OECD paper by Craig Matasick, Carlotta Alfonsi and Alessandro Bellantoni: “This paper provides a holistic policy approach to the challenge of disinformation by exploring a range of governance responses that rest on the open government principles of transparency, integrity, accountability and stakeholder participation. It offers an analysis of the significant changes that are affecting media and information ecosystems, chief among them the growth of digital platforms. Drawing on the implications of this changing landscape, the paper focuses on four policy areas of intervention: public communication for a better dialogue between government and citizens; direct responses to identify and combat disinformation; legal and regulatory policy; and media and civic responses that support better information ecosystems. The paper concludes with proposed steps the OECD can take to build evidence and support policy in this space…(More)”.
A need for open public data standards and sharing in light of COVID-19
Lauren Gardner, Jeremy Ratcliff, Ensheng Dong and Aaron Katz at the Lancet: “The disjointed public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated one clear truth: the value of timely, publicly available data. The John Hopkins University (JHU) Center for Systems Science and Engineering’s COVID-19 dashboard exists to provide this information. What grew from a modest effort to track a novel cause of pneumonia in China quickly became a mainstay symbol of the pandemic, receiving over 1 billion hits per day within weeks of its creation, primarily driven by the general public seeking information on the emerging health crisis. Critically, the data supporting the visualisation were provided in a publicly accessible repository and eagerly adopted by policy makers and the research community for purposes of modelling and planning, as evidenced by the more than 1200 citations in the first 4 months of its publication. 6 months into the pandemic, the JHU COVID-19 dashboard still stands as the authoritative source of global COVID-19 epidemiological data.
Similar commendable efforts to facilitate public understanding of COVID-19 have since been introduced by various academic, industry, and public health entities. These costly and disparate efforts around the world were necessary to fill the gap left by the lack of an established infrastructure for real-time reporting and open data sharing during an ongoing public health crisis…
Although existing systems were in place to achieve such objectives, they were not empowered or equipped to fully meet the public’s expectation for timely open data at an actionable level of spatial resolution. Moving forward, it is imperative that a standardised reporting system for systematically collecting, visualising, and sharing high-quality data on emerging infectious and notifiable diseases in real-time is established. The data should be made available at a spatial and temporal scale that is granular enough to prove useful for planning and modelling purposes. Additionally, a critical component of the proposed system is the democratisation of data; all collected information (observing necessary privacy standards) should be made publicly available immediately upon release, in machine-readable formats, and based on open data standards..(More)”. (See also https://data4covid19.org/)
Mapping socioeconomic indicators using social media advertising data
Paper by Ingmar Weber et al: “The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a global consensus on the world’s most pressing challenges. They come with a set of 232 indicators against which countries should regularly monitor their progress, ensuring that everyone is represented in up-to-date data that can be used to make decisions to improve people’s lives. However, existing data sources to measure progress on the SDGs are often outdated or lacking appropriate disaggregation. We evaluate the value that anonymous, publicly accessible advertising data from Facebook can provide in mapping socio-economic development in two low and middle income countries, the Philippines and India. Concretely, we show that audience estimates of how many Facebook users in a given location use particular device types, such as Android vs. iOS devices, or particular connection types, such as 2G vs. 4G, provide strong signals for modeling regional variation in the Wealth Index (WI), derived from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). We further show that, surprisingly, the predictive power of these digital connectivity features is roughly equal at both the high and low ends of the WI spectrum. Finally we show how such data can be used to create gender-disaggregated predictions, but that these predictions only appear plausible in contexts with gender equal Facebook usage, such as the Philippines, but not in contexts with large gender Facebook gaps, such as India….(More)”.
From Desert Battlefields To Coral Reefs, Private Satellites Revolutionize The View
NPR Story: “As the U.S. military and its allies attacked the last Islamic State holdouts last year, it wasn’t clear how many civilians were still in the besieged desert town of Baghouz, Syria.
So Human Rights Watch asked a private satellite company, Planet, for its regular daily photos and also made a special request for video.
