Regulation of Big Data: Perspectives on Strategy, Policy, Law and Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Pompeu Casanovas, Louis de Koker, Danuta Mendelson and David Watts: “…presents four complementary perspectives stemming from governance, law, ethics, and computer science. Big, Linked, and Open Data constitute complex phenomena whose economic and political dimensions require a plurality of instruments to enhance and protect citizens’ rights. Some conclusions are offered in the end to foster a more general discussion.

This article contends that the effective regulation of Big Data requires a combination of legal tools and other instruments of a semantic and algorithmic nature. It commences with a brief discussion of the concept of Big Data and views expressed by Australian and UK participants in a study of Big Data use in a law enforcement and national security perspective. The second part of the article highlights the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy interest in the themes and the focus of their new program on Big Data. UK law reforms regarding authorisation of warrants for the exercise of bulk data powers is discussed in the third part. Reflecting on these developments, the paper closes with an exploration of the complex relationship between law and Big Data and the implications for regulation and governance of Big Data….(More)”.

Computational Propaganda Worldwide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Summary: “The Computational Propaganda Research Project at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, has researched the use of social media for public opinion manipulation. The team involved 12 researchers across nine countries who, altogether, interviewed 65 experts, analyzed tens of millions posts on seven different social media platforms during scores of elections, political crises, and national security incidents. Each case study analyzes qualitative, quantitative, and computational evidence collected between 2015 and 2017 from Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

Computational propaganda is the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks. We find several distinct global trends in computational propaganda. •

  • Social media are significant platforms for political engagement and crucial channels for disseminating news content. Social media platforms are the primary media over which young people develop their political identities.
    • In some countries this is because some companies, such as Facebook, are effectively monopoly platforms for public life. o In several democracies the majority of voters use social media to share political news and information, especially during elections.
    • In countries where only small proportions of the public have regular access to social media, such platforms are still fundamental infrastructure for political conversation among the journalists, civil society leaders, and political elites.
  • Social media are actively used as a tool for public opinion manipulation, though in diverse ways and on different topics. o In authoritarian countries, social media platforms are a primary means of social control. This is especially true during political and security crises. o In democracies, social media are actively used for computational propaganda either through broad efforts at opinion manipulation or targeted experiments on particular segments of the public.
  • In every country we found civil society groups trying, but struggling, to protect themselves and respond to active misinformation campaigns….(More)”.

LSE launches crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials to shape Brexit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

LSE Press Release: “A crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials in Britain and the EU to help shape the upcoming Brexit negotiations is being launched by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) this week.

The social media-based project, which hopes to engage 3000 millennials aged 35 and under, kicks off on 23 June, the first anniversary of the life-changing vote to take Britain out of the EU.

One of the Generation Brexit project leaders, Dr Jennifer Jackson-Preece from LSE’s European Institute, said the online platform would give a voice to British and European millennials on the future of Europe in the Brexit negotiations and beyond.

She said: “We’re going to invite millennials from across the UK and Europe to debate, decide and draft policy proposals that will be sent to parliaments in Westminster and Strasbourg during the negotiations.”

Another project leader, Dr Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz, said the pan-European project would seek views from a whole cross section of millennials, including Leavers, Remainers, left and right-wingers, European federalists and nationalists.

“We want to come up with millennial proposals for a mutually beneficial relationship, reflecting the diverse political, cultural, religious and economic backgrounds in the UK and EU.

“We are especially keen to engage the forgotten, the apolitical and the apathetic – for whom Brexit has become a moment of political awakening,” he said.

Generation Brexit follows on the heels of LSE’s Constitution UK crowdsourcing project in 2015, which broke new ground in galvanising people around the country to help shape Britain’s first constitution. The 10-week internet project signed up 1500 people from all corners of the UK to debate how the country should be governed.

Dr Manmit Bhambra, also working on the project, said the success of the Constitution UK platform had laid the foundation for Generation Brexit, with LSE hoping to double the numbers and sign up 3000 participants, split equally between Britain and Europe.

The project can be accessed at www.generationbrexit.org and all updates will be available on Twitter @genbrexit & @lsebrexitvote with the hashtag #GenBrexit, and on facebook.com/GenBrexit… (More)”.

Fly on the Facebook Wall: How UNHCR Listened to Refugees on Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Social Media for Good: “In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR shows how to conduct meaningful, qualitative social media monitoring in a humanitarian crisis.

From A Refugee PerspectiveBetween March and December 2016 the project team (one project manager, one Pashto and Dari speaker, two native Arabic speakers and an English copy editor) monitored Facebook conversations related to flight and migration in the Afghan and Arabic speaking communities.

To do this, the team created Facebook accounts, joined relevant Facebook groups and summarised their findings in weekly monitoring reports to UNHCR staff and other interested people. I received these reports every week while working as the UNHCR team leader for the Communicating with Communities team in Greece and found them very useful since they gave me insights into what were some of the burning issues that week.

The project did not monitor Twitter because Twitter was not widely used by the communities.

