Ron S. Jarmin at the Journal of Economic Perspectives: “The system of federal economic statistics developed in the 20th century has served the country well, but the current methods for collecting and disseminating these data products are unsustainable. These statistics are heavily reliant on sample surveys. Recently, however, response rates for both household and business surveys have declined, increasing costs and threatening quality. Existing statistical measures, many developed decades ago, may also miss important aspects of our rapidly evolving economy; moreover, they may not be sufficiently accurate, timely, or granular to meet the increasingly complex needs of data users. Meanwhile, the rapid proliferation of online data and more powerful computation make privacy and confidentiality protections more challenging. There is broad agreement on the need to transform government statistical agencies from the
Applying behavioral insights to improve postsecondary education outcomes
Brookings: “Policymakers under President Obama implemented behaviorally-informed policies to improve college access, completion, and affordability. Given the complexity of the college application process, many of these policies aimed to simplify college and financial aid application processes and reduce informational barriers that students face when evaluating college options. Katharine Meyer and Kelly Ochs Rosinger summarize empirical evidence on these policies and conclude that behaviorally-informed policies play an important role, especially as supplements to (rather than replacements for) broader structural changes. For example, recent changes in the FAFSA filing timeline provided students with more time to complete the form. But this large shift may be more effective in changing behavior when accompanied by informational campaigns and nudges that improve students’ understanding of the new system. Governments and colleges can leverage behavioral science to increase awareness of student support services if more structural policy changes occur to provide the services in the first place….(More)”.
The Stanford Open Policing Project
About: “On a typical day in the United States, police officers make more than 50,000 traffic stops. Our team is gathering, analyzing, and releasing records from millions of traffic stops by law enforcement agencies across the country. Our goal is to help researchers, journalists, and policymakers investigate and improve interactions between police and the public.
Currently, a comprehensive, national repository detailing interactions between police and the public doesn’t exist. That’s why the Stanford Open Policing Project is collecting and standardizing data on vehicle and pedestrian stops from law enforcement departments across the country — and we’re making that information freely available. We’ve already gathered 130 million records from 31 state police agencies and have begun collecting data on stops from law enforcement agencies in major cities, as well.
We, the Stanford Open Policing Project, are an interdisciplinary team of researchers and journalists at Stanford University. We are committed to combining the academic rigor of statistical analysis with the explanatory power of data journalism….(More)”.
Algorithmic fairness: A code-based primer for public-sector data scientists
Paper by Ken Steif and Sydney Goldstein: “As the number of government algorithms
Opening the Government of Canada The Federal Bureaucracy in the Digital Age
Book by Amanda Clarke: “In the digital age, governments face growing calls to become more open, collaborative, and networked. But can bureaucracies abandon their closed-by-design mindsets and operations and, more importantly, should they?
Opening the Government of Canada presents a compelling case for the importance of a more open model of governance in the digital age – but a model that continues to uphold traditional democratic principles at the heart of the Westminster system. Drawing on interviews with public officials and extensive analysis of government documents and social media accounts, Clarke details the untold story of the Canadian federal bureaucracy’s efforts to adapt to new digital pressures from the mid-2000s onward. This book argues that the bureaucracy’s tradition of closed government, fuelled by today’s antagonistic political communications culture, is at odds with evolving citizen expectations and new digital policy tools, including social media, crowdsourcing, and open data. Amanda Clarke also cautions that traditional democratic principles and practices essential to resilient governance must not be abandoned in the digital age, which may justify a more restrained opening of our governing institutions than is currently proposed by many academics and governments alike.
Striking a balance between reform and tradition, Opening the Government of Canada concludes with a series of pragmatic recommendations that lay out a roadmap for building a democratically robust, digital-era federal government
Using Data Sharing Agreements as Tools of Indigenous Data Governance: Current Uses and Future Options
Paper by Martinez, A.
