Paper by Anna Boldina, Paul H. P. Hanel & Koen Steemers: “Inactivity is one of the major health risks in technologically developed countries. This paper explores the potential of a series of urban landscape interventions to engage people in physical activity. Online surveys were conducted with 595 participants living in the UK by inviting them to choose between conventional pavement or challenging routes (steppingstones, balancing beams, and high steps) using photorealistic images. Across four experiments, we discovered that 80% of walkers claim they would pick a challenging route in at least one of the scenarios, depending on perceived level of difficulty and design characteristics. Where a challenging option was shorter than a conventional route, this increased the likelihood of being chosen by 10%, and the presence of handrails by 12%. This suggests that people can get nudged into physical activities through minor changes to the urban landscape. We discuss implications for policy makers and urban designers…(More)”.
Digital Sovereignty: From Narrative To Policy?
Report by EU Cyber Direct: “The debate in Europe about digital sovereignty, technological sovereignty, data sovereignty and strategic autonomy has been building over recent years at both the EU level and the level of individual Member States. The different concepts – and their diverse interpretations – cover the sovereignty concerns of citizens, states and the EU itself, and range from the protection of fundamental rights to addressing geo-economic strengths and vulnerabilities and European military concerns. The language of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy has become integrated into the policy statements and documents of the European Union, even if definitions of the terminology remain scarce. While there has been much analysis of these new narratives of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy, less attention has been paid to the alignment – or misalignment – between these narratives and the EU policies that would translate the concepts into everyday life.
This lacuna was the point of departure for the EU Cyber Direct Research Seminar co-organised with The Hague Program on International Cyber Security on 18 March 2022 under the title Digital Sovereignty: From Narrative to Policy?, the results of which are published in this publication…(More)”.
The potential of Facebook advertising data for understanding flows of people from Ukraine to the European Union
Paper by Umberto Minora et al: “This work contributes to the discussion on how innovative data can support a fast crisis response. We use operational data from Facebook to gain useful insights on where people fleeing Ukraine following the Russian invasion are likely to be displaced, focusing on the European Union. In this context, it is extremely important to anticipate where these people are moving so that local and national authorities can better manage challenges related to their reception and integration. By means of the audience estimates provided by Facebook advertising platform, we analyse the flows of people fleeing Ukraine towards the European Union. At the fifth week since the beginning of the war, our results indicate an increase in the number of Ukrainian stocks derived from Ukrainian-speaking Facebook user estimates in all the European Union (EU) countries, with Poland registering the highest percentage share (33%) of the overall increase, followed by Germany (17%), and Czechia (15%). We assess the reliability of prewar Facebook estimates by comparison with official statistics on the Ukrainian diaspora, finding a strong correlation between the two data sources (Pearson’s ?=0.9r=0.9, ?<0.0001p<0.0001). We then compare our results with data on refugees in EU countries bordering Ukraine reported by the UNHCR, and we observe a similarity in their trend. In conclusion, we show how Facebook advertising data could offer timely insights on international mobility during crises, supporting initiatives aimed at providing humanitarian assistance to the displaced people, as well as local and national authorities to better manage their reception and integration…(More)”.
Economic Research on Privacy Regulation: Lessons from the GDPR and Beyond
Paper by Garrett Johnson: “This paper reviews the economic literature on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). I highlight key challenges for studying the regulation including the difficulty of finding a suitable control group, variable firm compliance and regulatory enforcement, as well as the regulation’s impact on data observability. The economic literature on the GDPR to date has largely—though not universally—documented harms to firms. These harms include firm performance, innovation, competition, the web, and marketing. On the elusive consumer welfare side, the literature documents some objective privacy improvements as well as helpful survey evidence. The literature also examines the consequences of the GDPR’s design decisions and illuminates how the GDPR works in practice. Finally, I suggest opportunities for future research on the GDPR as well as privacy regulation and privacy-related innovation more broadly…(More)”.
Orbán used Hungarians’ COVID data to boost election campaign, report says
Article by Louis Westendarp: “Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling party Fidesz used citizens’ data from COVID-19 vaccine signups to spread Fidesz campaign messages before Hungary’s election in April 2022, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
Not only was data from vaccine jabs used to help Fidesz, but also data from tax benefits applications and association membership registrations. This violates privacy rights, said the report — and blurs the line between the ruling party and government resources in Hungary, which has repeatedly been warned by the EU to clean up its act regarding the rule of law.
“Using people’s personal data collected so they could access public services to bombard them with political campaign messages is a betrayal of trust and an abuse of power,” said Deborah Brown, senior technology researcher at Human Rights Watch…(More)”.
