Citizen acceptance of mass surveillance? Identity, intelligence, and biodata concerns


Paper by Westerlund, Mika; Isabelle, Diane A; Leminen, Seppo: “News media and human rights organizations are warning about the rise of the surveillance state that builds on distrust and mass surveillance of its citizens. Further, the global pandemic has fostered public-private collaboration such as the launch of contact tracing apps to tackle COVID-19. Thus, such apps also contribute to the diffusion of technologies that can collect and analyse large amounts of sensitive data and the growth of the surveillance society. This study examines the impacts of citizens’ concerns about digital identity, government’s intelligence activities, and security of the increasing biodata on their trust in and acceptance of government’s use of personal data. Our analysis of survey data from 1,486 Canadians suggest that those concerns have direct effects on people’s acceptance of government’s use of personal data, but not necessarily on the trust in the government being respectful of privacy. Authorities should be more transparent about the collection and uses of data….(More)”

Re-use of smart city data: The need to acquire a social license through data assemblies


Written Testimony by Stefaan G. Verhulst before the New York City Council Committee on Technology: “…In crises such as these, calls for the city to harness technology and data to help policy-makers find solutions grow louder and stronger. Many have spoken about accelerating already ongoing work to turn New York into “a smart city” — using digital technology to connect, protect, and improve the lives of its residents. Some of this proposed work could involve the use of sensors to collect data on how people live and work across New York City. Other work could involve expanding the city’s relationships with private organizations through data collaboratives. Data collaboratives, which are central to our work at the GovLab, are a new form of collaboration that extends beyond the conventional public-private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors exchange their data to create public value. The city already operates one such data collaborative in the form of the NYC Recovery Data Partnership, a partnership that allows New York-based private and civic organizations to provide their data to analysts at city agencies to inform the COVID-19 pandemic response. I have the privilege of serving as an advisor to that initiative.

Data collaboration takes place widely through a variety of institutional, contractual and technical structures and instruments. Borrowing in language and inspiration from the open data movement, the emerging data collaborative movement has proven its value and possible positive impact. Data reuse has the potential to improve disease treatment, identify better ways to source supplies, monitor adherence to non-pharmaceutical restrictions, and provide a range of other public benefits. Whether it is informing decision-making or shaping the development of new tools and techniques, it is clear that data has tremendous potential to mitigate the worst effects of this pandemic.

However, as promising and attractive as reusing data might seem, it is important to keep in mind that there also exist widespread concerns and challenges….

My colleagues and I at The GovLab believe the Data Assembly methodology offers the city a new way forward on the issues under discussion today, as they relate to smart cities. In our view, oversight cannot just be a reactive process of responding to complaints but a proactive one, inviting city residents, data holders, and advocacy groups to the table to determine what is and is not acceptable. Amid rapidly changing circumstances, the city needs ways to collect and synthesize actionable and diverse public input to identify concerns, expectations, and opportunities. We encourage the city to explore assembling mini-publics of its own or, failing that, commission legitimate partners to lead such efforts.

New York faces many challenges in 2021 but I do not doubt the capacity of its people to overcome these struggles. Through people-led innovation and processes, the city can ensure that data re-use conducted as part of the smart city is deemed legitimate and more effective and targeted. It can also support the city in ensuring work across the city is more open, collaborative, and legitimate…(More)”.

Nowcasting Gentrification Using Airbnb Data


Paper by Shomik Jain, Davide Proserpio, Giovanni Quattrone, and Daniele Quercia: “There is a rumbling debate over the impact of gentrification: presumed gentrifiers have been the target of protests and attacks in some cities, while they have been welcome as generators of new jobs and taxes in others. Census data fails to measure neighborhood change in real-time since it is usually updated every ten years. This work shows that Airbnb data can be used to quantify and track neighborhood changes. Specifically, we consider both structured data (e.g. number of listings, number of reviews, listing information) and unstructured data (e.g. user-generated reviews processed with natural language processing and machine learning algorithms) for three major cities, New York City (US), Los Angeles (US), and Greater London (UK). We find that Airbnb data (especially its unstructured part) appears to nowcast neighborhood gentrification, measured as changes in housing affordability and demographics. Overall, our results suggest that user-generated data from online platforms can be used to create socioeconomic indices to complement traditional measures that are less granular, not in real-time, and more costly to obtain….(More)”.

