The Low Threshold for Face Recognition in New Delhi

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Varsha Bansal: “Indian law enforcement is starting to place huge importance on facial recognition technology. Delhi police, looking into identifying people involved in civil unrest in northern India in the past few years, said that they would consider 80 percent accuracy and above as a “positive” match, according to documents obtained by the Internet Freedom Foundation through a public records request.

Facial recognition’s arrival in India’s capital region marks the expansion of Indian law enforcement officials using facial recognition data as evidence for potential prosecution, ringing alarm bells among privacy and civil liberties experts. There are also concerns about the 80 percent accuracy threshold, which critics say is arbitrary and far too low, given the potential consequences for those marked as a match. India’s lack of a comprehensive data protection law makes matters even more concerning.

The documents further state that even if a match is under 80 percent, it would be considered a “false positive” rather than a negative, which would make that individual “subject to due verification with other corroborative evidence.”

“This means that even though facial recognition is not giving them the result that they themselves have decided is the threshold, they will continue to investigate,” says Anushka Jain, associate policy counsel for surveillance and technology with the IFF, who filed for this information. “This could lead to harassment of the individual just because the technology is saying that they look similar to the person the police are looking for.” She added that this move by the Delhi Police could also result in harassment of people from communities that have been historically targeted by law enforcement officials…(More)”

China May Be Chasing Impossible Dream by Trying to Harness Internet Algorithms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Karen Hao: “China’s powerful cyberspace regulator has taken the first step in a pioneering—and uncertain—government effort to rein in the automated systems that shape the internet.

Earlier this month, the Cyberspace Administration of China published summaries of 30 core algorithms belonging to two dozen of the country’s most influential internet companies, including TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd., e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., owner of China’s ubiquitous WeChat super app.

The milestone marks the first systematic effort by a regulator to compel internet companies to reveal information about the technologies powering their platforms, which have shown the capacity to radically alter everything from pop culture to politics. It also puts Beijing on a path that some technology experts say few governments, if any, are equipped to handle….

One important question the effort raises, algorithm experts say, is whether direct government regulation of algorithms is practically possible.

The majority of today’s internet platform algorithms are based on a technology called machine learning, which automates decisions such as ad-targeting by learning to predict user behaviors from vast repositories of data. Unlike traditional algorithms that contain explicit rules coded by engineers, most machine-learning systems are black boxes, making it hard to decipher their logic or anticipate the consequences of their use.

Beijing’s interest in regulating algorithms started in 2020, after TikTok sought an American buyer to avoid being banned in the U.S., according to people familiar with the government’s thinking. When several bidders for the short-video platform lost interest after Chinese regulators announced new export controls on information-recommendation technology, it tipped off Beijing to the importance of algorithms, the people said…(More)”.

Why Japan is building smart cities from scratch

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Tim Hornyak: “By 2050, nearly 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities, up from just over half in 2020. Urbanization is nothing new, but an effort is under way across many high-income countries to make their cities smarter, using data, instrumentation and more efficient resource management. In most of these nations, the vast majority of smart-city projects involve upgrades to existing infrastructure. Japan stands out for its willingness to build smart communities from scratch as it grapples with a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce, meaning that there are fewer people of working age to support older people.

In 2021, the proportion of Japan’s population aged 65 and over hit 29.1%, the highest in the world. By 2036 it will be 33%. Regional cities, especially, face a long, slow economic decline.

As a resource-poor, disaster-prone country, Japan has also had to pursue energy efficiency and resilience following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the tsunamis it triggered. The resulting meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant initially encouraged a shift away from nuclear power, which accounted for less than 4% of Japan’s energy use in 2020. However, there are growing calls, led by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, for some reactors to be reopened to provide energy security and tackle rising fuel prices…(More)”.

Big, Open Data for Development: A Vision for India 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Alison Campion, Tobias Lunt and Paul Novosad: “The government generates terabytes of data directly and incidentally in the operation of public programs. For intrinsic and instrumental reasons, these data should be made open to the public. Intrinsically, a right to government data is implicit in the right to information. Instrumentally, open government data will improve policy, increase accountability, empower citizens, create new opportunities for private firms, and lead to development and economic growth. A series of case studies demonstrates these benefits in a range of other contexts. We next examine how government can maximize social benefit from government data. This entails opening administrative data as far upstream in the data pipeline as possible. Most administrative data can be minimally aggregated to protect privacy, while providing data with high geographic granularity. We assess the status quo of the Government of India’s data production and dissemination pipeline, and find that the greatest weakness lies in the last mile: making government data accessible to the public. This means more than posting it online; we describe a set of principles for lowering the access and use costs close to zero. Finally, we examine the use of government data to guide policy in the COVID-19 pandemic. Civil society played a key role in aggregating, disseminating, and analyzing government data, providing analysis that was essential to policy response. However, key pieces of data, like testing rates and seroprevalence distribution, were unnecessarily withheld by the government, data which could have substantially improved the policy response. A more open approach to government data would have saved many lives…(More)”.