The project described here reviewed publicly available data sharing agreements that focus on research with Indigenous nations and communities in the United States. We utilized qualitative analysis methods to identify specific areas of focus in the data sharing agreements, whether or not traditional or cultural values were included in the language of the data sharing agreements, and how the agreements defined data. The results detail how Indigenous peoples currently use data sharing agreements and potential areas of expansion for language to include in data sharing agreements as Indigenous peoples address the research needs of their communities and the protection of
State Capability, Policymaking and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Demos Helsinki: “The world as we know it is built on the structures of the industrial era – and these structures are falling apart. Yet the vision of a new, sustainable and fair post-industrial society remains unclear. This discussion paper is the result of a collaboration between a group of
In the discussion paper, we set out to explore what the main opportunities and concerns that accompany the Fourth Industrial Revolution for policymaking and knowledge systems are particularly in middle-income countries. Overall, middle-income countries are home to five billion of the world’s seven billion people and 73 per cent of the world’s poor people; they represent about one-third of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and are major engines of global growth (World Bank 2018).
The paper is co-produced with Capability (Finland), Demos Helsinki (Finland), HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation (Switzerland), Politics & Ideas (global), Southern Voice (global), UNESCO Montevideo (Uruguay) and Using Evidence (Canada).
The guiding questions for this paper are:
– What are the critical elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
– What does the literature say about the impact of this revolution on societies and economies, and in particular on middle-income countries?
– What are the implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in middle-income countries?
– What does the literature say about the challenges for governance and the ways knowledge can inform policy during the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Full discussion paper: “State Capability, Policymaking and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Do Knowledge Systems Matter?”
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The privacy threat posed by detailed census data
Gillian Tett at the Financial Times: “Wilbur Ross suffered the political equivalent of a small(ish) black eye last month: a federal judge blocked the US commerce secretary’s attempts to insert a question about citizenship into the 2020 census and accused him of committing “egregious” legal violations.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the administration’s appeal in April. But while this high-profile fight unfolds, there is a second, less noticed, census issue about data privacy emerging that could have big implications for businesses (and citizens). Last weekend John Abowd, the Census Bureau’s chief scientist, told an academic gathering that statisticians had uncovered shortcomings in the protection of personal data in past censuses. There is no public evidence that anyone has actually used these weaknesses to hack records, and
The crucial problem revolves around what is known as “re-identification” risk. When companies and government institutions amass sensitive information about individuals, they typically protect privacy in two ways: they hide the full data set from outside eyes or they release it in an “anonymous” manner, stripped of identifying details. The census bureau does both: it is required by law to publish detailed data and protect confidentiality. Since 1990, it has tried to resolve these contradictory mandates by using “household-level swapping” — moving some households from one geographic location to another to generate enough uncertainty to prevent re-identification. This used to work. But today there are so many commercially-available data sets and computers are so powerful that it is possible to re-identify “anonymous” data by combining data sets. …
Thankfully, statisticians think there is a solution. The Census Bureau now plans to use a technique known as “differential privacy” which would introduce “noise” into the public statistics, using complex algorithms. This technique is expected to create just enough statistical fog to protect personal confidentiality in published data — while also preserving information in an encrypted form that statisticians can later unscramble, as needed. Companies such as Google, Microsoft
A Parent-To-Parent Campaign To Get Vaccine Rates Up
Alex Olgin at NPR: “In 2017, Kim Nelson had just moved her family back to her hometown in South Carolina. Boxes were still scattered around the apartment, and while her two young daughters played, Nelson scrolled through a newspaper article on her phone. It said religious exemptions for vaccines had jumped nearly 70 percent in recent years in the Greenville area — the part of the state she had just moved to.
She remembers yelling to her husband in the other room, “David, you have to get in here! I can’t believe this.”
Up until that point, Nelson hadn’t run into mom friends who didn’t vaccinate
Nelson started her own group, South Carolina Parents for Vaccines. She began posting scientific articles online. She started responding to private messages from concerned parents with specific questions. She also found that positive reinforcement was important and would roam around the mom groups, sprinkling affirmations.
“If someone posts, ‘My child got their two-months shots today,’ ” Nelson says, she’d quickly post a follow-up comment: “Great job, mom!”
Nelson was inspired by peer-focused groups around the country doing similar work. Groups with national reach like Voices for Vaccines and regional groups like Vax Northwest in Washington state take a similar approach, encouraging parents to get educated and share facts about vaccines with other parents….
Public health specialists are raising concerns about the need to improve vaccination rates. But efforts to reach vaccine-hesitant parents often fail. When presented with facts about vaccine safety, parents often remained entrenched in a decision not to vaccinate.
