, whose subscribers include data journalists from major news organizations in the United States and around the world. Our study examined the content of three discussion threads with a total of 119 posts that focused mainly on ethical issues.

Key ethical issues

Several broad ethical issues, and specific themes related to those issues, appeared in the discussion.

1. Freedom versus responsibility and journalistic purpose..

2. Privacy and verification..

3. Consequences..

….(More)”

See also: David Craig, Stan Ketterer and Mohammad Yousuf, “To Post or Not to Post: Online Discussion of Gun Permit Mapping and the Development of Ethical Standards in Data Journalism,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

Hacking the Holocaust: Remembering the data pirates, forgers, and social engineers who saved thousands.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Ava Ex Machina: “…Within the tech industry in particular, we work every day to build systems that ingest more and more of our personal information that while it might be used to sell us products, can also increasingly be used to index and endanger our most vulnerable communities. Software engineers are often unaware of how the systems they build and maintain can either help us live better lives, or be used to commit repeats of history’s most horrifying atrocities. But as Holocaust history also shows us, engineers and hackers can use their skills to take direct action too.

During that same Nazi-punching era of WWII, ordinary people used their abilities and access to proprietary systems, data, and information security knowledge to refuse to be complacent, and instead sabotage the Axis to save lives. It’s my hope that sharing some stories of those who “hacked” the systems that were meant to execute the atrocities of the Holocaust will help us remember that there are always more ways to resist.

René Carmille — was a punch card computer expert and comptroller general of the French Army, who later would head up the Demographics Department of the French National Statistics Service. As quickly as IBM worked with the Nazis to enable them to use their punch card computer systems to update census data to find and round up Jewish citizens, Rene and his team of double-agents worked just as fast to manipulate their data to undermine their efforts.

The IEEE newspaper, The Institute, describes Carmille as being an early ethical hacker: “Over the course of two years, Carmille and his group purposely delayed the process by mishandling the punch cards. He also hacked his own machines, reprogramming them so that they’d never punch information from Column 11 [which indicated religion] onto any census card.” His work to identify and build in this exploit saved thousands of Jews from being rounded up and deported to death camps….(More)”.

Who governs or how they govern: Testing the impact of democracy, ideology and globalization on the well being of the poor

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eunyoung Ha and Nicholas L.Cain in The Social Science Journal: “This paper examines the effects of regime type, government ideology and economic globalization on poverty in low- and middle-income countries around the world. We use panel regression to estimate the effect of these explanatory variables on two different response variables: national poverty gap (104 countries from 1981 to 2005) and child mortality rate (132 countries from 1976 to 2005). We find consistent and significant results for the interactive effect of democracy and government ideology: strong leftist power under a democratic regime is associated with a reduction in both the poverty gap and the child mortality rate. Democracy, on its own, is associated with a lower child mortality rate, but has no effect on the poverty gap. Leftist power under a non-democratic regime is associated with an increase in both poverty measures. Trade reduces both measures of poverty. Foreign direct investment has a weak and positive effect on the poverty gap. From examining factors that influence the welfare of poor people in less developed countries, we conclude that who governs is as important as how they govern….

  • Our paper uses a unique dataset to study the impact of regime type, ideology and globalization on two measures of poverty.
  • We find that higher levels of democracy are associated with lower child mortality rates, but do not impact poverty gap.
  • The interaction of regime type and ideology has a strong effect: leftist power in a democracy reduces poverty and child mortality.
  • We find that trade significantly reduces both the poverty gap and the child mortality rate.
  • Overall, we find strong evidence that who governs is as important as how they govern…(More)”

Open data is shaking up civic life in eastern Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anna Sienicka in the Financial Times: “I often imagine how different the world would look if citizens and social activists were able to fully understand and use data, and new technologies. Unfortunately, the entry point to this world is often inaccessible for most civil society groups…

The concept of open data has revolutionised thinking about citizens’ participation in civic life. Since the fall of communism, citizens across central and eastern Europe have been fighting for more transparent and responsive governments, and to improve collaboration between civil society and the public sector. When an institution makes its data public, it is a sign that it is committed to being transparent and accountable. A few cities have opened up data about budget spending, for example, but these remain the exception rather than the rule. Open data provides citizens with a tool to directly engage in civic life. For example, they can analyse public expenses to check how their taxes are used, track their MP’s votes or monitor the legislative process….

