Mind the app – considerations on the ethical risks of COVID-19 apps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Luciano Floridi: “There is a lot of talk about apps to deal with the pandemic. Some of the best solutions use the Bluetooth connection of mobile phones to determine the contact between people and therefore the probability of contagion.

In theory, it’s simple. In practice, it is a minefield of ethical problems, not only technical ones. To understand them, it is useful to distinguish between the validation and the verification of a system. 
The validation of a system answers the question: “are we building the right system?”. The answer is no if the app

  • is illegal;
  • is unnecessary, for example, there are better solutions; 
  • is a disproportionate solution to the problem, for example, there are only a few cases in the country; 
  • goes beyond the purpose for which it was designed, for example, it is used to discriminate people; 
  • continues to be used even after the end of the emergency.

Assuming the app passes the validation stage, then it needs to be verified.
The verification of a system answers the question: “are we building the system in the right way?”. Here too the difficulties are considerable. I have become increasingly aware of them as I collaborate with two national projects about a coronavirus app, as an advisor on their ethical implications. 
For once, the difficult problem is not privacy. Of course, it is trivially true that there are and there might always be privacy issues. The point is that, in this case, they can be made much less pressing than other issues. However, once (or if you prefer, even if) privacy is taken care of, other difficulties appear to remain intractable. A Bluetooth-based app can use anonymous data, recorded only in the mobile phone, used exclusively to send alerts in case of the contact with people infected. It is not easy but it is feasible, as demonstrated by the approach adopted by the Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative (PEPP-PT). The apparently intractable problems are the effectiveness and fairness of the app.

To be effective, an app must be adopted by many people. In Britain, I was told that it would be useless if used by less than 20% of the population. According to the PEPP-PT, real effectiveness seems to be reached around the threshold of 60% of the whole population. This means that in Italy, for example, the app should be consistently and correctly used by something between 11m to 33m people, out of a population of 55m. Consider that in 2019 Facebook Messenger was used by 23m Italians. Even the often-mentioned app TraceTogether has been downloaded by an insufficient number of people in Singapore.


Given that it is unlikely that the app will be adopted so extensively just voluntarily, out of social responsibility, and that governments are reluctant to impose it as mandatory (and rightly so, for it would be unfair, see below), it is clear that it will be necessary to encourage its use, but this only shifts the problem….

Therefore, one should avoid the risk of transforming the production of the app into a signalling process. To do so, the verification should not be severed from, but must feedback on, the validation. This means that if the verification fails so should the validation, and the whole project ought to be reconsidered. It follows that a clear deadline by when (and by whom) the whole project may be assessed (validation + verification) and in case be terminated, or improved, or even simply renewed as it is, is essential. At least this level of transparency and accountability should be in place.

An app will not save us. And the wrong app will be worse than useless, as it will cause ethical problems and potentially exacerbate health-related risks, e.g. by generating a false sense of security, or deepening the digital divide. A good app must be part of a wider strategy, and it needs to be designed to support a fair future. If this is not possible, better do something else, avoid its positive, negative and opportunity costs, and not play the political game of merely signalling that something (indeed anything) has been tried…(More)”.

Embracing digital government during the pandemic and beyond

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UN DESA Policy Brief: “…Involving civil society organizations, businesses, social entrepreneurs and the general public in managing the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath can prove to be highly effective for policy- and decision-makers. Online engagement initiatives led by governments can help people cope with the crisis as well as improve government operations. In a crisis situation, it becomes more important than ever to reach out to vulnerable groups in society, respond to their needs and ensure social stability. Engaging with civil society allows governments to tackle socio-economic challenges in a more productive way that leaves no one behind….

Since the crisis has put public services under stress, governments are urged to deploy effective digital technologies to contain the outbreak. Most innovative quick-to-market solutions have stemmed from the private sector. However, the crisis has exposed the need for government leadership in the development and adoption of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to ensure an effective provision of public services…

The efforts in developing digital government strategies after the COVID-19 crisis should focus on improving data protection and digital inclusion policies as well as on strengthening the policy and technical capabilities of public institutions. Even though public-private partnerships are essential for implementing innovative technologies, government leadership, strong institutions and effective public policies are crucial to tailor digital solutions to countries’ needs as well as prioritize security, equity and the protection of people’s rights. The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the importance of technology, but also the pivotal role of an effective, inclusive and accountable government….(More)”.