Inside India’s plan to train 3.1 million 21st century civil servants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Anirudh Dinesh and Beth Simone Noveck: “Prime Minister Modi established the Government of India’s Capacity Building Commission (CBC) on April 1, 2021 to reimagine how the state can deliver high-quality citizen services. According to the Commission’s chairman, Adil Zainulbhai and its secretary, Hemang Jani, the Commission will work with 93 central government departments and more than 800 training institutions across India to train over three million central government employees.

The competencies that civil servants are trained in should not be defined from the top down

By training employees, especially those who interact with citizens on a daily basis like those in the railways and postal departments, the hope is to impart new ways of working that translate into more effective and trustworthy government and better quality interactions with residents. The Commission has set itself two “north stars” or stretch goals to accomplish, namely to contribute to improving the “ease of living” for citizens and to advance Prime Minister Modi’s vision to make India a $5 trillion economy…

The Capacity Building Commission’s philosophy is that the competencies that civil servants are trained in should not be defined from the top down. Rather, the Commission wants each ministry to answer: What is the single most important thing we need to accomplish and then define the competencies they need to achieve that goal. …

An important first step in creating a capacity building programme is to understand what competencies already exist (or not) in the civil service. We asked both Zainulbhai and Jani about the CBC’s thinking about creating such a baseline of skills. The Commission’s approach, Jani explained to us, is to ask each ministry to look at its training needs from three “lenses:”

  1. Does the ministry have the capacity to deliver on “national priorities”? And are government employees aware of these national priorities?
  2. Does the ministry have the capacity necessary to deliver “citizen-centric” services?
  3. The “technology lens”: Do civil servants not only understand the challenges posed by technology but also appreciate new technologies and the solutions that could come from them?

The Commission also looks at capacity building on three levels:

  1. The individual level: What knowledge, skill and attitude an individual needs.
  2. The organisation level: What rules and procedures might be hindering service delivery.
  3. The institutional level: How to create an enabling environment for employees to upskill themselves resulting in better public services…(More)”

Does public opinion shape public policy? Effect of citizen dissent on legislative outcomes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nara Park and Jihyun Ham: “In South Korea, the Advance Notice Legislation (ANL) system requires by law that a public announcement be issued on any proposed bill that is likely to affect the fundamental rights, duties, and/or daily life of the general public. By investigating the effects of public dissent submitted via the online ANL system in South Korea, this study attempts to address the critical issue of how to increase citizen participation in the political process and to offer a possible strategy that modern democratic governments can employ in this regard. The findings suggest that citizens will actively participate in the political process to make their voices heard when an appropriate participatory mechanism is available, but they will be more active if the administration encourages citizen participation with various policies and institutions. In other words, formal and informal institutions actively interact to affect the behavior of actors both within and outside the political arena…(More)”.

In India, your payment data could become evidence of dissent

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nilesh Christopher: “Indian payments firm Razorpay is under fire for seemingly breaching customer privacy. Some have gone on to call the company a “sell out” for sharing users’ payment data with authorities without their consent. But is faulting Razorpay for complying with a legal request fair?

On June 19, Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checking outlet Alt News, was arrested for hurting religious sentiments over a tweet he posted in 2018. Investigating authorities, through legal diktats, have now gained access to payment data of donors supporting Alt News from payments processor Razorpay. (Police are now probing Alt News for accepting foreign donations. Alt News has denied the charge.) 

The data sharing has had a chilling effect. Civil society organization Internet Freedom Foundation, which uses Razorpay for donations, is exploring “additional payment platforms to offer choice and comfort to donors.” Many donors are worried that they might now become targets on account of their contributions. 

This has created a new faultline in the discourse around weaponizing payment data by a state that has gained notoriety for cracking down on critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Faulting Razorpay for complying with a legal request is misguided. “I think Razorpay played it by the book,” said Dharmendra Chatur, partner at the law firm Poovayya & Co. “They sort of did what any reasonable person would do in this situation.” 

Under Section 91 of India’s Criminal Procedure Code, police authorities have the power to seek information or documents on the apprehension that a crime has been committed during the course of an inquiry, inspection, or trial. “You either challenge it or you comply. There’s no other option available [for Razorpay]. And who would want to just unnecessarily initiate litigation?” Chatur said…(More)”.

How China uses search engines to spread propaganda

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Jessica Brandt and Valerie Wirtschafter: “Users come to search engines seeking honest answers to their queries. On a wide range of issues—from personal health, to finance, to news—search engines are often the first stop for those looking to get information online. But as authoritarian states like China increasingly use online platforms to disseminate narratives aimed at weakening their democratic competitors, these search engines represent a crucial battleground in their information war with rivals. For Beijing, search engines represent a key—and underappreciated vector—to spread propaganda to audiences around the world.  