In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR has now summarised their findings from the ten-month project. The main thing I really liked about this project is that UNHCR invested the resources for proper qualitative social media monitoring, as opposed to the purely quantitative analyses that we see so often and which rarely go beyond keyword counting. To complement the social media information, the team held focus group and other discussions with refugees who had arrived in Europe. Among other things, these discussion provided information on how the refugees and migrants are consuming and exchanging information (related: see this BBC Media Action report).

Of course, this type of research is much more resource intensive than what most organisations have in mind when they want to do social media monitoring, but this report shows that additional resources can also result in more meaningful information.

Smuggling prices

Smuggling prices according to monitored Facebook page. Source: From A Refugee Perspective

Monitoring the conversations on Facebook enabled the team to track trends, such as the rise and fall of prices that smugglers asked for different routes (see image). In addition, it provided fascinating insights into how smugglers are selling their services online….(More)”

Citizen Participation: A Critical Look at the Democratic Adequacy of Government Consultations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
John Morison at Oxford Journal of Legal Studies: “Consultation procedures are used increasingly in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. This account looks critically at consultation as presently practised, and suggests that consulters and consultees need to do much more to ensure both the participatory validity and democratic value of such exercises. The possibility of a ‘right to be consulted’ is examined. Some ideas from a governmentality perspective are developed, using the growth of localism as an example, to suggest that consultation is often a very structured interaction: the actual operation of participation mechanisms may not always create a space for an equal exchange between official and participant views. Examples of best practice in consultation are examined, before consideration is given to recent case law from the UK seeking to establish basic ground rules for how consultations should be organised. Finally, the promise of consultation to reinvigorate democracy is evaluated and weighed against the correlative risk of ‘participatory disempowerment’…(More)”.

The Digital Footprint of Europe’s Refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Research Center: “Migrants leaving their homes for a new country often carry a smartphone to communicate with family that may have stayed behind and to help search for border crossings, find useful information about their journey or search for details about their destination. The digital footprints left by online searches can provide insight into the movement of migrants as they transit between countries and settle in new locations, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of refugee flows between the Middle East and Europe.1

Refugees from just two Middle Eastern countries — Syria and Iraq — made up a combined 38% of the record 1.3 million people who arrived and applied for asylum in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland in 2015 and a combined 37% of the 1.2 million first-time asylum applications in 2016. Most Syrian and Iraqi refugees during this period crossed from Turkey to Greece by sea, before continuing on to their final destinations in Europe.

Since many refugees from Syria and Iraq speak Arabic as their native, if not only, language, it is possible to identify key moments in their migration by examining trends in internet searches conducted in Turkey using Arabic, as opposed to the dominant Turkic languages in that country. For example, Turkey-based searches for the word “Greece” in Arabic closely mirror 2015 and 2016 fluctuations in the number of refugees crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece. The searches also provide a window into how migrants planned to move across borders — for example, the search term “Greece” was often combined with “smuggler.” In addition, an hourly analysis of searches in Turkey shows spikes in the search term “Greece” during early morning hours, a typical time for migrants making their way across the Mediterranean.

Comparing online searches with migration data

This report’s analysis compares data from internet searches with government and international agency refugee arrival and asylum application data in Europe from 2015 and 2016. Internet searches were captured from Google Trends, a publicly-available analytical tool that standardizes search volume by language and location over time. The analysis examines searches in Arabic, done in Turkey and Germany, for selected words such as “Greece” or “German” that can be linked to migration patterns. For a complete list of search terms employed, see the methodology. Google releases hourly, daily and weekly search data.

Google does not release the actual number of searches conducted but provides a metric capturing the relative change in searches over a specified time period. The metric ranges from 0 to 100 and indicates low- or high-volume search activity for the time period. Predicting or deciphering human behavior from the analysis of internet searches has limitations and remains experimental. But, internet search data does offer a potentially promising way to explore migration flows crossing international borders.

Migration data cited in this report come from two sources. The first is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which provides data on new arrivals into Greece on a monthly basis. The second is first-time asylum applications from Eurostat, Europe’s statistical agency. Since both Syrian and Iraqi asylum seekers have had fairly high acceptance rates in Europe, it is likely that most Syrian and Iraqi migrants entering during 2015 and 2016 were counted by UNHCR and applied for asylum with European authorities.

The unique circumstances of this Syrian and Iraqi migration — the technology used by refugees, the large and sudden movement of refugees and language groups in transit and destination countries — presents a unique opportunity to integrate the analysis of online searches and migration data. The conditions that permit this type of analysis may not apply in other circumstances where migrants are moving between countries….(More)”

Social Network for Doctors to Transform Medical Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “SERMO, a global social network for physicians has expanded its footprint globally to revolutionize medical crowdsourcing. SERMO is now open to physicians on all seven continents, delivering on its promise from day one to unite physicians from every corner of the globe, ensuring the free flow of expert information amongst physicians.