Pediatricians could play a role — and many do — but they’re not compensated to have lengthy discussions with parents, and some of them find it a frustrating task. That has left an opening for alternative approaches, like Nelson’s.
Nelson thought it would be best to zero in on moms who were still on the fence about vaccines.
“It’s easier to pull a hesitant parent over than it is somebody who is firmly anti-vax,” Nelson says. She explains that parents who oppose vaccination often feel so strongly about it that they won’t engage in a discussion. “They feel validated by that choice — it’s part of
Data Fiduciary
/ˈdeɪtə fəˈduʃiˌɛri/
A person or a business that manages individual data in a trustworthy manner. Also ‘information fiduciary’, ‘data trust’, or ‘data steward’.
‘Fiduciary’ is an old concept in the legal world. Its Latin origin is fidere, which means to trust. In the legal context, a fiduciary is usually a person that is trusted to make a decision on how to manage an asset or information, within constraints given by another person who owns such asset or information. Examples of a fiduciary relationship include homeowner and property manager, patient and doctor, or client and attorney. The latter has the ability to make decisions about the trusted asset that falls within the conditions agreed upon by the former.
Jack M. Balkin and Jonathan Zittrain wrote a case for “information fiduciary”, in which they pointed out the urgency of adopting the practice of fiduciary in the data space. In The Atlantic, they wrote:
“The information age has created new kinds of entities that have many of the trappings of fiduciaries—huge online businesses, like Facebook, Google, and Uber, that collect, analyze, and use our personal information—sometimes in our interests and sometimes not. Like older fiduciaries, these businesses have become virtually indispensable. Like older fiduciaries, these companies collect a lot of personal information that could be used to our detriment. And like older fiduciaries, these businesses enjoy a much greater ability to monitor our activities than we have to monitor theirs. As a result, many people who need these services often shrug their shoulders and decide to trust them. But the important question is whether these businesses, like older fiduciaries, have legal obligations to be trustworthy. The answer is that they should.”
Recent controversy involving Facebook data and Cambridge Analytica provides another reason for why companies collecting data from users need to act as a fiduciary. Within this framework, individuals would have a say over how and where their data can be used.
Another call for a form of data fiduciary comes from Google’s Sidewalk Labs project in Canada. After collecting data to inform urban planning in the Quayside area in Toronto, Sidewalk Labs announced that they would not be claiming ownership over the data that they collected and that the data should be “under the control of an independent Civic Data Trust.”
In a blog post, Sidewalk Labs wrote that:
“Sidewalk Labs believes an independent Civic Data Trust should become the steward of urban data collected in the physical environment. This Trust would approve and control the collection of, and manage access to, urban data originating in Quayside. The Civic Data Trust would be guided by a charter ensuring that urban data is collected and used in a way that is beneficial to the community, protects privacy, and spurs innovation and investment.”
Realizing the potential of creating new public value through an exchange of data, or data collaboratives, the GovLab “ is advancing the concept and practice of Data Stewardship to promote responsible data leadership that can address the challenges of the 21st century.” A Data Steward mirrors some of the responsibilities of a data fiduciary, in that they are “responsible for determining what, when, how and with whom to share private data for public good.”
Balkin and Zittrain suggest that there is an asymmetrical power between companies that collect user-generated data and the users themselves, in that these companies are becoming indispensable and having more control over an individual’s data. However, these companies are currently not legally obligated to be trustworthy, meaning that there is no legal consequence for when they use this data in a way that breaches privacy or is in the least interest of the customers.
Under a data fiduciary framework, individuals who are trusted with data are attached with legal rights and responsibilities regarding the use of the data. In a case where a breach of trust happens, the trustee will have to face legal consequences.
Sources and Further Readings:
- Balkin, J. M. (2016). Information Fiduciaries and the First Amendment. UC Davis Law Review, 49(4), 1183–1234.
- Balkin, J. M., & Zittrain, J. (2016, October 3). A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies Trustworthy.
- Pearson, J. (2018, October 16). Why Does Google Want to Hand Its Smart City Data to a Third Party “Civic Data Trust?”
- Schwartz, A., & Cohn, C. (2018, October 25). “Information Fiduciaries” Must Protect Your Data Privacy.