On a range of topics of geopolitical importance, Beijing has exploited search engine results to disseminate state-backed media that amplify the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda. As we demonstrate in our recent report, published by the Brookings Institution in collaboration with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, users turning to search engines for information on Xinjiang, the site of the CCP’s egregious human rights abuses of the region’s Uyghur minority, or the origins of the coronavirus pandemic are surprisingly likely to encounter articles on these topics published by Chinese state-media outlets. By prominently surfacing this type of content, search engines may play a key role in Beijing’s effort to shape external perceptions, which makes it crucial that platforms—along with authoritative outlets that syndicate state-backed content without clear labeling—do more to address their role in spreading these narratives…(More)“.

Unleashing the power of big data to guide precision medicine in China

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Yvaine Ye in Nature: “Precision medicine in China was given a boost in 2016 when the government included the field in its 13th five-year economic plan. The policy blueprint, which defined the country’s spending priorities until 2020, pledged to “spur innovation and industrial application” in precision medicine alongside other areas such as smart vehicles and new materials.

Precision medicine is part of the Healthy China 2030 plan, also launched in 2016. The idea is to use the approach to tackle some major health-care challenges the country faces, such as rising cancer rates and issues related to an ageing population. Current projections suggest that, by 2040, 28% of China’s population will be over 60 years old.

Following the announcement of the five-year plan, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) launched a precision-medicine project as part of its National Key Research and Development Program. MOST has invested about 1.3 billion yuan (US$200.4 million) in more than 100 projects from 2016 to 2018. These range from finding new drug targets for chronic diseases such as diabetes to developing better sequencing technologies and building a dozen large population cohorts comprising hundreds of thousands of people from across China.

China’s population of 1.4 billion people means the country has great potential for using big data to study health issues, says Zhengming Chen, an epidemiologist and chronic-disease researcher at the University of Oxford, UK. “The advantage is especially prominent in the research of rare diseases, where you might not be able to have a data set in smaller countries like the United Kingdom, where only a handful of cases exist,” says Chen, who leads the China Kadoorie Biobank, a chronic-disease initiative that launched in 2004. It recruited more than 510,000 adults from 10 regions across China in its first 4 years, collecting data through questionnaires and by recording physical measurements and storing participants’ blood samples for future study. So far, the team has investigated whether some disease-related lifestyle factors that have been identified in the West apply to the Chinese population. They have just begun to dig into participants’ genetic data, says Chen.

Another big-data precision-medicine project launched in 2021, after Huijun Yuan, a physician who has been researching hereditary hearing loss for more than two decades, founded the Institute of Rare Diseases at West China Hospital in Chengdu, Sichuan province, in 2020. By 2025, the institute plans to set up a database of 100,000 people from China who have rare conditions, including spinal muscular atrophy and albinism. It will contain basic health information and data relating to biological samples, such as blood for gene sequencing. Rare diseases are hard to diagnose, because their incidences are low. But the development of technologies such as genetic testing and artificial intelligence driven by big data is providing a fresh approach to diagnosing these rare conditions, and could pave the way for therapies…(More)”.

A New Model for Saving Lives on Roads Around the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Krishen Mehta & Piyush Tewari: “…In 2016, SaveLIFE Foundation (SLF), an Indian non-profit organization, introduced the Zero Fatality Corridor (ZFC) solution, which has, since its inception, delivered an unprecedented reduction in road crash fatalities on the stretches of road where it has been deployed. The ZFC solution has adapted and added to the Safe System Approach, traditionally a western concept, to make it suitable for Indian conditions and requirements.

The Safe System Approach recognizes that people are fallible and can make mistakes that may be fatal for them or their fellow road-users—irrespective of how well they are trained.

The ZFC model, in turn, is an innovation designed specifically to accommodate the realities, resources, and existing infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries, which are vastly different from their developed counterparts. For example, unlike developed nations, people in low- and middle-income countries often live closer to the highways, and use them on a daily basis on foot or through traditional and slower modes of transportation. This gives rise to high crash conflict areas.

Some of the practices that are a part of the ZFC solution include optimized placement of ambulances at high-fatality locations, the utilization of drones to identify parked vehicles to preemptively prevent rear-end collisions, and road engineering solutions unique to the realities of countries like India. The ZFC model has helped create a secure environment specific to such countries with safer roads, safer vehicles, safer speeds, safer drivers, and rapid post-crash response.

The ZFC model was first deployed in 2016 on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway (MPEW) in Maharashtra, through a collaboration between SLF, Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), and automaker Mahindra & Mahindra. From 2010 to 2016, the 95-kilometer stretch witnessed 2,579 crashes and 887 fatalities, making it one of India’s deadliest roads…(More)”.