Now available in more than 150 countries, physicians from both rural and urban areas, in developed and developing nations, can be exposed to the same expertise from their peers, providing an even higher level of care to their patients.

According to one orthopedic surgeon from Greece, SERMO offers “Exciting doctor interactions, is very helpful with difficult cases and always prompts us with very interesting social topics and discussions. It is a form of collective intelligence that allows individuals to achieve more than they could on their own.”

Combined with last month’s Drug Ratings launch, physicians will now be able to evaluate prescription drugs, in addition to communicating with peers and solving tough patient cases. These tools are revolutionizing the way physicians exchange and obtain information, as well as offer personalized care to their patients. With over 300,000 drug ratings gathered since the beta launch began last year, Ratings enables doctors globally to share prescription drug treatment experiences with their peers, transforming how physicians around the world make prescribing decisions in their daily practice.

SERMO’s membership has grown from 130,000 in 2012, when SERMO merged with WorldOne, to 650,000 total members prior to today’s expansion – now, the network includes close to 800,000 physicians….(More)”.

Inspecting Algorithms for Bias

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthias Spielkamp at MIT Technology Review: “It was a striking story. “Machine Bias,” the headline read, and the teaser proclaimed: “There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.”

ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonprofit news organization, had analyzed risk assessment software known as COMPAS. It is being used to forecast which criminals are most likely to ­reoffend. Guided by such forecasts, judges in courtrooms throughout the United States make decisions about the future of defendants and convicts, determining everything from bail amounts to sentences. When ProPublica compared COMPAS’s risk assessments for more than 10,000 people arrested in one Florida county with how often those people actually went on to reoffend, it discovered that the algorithm “correctly predicted recidivism for black and white defendants at roughly the same rate.”…

After ProPublica’s investigation, Northpointe, the company that developed COMPAS, disputed the story, arguing that the journalists misinterpreted the data. So did three criminal-justice researchers, including one from a justice-reform organization. Who’s right—the reporters or the researchers? Krishna Gummadi, head of the Networked Systems Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken, Germany, offers a surprising answer: they all are.

Gummadi, who has extensively researched fairness in algorithms, says ProPublica’s and Northpointe’s results don’t contradict each other. They differ because they use different measures of fairness.

Imagine you are designing a system to predict which criminals will reoffend. One option is to optimize for “true positives,” meaning that you will identify as many people as possible who are at high risk of committing another crime. One problem with this approach is that it tends to increase the number of false positives: people who will be unjustly classified as likely reoffenders. The dial can be adjusted to deliver as few false positives as possible, but that tends to create more false negatives: likely reoffenders who slip through and get a more lenient treatment than warranted.

Raising the incidence of true positives or lowering the false positives are both ways to improve a statistical measure known as positive predictive value, or PPV. That is the percentage of all positives that are true….

But if we accept that algorithms might make life fairer if they are well designed, how can we know whether they are so designed?

Democratic societies should be working now to determine how much transparency they expect from ADM systems. Do we need new regulations of the software to ensure it can be properly inspected? Lawmakers, judges, and the public should have a say in which measures of fairness get prioritized by algorithms. But if the algorithms don’t actually reflect these value judgments, who will be held accountable?

These are the hard questions we need to answer if we expect to benefit from advances in algorithmic technology…(More)”.

Governments and Citizens in the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission: “In 2009, the Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment was adopted in Malmö, Sweden, uniting EU member states around a comprehensive programme for administrative reform and digital government. Now, as the government of Estonia prepares to take over the presidency of the Council of the European Union, EU Member States look again at the renewed prospects for restoring public trust in the digital age and unleashing the power of the Internet towards better public services and easier citizen/state interaction.

At the High-Level Roundtable on the European Union Ministerial Declaration on Digital Government, delegations from 13 member states met to discuss a “concept paper” prepared by the Lisbon Council.

It spelled out three areas for highlight:

  1. the “once-only” principle
  2. open government
  3. eIdentity and security

Delegations promised to take up the discussion in the Council of the European Union, but they want to hear from you, too. If you haven’t already, please visit www.ideas4digitalgov.eu, where you will find a commentable version of The 2017 Ministerial Declaration on Digital Government: Key Principles and Guidelines, the “thought paper” launched at the high-level roundtable.

Let us know what you think. The consultation is open and the results, if successful, will contribute to a new Ministerial Declaration on Digital Government to be adopted at the Council of the European Union informal meeting in Autumn, 2017. (More information)”

Applying Public Opinion in Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Scott Edward Bennett: “…explores how public opinion is used to design, monitor and evaluate government programmes in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Using information collected from the media and from international practitioners in the public opinion field, as well as interviews in each of the 4 countries, the author describes how views of public opinion and governance differ significantly between elites and the general public. Bennett argues that elites generally risk more by allowing the creation of new data, fearing that its analysis may become public and create communications and political problems of various kinds. The book finds evidence that recent conservative governments in several countries are changing their perspective on the use of public opinion, and that conventional public opinion studies are facing challenges from the availability of other kinds of information and new technologies….(More)”