How Much Is Data Privacy Worth? A Preliminary Investigation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Angela G. Winegar and Cass R. Sunstein: “Do consumers value data privacy? How much? In a survey of 2,416 Americans, we find that the median consumer is willing to pay just $5 per month to maintain data privacy (along specified dimensions), but would demand $80 to allow access to personal data. This is a “superendowment effect,” much higher than the 1:2 ratio often found between willingness to pay and willingness to accept. In addition, people demand significantly more money to allow access to personal data when primed that such data includes health-related data than when primed that such data includes demographic data. We analyze reasons for these disparities and offer some notations on their implications for theory and practice.

A general theme is that because of a lack of information and behavioral biases, both willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures are highly unreliable guides to the welfare effects of retaining or giving up data privacy. Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, California may hold for consumer valuations of data privacy: “There is no there there.” For guidance, policymakers should give little or no attention to either of those conventional measures of economic value, at least when steps are not taken to overcome deficits in information and behavioral biases….(More)”.

Google and the University of Chicago Are Sued Over Data Sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daisuke Wakabayashi in The New York Times: “When the University of Chicago Medical Center announced a partnership to share patient data with Google in 2017, the alliance was promoted as a way to unlock information trapped in electronic health records and improve predictive analysis in medicine.

On Wednesday, the University of Chicago, the medical center and Google were sued in a potential class-action lawsuit accusing the hospital of sharing hundreds of thousands of patients’ records with the technology giant without stripping identifiable date stamps or doctor’s notes.

The suit, filed in United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, demonstrates the difficulties technology companies face in handling health data as they forge ahead into one of the most promising — and potentially lucrative — areas of artificial intelligence: diagnosing medical problems.

Google is at the forefront of an effort to build technology that can read electronic health records and help physicians identify medical conditions. But the effort requires machines to learn this skill by analyzing a vast array of old health records collected by hospitals and other medical institutions.

That raises privacy concerns, especially when is used by a company like Google, which already knows what you search for, where you are and what interests you hold.

In 2016, DeepMind, a London-based A.I. lab owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was accused of violating patient privacy after it struck a deal with Britain’s National Health Service to process medical data for research….(More)”.

Open Mobility Foundation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) – a global coalition led by cities committed to using well-designed, open-source technology to evolve how cities manage transportation in the modern era – launched today with the mission to promote safety, equity and quality of life. The announcement comes as a response to the growing number of vehicles and emerging mobility options on city streets. A new city-governed non-profit, the OMF brings together academic, commercial, advocacy and municipal stakeholders to help cities develop and deploy new digital mobility tools, and provide the governance needed to efficiently manage them.

“Cities are always working to harness the power of technology for the public good. The Open Mobility Foundation will help us manage emerging transportation infrastructures, and make mobility more accessible and affordable for people in all of our communities,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who also serves as Advisory Council Chair of Accelerator for America, which showcased the MDS platform early on.

The OMF convenes a new kind of public-private forum to seed innovative ideas and govern an evolving software platform. Serving as a forum for discussions about pedestrian safety, privacy, equity, open-source governance and other related topics, the OMF has engaged a broad range of city and municipal organizations, private companies and non-profit groups, and experts and advocates to ensure comprehensive engagement and expertise on vital issues….

The OMF governs a platform called “Mobility Data Specification” (MDS) that the Los Angeles Department of Transportation developed to help manage dockless micro-mobility programs (including shared dockless e-scooters). MDS is comprised of a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that create standard communications between cities and private companies to improve their operations. The APIs allow cities to collect data that can inform real-time traffic management and public policy decisions to enhance safety, equity and quality of life. More than 50 cities across the United States – and dozens across the globe – already use MDS to manage micro-mobility services.

Making this software open and free offers a safe and efficient environment for stakeholders, including municipalities, companies, experts and the public, to solve problems together. And because private companies scale best when cities can offer a consistent playbook for innovation, the OMF aims to nurture those services that provide the highest benefit to the largest number of people, from sustainability to safety outcomes….(More)”

Seize the Data: Using Evidence to Transform How Federal Agencies Do Business

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Partnership for Public Service: “The use of data analysis, rigorous evaluation and a range of other credible strategies to inform decision-making is becoming more common across government. Even so, the movement is nascent, with leading practices implemented at some agencies, but not yet widely adopted. Much more progress is necessary. In fact, the recently enacted Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, as well as the recently released draft Federal Data Strategy Action Plan, both prioritize broader adoption of leading practices.