Rescuing Our Democracy by Rethinking New York Times Co. v. Sullivan


Paper by David Andrew Logan: “New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) is an iconic decision, foundational to modern First Amendment theory, and in a string of follow-on decisions the Court firmly grounded free speech theory and practice in the need to protect democratic discourse. To do this the Court provided broad and deep protections to the publishers of falsehoods. This article recognizes that New York Times and its progeny made sense in the “public square” of an earlier era, but the justices could never have foreseen the dramatic changes in technology and the media environment in the years since, nor predict that by making defamation cases virtually impossible to win they were harming, rather than helping self-government. In part because of New York Times, the First Amendment has been weaponized, frustrating a basic requirement of a healthy democracy: the development of a set of broadly agreed-upon facts. Instead, we are subject to waves of falsehoods that swamp the ability of citizens to effectively self-govern. As a result, and despite its iconic status, New York Times needs to be reexamined and retooled to better serve our democracy….(More)”

When FOIA Goes to Court: 20 Years of Freedom of Information Act Litigation by News Organizations and Reporters


Report by The FOIA Project: “The news media are powerful players in the world of government transparency and public accountability. One important tool for ensuring public accountability is through invoking transparency mandates provided by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In 2020, news organizations and individual reporters filed 122 different FOIA suits[1] to compel disclosure of federal government records—more than any year on record according to federal court data back to 2001 analyzed by the FOIA Project

In fact, the media alone have filed a total of 386 FOIA cases during the four years of the Trump Administration, from 2017 through 2020. This is greater than the total of 311 FOIA media cases filed during the sixteen years of the Bush and Obama Administrations combined. Moreover, many of these FOIA cases were the very first FOIA cases filed by members of the news media. Almost as many new FOIA litigators filed their first case in court in the past four years—178 from 2017 to 2020—than the years 2001 to 2016, when 196 FOIA litigators filed their first case. Reporters made up the majority of these. During the past four years, more than four out of five of first-time litigators were individual reporters. The ranks of FOIA litigators thus expanded considerably during the Trump Administration, with more reporters challenging agencies in court for failing to provide records they are seeking, either alone or with their news organizations.

Using the FOIA Project’s unique dataset of FOIA cases filed in federal court, this report provides unprecedented and valuable insight into the rapid growth of media lawsuits designed to make the government more transparent and accountable to the public. The complete, updated list of news media cases, along with the names of organizations and reporters who filed these suits, is available on the News Media List at FOIAProject.org. Figure 1shows the total number of FOIA cases filed by the news each year. Counts are available in Appendix Table 1 at the end of this report….(More)”.

Figure 1. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Cases Filed by News Organizations and Reporters in Federal Court, 2001–2020.

The War on Professionalism


Jonathan Rauch in National Affairs: “…As a child, I asked my father, a lawyer, what the word “professional” meant. He replied, “it means you do something for a living.” He contrasted it with the term “amateur,” meaning someone who works for pleasure.

My father’s definition has merit. I recall it whenever I tell interns that, to me, professionalism means performing a job to the highest standards, even when I don’t feel like doing it at all. One might think of the doctor who shows up for emergency surgery on Christmas Eve, the journalist who takes care to verify every fact mentioned in a report, or the concert pianist who gives the audience the best he is capable of night after night, even on nights when he would much rather be doing anything else.

That concept of professionalism is a good starting point, but we can dig deeper by drawing on the work of the American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin. In his book A Time to Build, Levin explores the role and meaning of institutions. Institutions, he says, are — or, when they function well, should be — forms, training and shaping people to work together toward a larger goal. The military is a classic example, as are churches and schools. These “structures of social life” provide the durable arrangements that frame our perceptions, mold our character, and delineate our social existence.

When institutions do not or cannot perform those shaping functions, they collapse into something more like platforms — stages upon which individuals perform in order to build audiences and self-advertise. He locates the collapse of trust in institutions — and the resulting public sense of anomie and disconnectedness — in the conversion of many institutions from places where people are formed to places where people perform. Thus a self-promoting real-estate magnate can become a self-promoting reality-TV host and then a self-promoting presidential candidate, hopping from one stage to the next, all while putting on pretty much the same show.