One of the successful projects in Ukraine is the Open School app, which provides reviews and ratings of secondary schools based on indicators such as the number of pupils who go on to university, school subject specialisations and accessibility. It allows students and parents to make informed decisions about their educational path… Another example comes from the Serbian city of Pancevo, where a maths teacher and a tax inspector have worked together to help people navigate the tax system. The idea is simple: the more people know about taxes, the less likely they are to unconsciously violate the law. Open Taxes is a free, web-based, interactive guide to key national and local taxes…(More)”

Better Data for Better Policy: Accessing New Data Sources for Statistics Through Data Collaboratives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Medium Blog by Stefaan Verhulst: “We live in an increasingly quantified world, one where data is driving key business decisions. Data is claimed to be the new competitive advantage. Yet, paradoxically, even as our reliance on data increases and the call for agile, data-driven policy making becomes more pronounced, many Statistical Offices are confronted with shrinking budgets and an increased demand to adjust their practices to a data age. If Statistical Offices fail to find new ways to deliver “evidence of tomorrow”, by leveraging new data sources, this could mean that public policy may be formed without access to the full range of available and relevant intelligence — as most business leaders have. At worst, a thinning evidence base and lack of rigorous data foundation could lead to errors and more “fake news,” with possibly harmful public policy implications.

While my talk was focused on the key ways data can inform and ultimately transform the full policy cycle (see full presentation here), a key premise I examined was the need to access, utilize and find insight in the vast reams of data and data expertise that exist in private hands through the creation of new kinds of public and private partnerships or “data collaboratives” to establish more agile and data-driven policy making.

Screen Shot 2017-10-20 at 5.18.23 AM

Applied to statistics, such approaches have already shown promise in a number of settings and countries. Eurostat itself has, for instance, experimented together with Statistics Belgium, with leveraging call detail records provided by Proximus to document population density. Statistics Netherlands (CBS) recently launched a Center for Big Data Statistics (CBDS)in partnership with companies like Dell-EMC and Microsoft. Other National Statistics Offices (NSOs) are considering using scanner data for monitoring consumer prices (Austria); leveraging smart meter data (Canada); or using telecom data for complementing transportation statistics (Belgium). We are now living undeniably in an era of data. Much of this data is held by private corporations. The key task is thus to find a way of utilizing this data for the greater public good.

Value Proposition — and Challenges

There are several reasons to believe that public policy making and official statistics could indeed benefit from access to privately collected and held data. Among the value propositions:

  • Using private data can increase the scope and breadth and thus insights offered by available evidence for policymakers;
  • Using private data can increase the quality and credibility of existing data sets (for instance, by complementing or validating them);
  • Private data can increase the timeliness and thus relevance of often-outdated information held by statistical agencies (social media streams, for example, can provide real-time insights into public behavior); and
  • Private data can lower costs and increase other efficiencies (for example, through more sophisticated analytical methods) for statistical organizations….(More)”.

A Brief History of Living Labs: From Scattered Initiatives to Global Movement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Seppo Leminen, Veli-Pekka Niitamo, and Mika Westerlund presented at the Open Living Labs Day Conference: “This paper analyses the emergence of living labs based on a literature review and interviews with early living labs experts. Our study makes a contribution to the growing literature of living labs by analysing the emergence of living labs from the perspectives of (i) early living lab pioneers, (ii) early living lab activities in Europe and especially Nokia Corporation, (iii) framework programs of the European Union supporting the development of living labs, (iv) emergence of national living lab networks, and (v) emergence of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL). Moreover, the paper highlights major events in the emergence of living lab movement and labels three consecutive phases of the global living lab movement as (i) toward a new paradigm, (ii) practical experiences, and (iii) professional living labs….(More)”.

Open Space: The Global Effort for Open Access to Environmental Satellite Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mariel Borowitz: “Key to understanding and addressing climate change is continuous and precise monitoring of environmental conditions. Satellites play an important role in collecting climate data, offering comprehensive global coverage that can’t be matched by in situ observation. And yet, as Mariel Borowitz shows in this book, much satellite data is not freely available but restricted; this remains true despite the data-sharing advocacy of international organizations and a global open data movement. Borowitz examines policies governing the sharing of environmental satellite data, offering a model of data-sharing policy development and applying it in case studies from the United States, Europe, and Japan—countries responsible for nearly half of the unclassified government Earth observation satellites.

Borowitz develops a model that centers on the government agency as the primary actor while taking into account the roles of such outside actors as other government officials and non-governmental actors, as well as the economic, security, and normative attributes of the data itself. The case studies include the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS); the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT); and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA). Finally, she considers the policy implications of her findings for the future and provides recommendations on how to increase global sharing of satellite data….(More)”.

Our Gutenberg Moment: It’s Time To Grapple With The Internet’s Effect On Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alberto Ibargüen at HuffPost: “When clashes wracked Charlottesville, many Americans saw neo-nazi demonstrators as the obvious instigators. But others focused on counter-demonstrators, a view amplified by the president blaming “many sides.” The rift in perception underscored an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth about the flow of information today: Americans no longer have a shared foundation of facts upon which we can agree.

Politics has long been a messy, divisive business. I lived through the 1960s, a period of similar dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and disunity, brilliantly chronicled by Ken Burns’ new film “The Vietnam War” on PBS. But common, local knowledge —of history and current events — has always been the great equalizer in American society. Today, however, a decrease in shared knowledge has led to a collapse in trust. Over the past few years, we have watched our capacity to compromise wane as not only our politics, but also our most basic value systems, have become polarized.