To support that effort, this report highlights practical steps that agencies can take to become more data-driven and evidence-based. The findings emerged from a series of workshops and interviews conducted between April 2018 and May 2019 by the Partnership for Public Service and Grant Thornton. From these sessions, we learned that the most forward-thinking agencies rely on multiple approaches, including:
• Using top-down and bottom-up approaches to build evidence-based organizations.
• Driving longer-term and shorter-term learning.
• Using existing data and new data.
• Strengthening internal capacity and creating external research practitioner partnerships.
This report describes what these strategies look like in practice, and shares real-world and replicable examples of how leading agencies have become more data-driven and evidence-based….(More)”.

Modernizing Congress: Bringing Democracy into the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Lorelei Kelly: “Congress represents a national cross section of civic voice. It is potentially the most diverse market for ideas in government and should be reaping the benefits of America’s creativity and knowledge. During our transition into the 21st century, this civic information asset — from lived experience to structured data — should fuel the digital infrastructure of a modern representative system. Yet Congress has thus far failed to tap this resource on behalf of its legislative and deliberative functions.

Today’s Congress can’t compete on digital infrastructure or modern data methods with the executive branch, the media or the private sector. To be sure, information weaponization, antique technology and Congress’ stubborn refusal to fund itself has arrested its development of a digital infrastructure. Congress is knowledge incapacitated, physically disconnected and technologically obsolete. In this condition, it cannot fulfill its First Branch duties as laid out in Article I of the U.S. Constitution.

Fortunately, changing the direction of Congress is now in sight. Before the end of January 2019, (1) the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act became law, (2) the House created a Select Committee on Modernization, and (3) Congress began to restore its internal science and technology capacity.

Modernizing Congress lays out a plan to accelerate this institutional progress. It scopes out the challenge of including civic voice in the legislative and deliberative process. It then identifies trusted local information intermediaries who could act as key components of a modern knowledge commons in Congress. With three case studies, the report illustrates how members and staff are finding new ways to build connection and gather useful constituent input at the district level. The report explores an urban, rural and suburban district. It concludes that while individual members are leveraging technology to connect and use new forms of civic voice from constituents, what Congress needs most is a systemwide digital infrastructure and updated institutional standards for data collection….(More)”.

Postsecondary Data Infrastructure: What is Possible Today

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Amy O’Hara: “Data sharing across government agencies allows consumers, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to answer pressing questions. Creating a data infrastructure to enable this data sharing for higher education data is challenging, however, due to legal, privacy, technical, and perception issues. To overcome these challenges, postsecondary education can learn from other domains to permit secure, responsible data access and use. Working models from both the public sector and academia show how sensitive data from multiple sources can be linked and accessed for authorized uses.

This brief describes best practices in use today and the emerging technology that could further protect future data systems and creates a new framework, the “Five Safes”, for controlling data access and use. To support decisions facing students, administrators, evaluators, and policymakers, a postsecondary infrastructure must support cycles of data discovery, request, access, analysis, review, and release. It must be cost-effective, secure, and efficient and, ideally, it will be highly automated, transparent, and adaptable. Other industries have successfully developed such infrastructures, and postsecondary education can learn from their experiences.

A functional data infrastructure relies on trust and control between the data providers, intermediaries, and users. The system should support equitable access for approved users and offer the ability to conduct independent analyses with scientific integrity for reasonable financial costs. Policymakers and developers should ensure the creation of expedient, convenient data access modes that allow for policy analyses. …

The “Five Safes” framework describes an approach for controlling data access and use. The five safes are: safe projects, safe people, safe settings, safe data, and afe outputs….(More)”.