As institutions have drifted away from shaping us and toward displaying us, they have lost both efficacy and legitimacy. And we, in turn, have naturally lost confidence in them. Moreover, Levin argues, institutions have been taken for granted for so long, and yet are neglected so generally, that we have lost even the vocabulary for talking about what they are supposed to be doing. We don’t realize what we are missing, although we acutely feel the void.

Something very much like that has happened with professionalism. A combination of institutional absence, lazy thinking, and populist politics has collapsed the idea of professionalism down to the much flatter notion of elitism.

To some extent, it is natural to think of professionalism and elitism as two sides of the same coin. After all, many professionals are people with advanced degrees and high incomes who occupy elite positions in society. We imagine professionalism to be about excluding others from certain pursuits or occupations like law and medicine — a seemingly elitist practice. We think of it, too, as synonymous with professional schooling, something not everyone can aspire to.

Still, there is a world of difference between professionals and elites. Elites are influential by dint of who they are and whom they know. They are elite because they have social connections and powerful positions. Professionals, by contrast, are influential by dint of what they know and what they do. Their status is contingent on both their standing and their behavior.

That distinction gestures toward a fuller definition of professionalism, one that implies commitment to personal standards, social norms, and expert knowledge in furtherance of a mission or an institution. That is, professionalism defines a right way of doing things — a notion of best practices — that is grounded in dedication to a mission or an institution rather than personal advancement or partisan loyalty. As Levin says, professionalism “tends to yield a strong internal ethos among practitioners. In uncertain situations, a professional asks himself, ‘What should I do here, given my professional responsibilities?’ And his profession will generally have an answer to that question.”

As Levin notices, institutionalism and professionalism are cousins. Both institutions and professions organize individuals to accomplish missions, they seek to inculcate norms and guide behavior, they assemble and transmit knowledge and best practices across generations, they cultivate reputational capital over long spans of time, and they draw and enforce boundaries between insiders and outsiders….(More)”

To Thrive, Our Democracy Needs Digital Public Infrastructure


Article by Eli Pariser and Danielle Allen: “The story of how the internet has become so broken is already familiar. More and more of our public life takes place on big tech platforms optimized for clicks, shares, and virality. The result is that we spend our online time largely in rule-less spaces that reward our worst impulses, trap us in bubbles of like-minded opinion, and leave us susceptible to harassment, lies and misinformation. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube each took first steps to rein in the worst behavior on their platforms in the heat of the election, but none have confronted how their spaces were structured to become ideal venues for outrage and incitement…

The first step in the process is realizing that the problems we’re experiencing in digital life — how to gather strangers together in public in ways that make it so people generally behave themselves — aren’t new. They’re problems that physical communities have wrestled with for centuries. In physical communities, businesses play a critical role — but so do public libraries, schools, parks and roads. These spaces are often the groundwork that private industry builds itself around: Schools teach and train the next generation of workers; new public parks and plazas often spur private real estate development; businesses transport goods on publicly funded roads; and so on. Public spaces and private industry work symbiotically, if sometimes imperfectly.

Beyond their instrumental value for prosperity, we need public spaces and institutions to weave and maintain our social fabric. In physical communities, parks and libraries aren’t just places for exercise or book-borrowing — they also create social connections, a sense of community identity, and a venue in which differences and inequalities can be surfaced and addressed. Public spaces provide access to essential resources for people who couldn’t otherwise access them — whether it’s an outdoor workout station, basketball court, or books in a library — but they are some of the few spaces in a community where we get a glimpse of each other’s lives and help us see ourselves as part of a pluralistic but cohesive society….

If mission, design and governance are important ingredients, the final component is what might be called digital essential workers — professionals like librarians whose job is to manage, steward, and care for the people in these spaces. This care work is one of the pillars of successful physical communities which has been abstracted away by the existing tech platforms. Scholar Joan Donovan has called for 10,000 librarians for the Internet, while Sarah R. Roberts has pointed out that doing curation at scale would be impossible within the current social media business model. At a time when our country is pulling apart and many Americans need work, it’s worth considering whether we need an AmeriCorps for digital space.

How might we pay for this? A two-year project one of us helped lead at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a final report that recommended taxing what’s known as “targeted advertising” — the kind Google and Facebook rely on for their revenue — in order to support the democratic functions social platforms have had a hand in dismantling, like local journalism. The truth is that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have displaced and sucked the revenue out of an entire ecosystem of local journalistic enterprises and other institutions that served some of these public functions. Those three companies alone made nearly $33 billion in profits in the third quarter of 2020 alone — and that profit margin in part comes from not having to pay for the negative externalities they create or the public goods they erode. Using some of those funds to support public digital infrastructure seems eminently reasonable….(More)”.