The key difference between then and now is how news is delivered and consumed. At the beginning of our Republic, the reach of media was local and largely verifiable. That direct relationship between media outlets and their communities — local newspapers and, later, radio and TV stations — held until the second half of the 20th century. Network TV began to create a sense of national community but it fractioned with the sudden ability to offer targeted, membership-based models via cable.

But cable was nothing compared to Internet. Internet’s unique ability to personalize and to create virtual communities of interest accelerated the decline of newspapers and television business models and altered the flow of information in ways that we are still uncovering. “Media” now means digital and cable, cool mediums that require hot performance. Trust in all media, including traditional media, is at an all-time low, and we’re just now beginning to grapple with the threat to democracy posed by this erosion of trust.

Internet is potentially the greatest democratizing tool in history. It is also democracy’s greatest challenge. In offering access to information that can support any position and confirm any bias, social media has propelled the erosion of our common set of everyday facts….(More)”.

How online citizenship is unsettling rights and identities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Bridle at Open Democracy: “Historically, and for those lucky enough to be born under the aegis of stable governments and national regimes, there have been two ways in which citizenship is acquired at birth. Jus soli – the right of soil – confers citizenship upon those born within the territory of a state regardless of their parentage. This right is common in the Americas, but less so elsewhere (and, since 2004, is to be found nowhere in Europe). More frequently, Jus sanguinis – the right of blood – determines a person’s citizenship based on the rights held by their parents. One might be denied citizenship in the place of one’s birth, but obtain it elsewhere….

One of the places we see traditional notions of the nation state and its methods of organisation and control – particularly the assignation of citizenship – coming under greatest stress is online, in the apparently borderless expanses of the internet, where information and data flow almost without restriction across the boundaries between states. And as our rights and protections are increasingly assigned not to our corporeal bodies but to our digital selves – the accumulations of information which stand as proxies for us in our relationships to states, banks, and corporations – so new forms of citizenship arise at these transnational digital junctions.

Jus algoritmi is a term coined by John Cheney-Lippold to describe a new form of citizenship which is produced by the surveillance state, whose primary mode of operation, like other state forms before it, is control through identification and categorisation. Jus algoritmi – the right of the algorithm – refers to the increasing use of software to make judgements about an individual’s citizenship status, and thus to decide what rights they have, and what operations upon their person are permitted….(More)”.

Blockchain Could Help Us Reclaim Control of Our Personal Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Mainelli at Harvard Business Review: “…numerous smaller countries, such as Singapore, are exploring national identity systems that span government and the private sector. One of the more successful stories of governments instituting an identity system is Estonia, with its ID-kaarts. Reacting to cyber-attacks against the nation, the Estonian government decided that it needed to become more digital, and even more secure. They decided to use a distributed ledger to build their system, rather than a traditional central database. Distributed ledgers are used in situations where multiple parties need to share authoritative information with each other without a central third party, such as for data-logging clinical assessments or storing data from commercial deals. These are multi-organization databases with a super audit trail. As a result, the Estonian system provides its citizens with an all-digital government experience, significantly reduced bureaucracy, and significantly high citizen satisfaction with their government dealings.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have increased the awareness of distributed ledgers with their use of a particular type of ledger — blockchain — to hold the details of coin accounts among millions of users. Cryptocurrencies have certainly had their own problems with their wallets and exchanges — even ID-kaarts are not without their technical problems — but the distributed ledger technology holds firm for Estonia and for cryptocurrencies. These technologies have been working in hostile environments now for nearly a decade.

The problem with a central database like the ones used to house social security numbers, or credit reports, is that once it’s compromised, a thief has the ability to copy all of the information stored there. Hence the huge numbers of people that can be affected — more than 140 million people in the Equifax breach, and more than 50 million at Home Depot — though perhaps Yahoo takes the cake with more than three billion alleged customer accounts hacked.  Of course, if you can find a distributed ledger online, you can copy it, too. However, a distributed ledger, while available to everyone, may be unreadable if its contents are encrypted. Bitcoin’s blockchain is readable to all, though you can encrypt things in comments. Most distributed ledgers outside cryptocurrencies are encrypted in whole or in part. The effect is that while you can have a copy of the database, you can’t actually read it.

This characteristic of encrypted distributed ledgers has big implications for identity systems.  You can keep certified copies of identity documents, biometric test results, health data, or academic and training certificates online, available at all times, yet safe unless you give away your key. At a whole system level, the database is very secure. Each single ledger entry among billions would need to be found and then individually “cracked” at great expense in time and computing, making the database as a whole very safe.

Distributed ledgers seem ideal for private distributed identity systems, and many organizations are working to provide such systems to help people manage the huge amount of paperwork modern society requires to open accounts, validate yourself, or make payments.  Taken a small step further, these systems can help you keep relevant health or qualification records at your fingertips.  Using “smart” ledgers, you can forward your documentation to people who need to see it, while keeping control of access, including whether another party can forward the information. You can even revoke someone’s access to the information in the future….(More)”.