Make FOIA Work

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Make FOIA Work is about re-imagining journalism through design, participation and collaboration. Faculty, staff and students at Emerson College and the Engagement Lab staff worked alongside the Boston Institute of Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) and MuckRock, two independent and alternative news and information platforms and publishers, to produce a data-driven and engagement-based investigative reporting series that exposes corruption around the sales of guns in Massachusetts. Through design studios in participatory methods and data visualization, project participants created a participatory guide book for journalists, practitioners and community members on how to undertake participatory design projects with a focus on FOIA requests, community participation, and collaboration. The project also highlights the course syllabi in participatory design methods and data visualization….(More)”.

Disinformation Rated As Significant of a Problem As Gun Violence and Terrorism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Institute for Public Relations: “Sixty-three percent of Americans view disinformation—deliberately biased and misleading information—as a “major” problem in society, on par with gun violence (63%) and terrorism (66%), according to the 2019 Institute for Public Relations Disinformation in Society Report.

The 2019 IPR Disinformation in Society Report surveyed 2,200 adults to determine the prevalence of disinformation, who is responsible for sharing disinformation, the level of trust in different information sources, and the parties responsible for combatting disinformation.

“One surprising finding was how significant of a problem both Republicans and Democrats rated disinformation,” said Dr. Tina McCorkindale, APR, President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations. “Unfortunately, only a few organizations outside of the media literacy and news space devote resources to help fix it, including many of the perceived culprits responsible for spreading disinformation.”

More than half (51%) of the respondents said they encounter disinformation at least once a day, while 78% said they see it once a week. Four in five adults (80%) said they are confident in their ability to recognize false news and information. Additionally, nearly half of Americans (47%) said they “often” or “always” go to other sources to see if news and information are accurate….(More)”.

Supreme Court rules against newspaper seeking access to food stamp data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Josh Gerstein at Politico: “The Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory to businesses seeking to block their information from being disclosed to the public after it winds up in the hands of the federal government.

The justices ruled in favor of retailers seeking to prevent a South Dakota newspaper from obtaining store-level data on the redemption of food stamp benefits, now officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The high court ruling rejected a nearly half-century-old appeals court precedent that allowed the withholding of business records under the Freedom of Information Act only in cases where harm would result either to the business or to the government’s ability to acquire information in the future.

The latest case was set into motion when the U.S. Department of Agriculture refused to disclose the store-level SNAP data in response to a 2011 FOIA request from the Argus Leader, the daily newspaper in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The newspaper sued, but a federal district court ruled in favor of the USDA.

The Argus Leader appealed, and the U.S. Appeals Court for the 8th Circuit ruled that the exemption the USDA was citing did not apply in this case, sending the issue back to a lower court. The district court was tasked with determining whether the USDA was covered by a separate FOIA exemption governing information that would cause competitive injury if released.

That court ruled in favor of the newspaper, at which point the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group that represents retailers such as grocery stores, filed an appeal in lieu of the USDA….(More)”.

Developing Artificially Intelligent Justice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Richard M. Re and Alicia Solow-Niederman: “Artificial intelligence, or AI, promises to assist, modify, and replace human decision-making, including in court. AI already supports many aspects of how judges decide cases, and the prospect of “robot judges” suddenly seems plausible—even imminent. This Article argues that AI adjudication will profoundly affect the adjudicatory values held by legal actors as well as the public at large. The impact is likely to be greatest in areas, including criminal justice and appellate decision-making, where “equitable justice,” or discretionary moral judgment, is frequently considered paramount. By offering efficiency and at least an appearance of impartiality, AI adjudication will both foster and benefit from a turn toward “codified justice,” an adjudicatory paradigm that favors standardization above discretion. Further, AI adjudication will generate a range of concerns relating to its tendency to make the legal system more incomprehensible, data-based, alienating, and disillusioning. And potential responses, such as crafting a division of labor between human and AI adjudicators, each pose their own challenges. The single most promising response is for the government to play a greater role in structuring the emerging market for AI justice, but auspicious reform proposals would borrow several interrelated approaches. Similar dynamics will likely extend to other aspects of government, such that choices about how to incorporate AI in the judiciary will inform the future path of AI development more broadly….(More)”.