New York Temporarily Bans Facial Recognition Technology in Schools


Hunton’s Privacy Blog: “On December 22, 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law legislation that temporarily bans the use or purchase of facial recognition and other biometric identifying technology in public and private schools until at least July 1, 2022. The legislation also directs the New York Commissioner of Education (the “Commissioner”) to conduct a study on whether this technology is appropriate for use in schools.

In his press statement, Governor Cuomo indicated that the legislation comes after concerns were raised about potential risks to students, including issues surrounding misidentification by the technology as well as safety, security and privacy concerns. “This legislation requires state education policymakers to take a step back, consult with experts and address privacy issues before determining whether any kind of biometric identifying technology can be brought into New York’s schools. The safety and security of our children is vital to every parent, and whether to use this technology is not a decision to be made lightly,” the Governor explained.

Key elements of the legislation include:

  • Defining “facial recognition” as “any tool using an automated or semi-automated process that assists in uniquely identifying or verifying a person by comparing and analyzing patterns based on the person’s face,” and “biometric identifying technology” as “any tool using an automated or semi-automated process that assists in verifying a person’s identity based on a person’s biometric information”;
  • Prohibiting the purchase and use of facial recognition and other biometric identifying technology in all public and private elementary and secondary schools until July 1, 2022, or until the Commissioner authorizes the purchase and use of such technology, whichever occurs later; and
  • Directing the Commissioner, in consultation with New York’s Office of Information Technology, Division of Criminal Justice Services, Education Department’s Chief Privacy Officer and other stakeholders, to conduct a study and make recommendations as to the circumstances in which facial recognition and other biometric identifying technology is appropriate for use in schools and what restrictions and guidelines should be enacted to protect privacy, civil rights and civil liberties interests….(More)”.

A nudge in the right direction


Report by Partnership for Public Service and Grant Thornton: “The people of this nation depend on government to perform at the highest level. To optimize performance, some agencies are drawing on knowledge about human behavior to improve how they do business. By understanding how people process information and make decisions, and using that knowledge to inform how programs are designed and administered, those agencies
are producing better results—often quickly and at little cost.

At the Department of Education, staff and a team of outside researchers sent personalized text messages over the summer to high school graduates who had been accepted to college, boosting how many enrolled in the fall. The Department of Defense increased the number of service members who enrolled in the Thrift Savings Plan, the federal government’s retirement program, by nudging them at a “reset” point in their life—as they transferred to a new base. And an easier to understand letter from the Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program asking participants to verify their eligibility led to a higher response rate and fewer
eligible participants losing access to the program.

While the application of behavioral insights has tremendous potential to improve the work of government, the movement is still in early stages.

To encourage more widespread use, the Partnership for Public Service and Grant Thornton hosted five workshops with federal employees between March and September 2020. The sessions examined how behavioral insights could improve processes and programs and deliver better agency performance.

This report presents the findings from those workshops, including insights from workshop presenters, many of whom are applying behavioral insights in their own agencies. It explains how behavioral insights can make government more effective; provides tips for choosing a behavioral insights project and getting leaders to buy in; describes how to test whether a behavioral insights project was successful; and offers guidance on how to build on the results of a test….(More)”.

Is a racially-biased algorithm delaying health care for one million Black people?


Jyoti Madhusoodanan at Nature: “One million Black adults in the United States might be treated earlier for kidney disease if doctors were to remove a controversial ‘race-based correction factor’ from an algorithm they use to diagnose people and decide whether to administer medication, a comprehensive analysis finds.

Critics of the factor question its medical validity and say it potentially perpetuates racial bias — and that the latest study, published on 2 December in JAMA1, strengthens growing calls to discontinue its use.

“A population that is marginalized and much less likely to have necessary resources and support is the last group we want to put in a situation where they’re going to have delays in diagnosis and treatment,” says nephrologist Keith Norris at the University of California, Los Angeles, who argues for retiring the correction until there’s clear evidence that it’s necessary.

On the flip side, others say that the correction is based on scientific data that can’t be ignored, although they, too, agree that its basis on race is a problem….(More)”.