“That live video actually was instrumental in convincing us that there were thousands of civilians trapped in this pocket,” said Josh Lyons of Human Rights Watch. “Therefore, the coalition forces absolutely had an obligation to stop and to avoid bombardment of that pocket at that time.”
Which they did until the civilians fled.
Lyons, who’s based in Geneva, has a job title you wouldn’t expect at a human rights group: director of geospatial analysis. He says satellite imagery is increasingly a crucial component of human rights investigations, bolstering traditional eyewitness accounts, especially in areas where it’s too dangerous to send researchers.
“Then we have this magical sort of fusion of data between open-source, eyewitness testimony and data from space. And that becomes essentially a new gold standard for investigations,” he said.
‘A string of pearls’
Satellite photos used to be restricted to the U.S. government and a handful of other nations. Now such imagery is available to everyone, creating a new world of possibilities for human rights groups, environmentalists and researchers who monitor nuclear programs.
They get those images from a handful of private, commercial satellite companies, like Planet and Maxar….(More)”.
Building and maintaining trust in research
Daniel Nunan at the International Journal of Market Research: “One of the many indirect consequences of the COVID pandemic for the research sector may be the impact upon consumers’ willingness to share data. This is reflected in concerns that government mandated “apps” designed to facilitate COVID testing and tracking schemes will undermine trust in the commercial collection of personal data (WARC, 2020). For example, uncertainty over the consequences of handing over data and the ways in which it might be used could reduce consumers’ willingness to share data with organizations, and reverse a trend that has seen growing levels of consumer confidence in Data Protection Regulations (Data & Direct Marketing Association [DMA], 2020). This highlights how central the role of trust has become in contemporary research practice, and how fragile the process of building trust can be due to the ever competing demands of public and private data collectors.
For researchers, there are two sides to trust. One relates to building sufficient trust with research participants to be facilitate data collection, and the second is building trust with the users of research. Trust has long been understood as a key factor in effective research relationships, with trust between researchers and users of research the key factor in determining the extent to which research is actually used (Moorman et al., 1993). In other words, a trusted messenger is just as important as the contents of the message. In recent years, there has been growing concern over declining trust in research from research participants and the general public, manifested in declining response rates and challenges in gaining participation. Understanding how to build consumer trust is more important than ever, as the shift of communication and commercial activity to digital platforms alter the mechanisms through which trust is built. Trust is therefore essential both for ensuring that accurate data can be collected, and that insights from research have necessary legitimacy to be acted upon. The two research notes in this issue provide an insight into new areas where the issue of trust needs to be considered within research practice….(More)”.
The Risks and Rewards of Data Sharing for Smart Cities
Study by Massimo Russo and Tian Feng: “…To develop innovative solutions to problems old and new, many cities are aggregating and sharing more and more data, establishing platforms to facilitate private-sector participation, and holding “hackathons” and other digital events to invite public help. But digital solutions carry their own complications. Technology-led innovation often depends on access to data from a wide variety of sources to derive correlations and insights. Questions regarding data ownership, amalgamation, compensation, and privacy can be flashing red lights.
Smart cities are on the leading edge of the trend toward greater data sharing. They are also complex generators and users of data. Companies, industries, governments, and others are following in their wake, sharing more data in order to foster innovation and address such macro-level challenges as public health and welfare and climate change. Smart cities thus provide a constructive laboratory for studying the challenges and benefits of data sharing.
WHY CITIES SHARE DATA
BCG examined some 75 smart-city applications that use data from a variety of sources, including connected equipment (that is, the Internet of Things, or IoT). Nearly half the applications require data sourced from multiple industries or platforms. (See Exhibit 1.) For example, a parking reservation app assembles garage occupancy data, historical traffic data, current weather data, and information on upcoming public events to determine real-time parking costs. We also looked at a broader set of potential future applications and found that an additional 40% will likewise require cross-industry data aggregation.