Varieties of Mobility Measures: Comparing Survey and Mobile Phone Data during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Paper by Fabian Kalleitner, David W Schiestl, Georg Heiler: “Human mobility has become a major variable of interest during the COVID-19 pandemic and central to policy decisions all around the world. To measure individual mobility, research relies on a variety of indicators that commonly stem from two main data sources: survey self-reports and behavioral mobility data from mobile phones. However, little is known about how mobility from survey self-reports relates to popular mobility estimates using data from the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Spanning March 2020 until April 2021, this study compares self-reported mobility from a panel survey in Austria to aggregated mobility estimates utilizing (1) GSM data and (2) Google’s GPS-based Community Mobility Reports. Our analyses show that correlations in mobility changes over time are high, both in general and when comparing subgroups by age, gender, and mobility category. However, while these trends are similar, the size of relative mobility changes over time differs substantially between different mobility estimates. Overall, while our findings suggest that these mobility estimates manage to capture similar latent variables, especially when focusing on changes in mobility over time, researchers should be aware of the specific form of mobility different data sources capture….(More)”.
New Interoperable Europe Act to deliver more efficient public services through improved cooperation between national administrations on data exchanges and IT solutions
Press Release: “The Commission has adopted the Interoperable Europe Act proposal and its accompanying Communication to strengthen cross-border interoperability and cooperation in the public sector across the EU. The Act will support the creation of a network of sovereign and interconnected digital public administrations and will accelerate the digital transformation of Europe’s public sector. It will help the EU and its Member States to deliver better public services to citizens and businesses, and as such, it is an essential step to achieve Europe’s digital targets for 2030 and support trusted data flows. It will also help save costs, and cross-border interoperability can lead to cost-savings between €5.5 and €6.3 million for citizens and between €5.7 and €19.2 billion for businesses dealing with public administrations…
The Interoperable Europe Act introduces:
- A structured EU cooperation where public administrations, supported by public and private actors, come together in the framework of projects co-owned by Member States, as well as regions and cities.
- Mandatory assessments to evaluate the impact of changes in information technology (IT) systems on cross-border interoperability in the EU.
- The sharing and reuse of solutions, often open source, powered by an ‘Interoperable Europe Portal’ – a one-stop-shop for solutions and community cooperation.
- Innovation and support measures, including regulatory sandboxes for policy experimentation, GovTech projects to develop and scale up solutions for reuse, and training support…(More)”.
Digital rights and principles: a digital transformation for EU citizens
Press Release: “The Commission welcomes the agreement reached yesterday with the Parliament and the Council on the European declaration on digital rights and principles. The declaration, proposed in January, establishes a clear reference point about the kind of human-centred digital transformation that the EU promotes and defends, at home and abroad.
It builds on key EU values and freedoms and will benefit all individuals and businesses. The declaration will also provide a guide for policymakers and companies when dealing with new technologies. The declaration focuses on six key areas: putting people at the centre of the digital transformation; solidarity and inclusion; freedom of choice; participation in digital life; safety and security; and sustainability…(More)” See also: European Digital Rights and Principles
Digital Oil
Book by Eric Monteiro: “Digitalization sits at the forefront of public and academic conversation today, calling into question how we work and how we know. In Digital Oil, Eric Monteiro uses the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry as a lens to investigate the effects of digitalization on embodied labor and, in doing so, shows how our use of new digital technology transforms work and knowing.
For years, roughnecks have performed the dangerous and unwieldy work of extracting the oil that lies three miles below the seabed along the Norwegian continental shelf. Today, the Norwegian oil industry is largely digital, operated by sensors and driven by data. Digital representations of physical processes inform work practices and decision-making with remotely operated, unmanned deep-sea facilities. Drawing on two decades of in-depth interviews, observations, news clips, and studies of this industry, Monteiro dismantles the divide between the virtual and the physical in Digital Oil.
What is gained or lost when objects and processes become algorithmic phenomena with the digital inferred from the physical? How can data-driven work practices and operational decision-making approximate qualitative interpretation, professional judgement, and evaluation? How are emergent digital platforms and infrastructures, as machineries of knowing, enabling digitalization? In answering these questions Monteiro offers a novel analysis of digitalization as an effort to press the limits of quantification of the qualitative…(More)”.
Missions for governance: Unleashing missions beyond policy
Paper by Demos Helsinki: “How can governments pursue meaningful industrial policy in the 21st century? How can they incentivise new markets to lead the twin transition? How can they create good jobs for future disadvantaged workers?
Most importantly, can the current setup of government achieve these essential transformations?
In this white paper, we propose a way to think about and implement missions that can unleash them beyond mere policy tools, launching a new type of governance for the 21st century.
The rise of mission-oriented innovation policy (MOIP) has given policymakers a practical approach to enabling and accelerating societal, economic, and technological transformations. The main premise behind its ever-growing dissemination across global policy networks is straightforward: in the face of the challenges posed by the 21st century, traditional innovation policy is broken.
Indeed, between 2010 and 2020, governments did not invest in clean energy as much as they should have; there was slow growth in markets for education, care, and other social services; and even antivirals were underfunded, leading to a slower response to the pandemic….(More)”.