Because today’s smart solutions are often sponsored by individual municipal departments, many IoT-enabled applications rely on limited, siloed data. But given the potential value of applications that require aggregation across sources, it’s no surprise that many cities are pursuing partnerships with tech providers to develop platforms and other initiatives that integrate data from multiple sources….(More)”.
Strengthening Privacy Protections in COVID-19 Mobile Phone–Enhanced Surveillance Programs
Rand Report: “Dozens of countries, including the United States, have been using mobile phone tools and data sources for COVID-19 surveillance activities, such as tracking infections and community spread, identifying populated areas at risk, and enforcing quarantine orders. These tools can augment traditional epidemiological interventions, such as contact tracing with technology-based data collection (e.g., automated signaling and record-keeping on mobile phone apps). As the response progresses, other beneficial technologies could include tools that authenticate those with low risk of contagion or that build community trust as stay-at-home orders are lifted.
However, the potential benefits that COVID-19 mobile phone–enhanced public health (“mobile”) surveillance program tools could provide are also accompanied by potential for harm. There are significant risks to citizens from the collection of sensitive data, including personal health, location, and contact data. People whose personal information is being collected might worry about who will receive the data, how those recipients might use the data, how the data might be shared with other entities, and what measures will be taken to safeguard the data from theft or abuse.
The risk of privacy violations can also impact government accountability and public trust. The possibility that one’s privacy will be violated by government officials or technology companies might dissuade citizens from getting tested for COVID-19, downloading public health–oriented mobile phone apps, or sharing symptom or location data. More broadly, real or perceived privacy violations might discourage citizens from believing government messaging or complying with government orders regarding COVID-19.
As U.S. public health agencies consider COVID-19-related mobile surveillance programs, they will need to address privacy concerns to encourage broad uptake and protect against privacy harms. Otherwise, COVID-19 mobile surveillance programs likely will be ineffective and the data collected unrepresentative of the situation on the ground….(More)“.
Digital technologies in the public-health response to COVID-19
Paper by Jobie Budd et al in Nature Medicine: “Digital technologies are being harnessed to support the public-health response to COVID-19 worldwide, including population surveillance, case identification, contact tracing and evaluation of interventions on the basis of mobility data and communication with the public. These rapid responses leverage billions of mobile phones, large online datasets, connected devices, relatively low-cost computing resources and advances in machine learning and natural language processing. This Review aims to capture the breadth of digital innovations for the public-health response to COVID-19 worldwide and their limitations, and barriers to their implementation, including legal, ethical and privacy barriers, as well as organizational and workforce barriers. The future of public health is likely to become increasingly digital, and we review the need for the alignment of international strategies for the regulation, evaluation and use of digital technologies to strengthen pandemic management, and future preparedness for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases….(More)”.
The Ethics of Pandemics
Book edited by Meredith Celene Schwartz: “The rapid spread of COVID-19 has had an unprecedented impact on modern health-care systems and has given rise to a number of complex ethical issues. This collection of readings and case studies offers an overview of some of the most pressing of these issues, such as the allocation of ventilators and other scarce resources, the curtailing of standard privacy measures for the sake of public health, and the potential obligations of health-care professionals to continue operating in dangerous work environments….(More)“.
Coming Together While Staying Apart : Facilitating Collective Action through Trust and Social Connection in the Age of COVID-19
Worldbank Report: “Facing the COVID-19 pandemic requires an unprecedented degree of cooperation between governments and citizens and across all facets of society to implement spatial distancing and other policy measures. This paper proposes to think about handling the pandemic as a collective action problem that can be alleviated by policies that foster trust and social connection. Policy and institutional recommendations are presented according to a three-layered pandemic response generally corresponding to short-, medium-, and long-term needs. This paper focuses on building connection and cooperation as means to bring about better health and socioeconomic outcomes. Many factors outside the paper’s scope, such as health policy choices, will greatly affect the outcomes. As such, the paper explores the role of trust, communication, and collaboration conditional on sound health and economic policy choices…(More)”.