How can digital tools support deliberation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Claudia Chwalisz at the OECD: “As part of our work on Innovative Citizen Participation, we’ve launched a series of articles to open a discussion and gather evidence on the use of digital tools and practices in representative deliberative processes. ….The current context is obliging policy makers and practitioners to think outside the box and adapt to the inability of physical deliberation. How can digital tools allow planned or ongoing processes like Citizens’ Assemblies to continue, ensuring that policy makers can still garner informed citizen recommendations to inform their decision making? New experiments are getting underway, and the evidence gathered could also be applied to other situations when face-to-face is not possible or more difficult like international processes or any situation that prevents physical gathering.

This series will cover the core phases that a representative deliberative process should follow, as established in the forthcoming OECD report: learning, deliberation, decision making, and collective recommendations. Due to the different nature of conducting a process online, we will additionally consider a phase required before learning: skills training. The articles will explore the use of digital tools at each phase, covering questions about the appropriate tools, methods, evidence, and limitations.

They will also consider how the use of certain digital tools could enhance good practice principles such as impact, transparency, and evaluation:

  • Impact: Digital tools can help participants and the public to better monitor the status of the proposed recommendations and the impact they had on final decision- making. A parallel can be drawn with the extensive use of this methodology by the United Nations for the monitoring and evaluation of the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
  • Transparency: Digital tools can facilitate transparency across the process. The use of collaborative tools allows for transparency regarding who wrote the final outcome of the process (ability to trace the contributors of the document and the different versions). By publishing the code and the algorithms applied for the random selection (sortition) process and the data or statistics used for the stratification could give total transparency on how participants are selected.
  • Evaluation: Data collection and analysis can help researchers and policy makers assess the process (for e.g., deliberation quality, participant surveys, opinion evolution). Publishing this data in a structured and open format can allow for a broader evaluation and contribute to research. Over the course of the next year, the OECD will be preparing evaluation guidelines in accordance with the good practice principles to enable comparative data analysis.

The series will also consider how the use of emerging technologies and digital tools could complement face-to-face processes, for instance:

  • Artificial intelligence (AI) and text-based technologies (i.e. natural language processing, NLP): Could the use of AI-based tools enrich deliberative processes? For example: mapping opinion clusters, consensus building, analysis of massive inputs from external participants in the early stage of stakeholder input. Could NLP allow for simultaneous translation to other languages, feelings analysis, and automated transcription? These possibilities already exist, but raise more pertinent questions around reliability and user experience. How could they be connected to human analysis, discussion, and decision making?
  • Virtual/Augmented reality: Could the development of these emerging technologies allow participants to be immersed in virtual environments and thereby simulate face-to-face deliberation or experiences that enable and build empathy with possible futures or others’ lived experiences?…(More)”.

Global AI Ethics Consortium

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “…The newly founded Global AI Ethics Consortium (GAIEC) on Ethics and the Use of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Fight Against COVID-19 and other Pandemics aims to:

  1. Support immediate needs for expertise related to the COVID-19 crisis and the emerging ethical questions related to the use of AI in managing the pandemic.
  2. Create a repository that includes avenues of communication for sharing and disseminating current research, new research opportunities, and past research findings.
  3. Coordinate internal funding and research initiatives to allow for maximum opportunities to pursue vital research related to health crises and the ethical use of AI.
  4. Discuss research findings and opportunities for new areas of collaboration.

Read the Statement of Purpose and find out more about the Global AI Ethics Consortium and its founding members: Christoph Lütge (TUM Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, Technical University of Munich), Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (LIP6-CNRS, Sorbonne Université), Mark Findlay (Centre for AI and Data Governance, Law School, Singapore Management University), Ken Ito and Kan Hiroshi Suzuki (The University of Tokyo), Jeannie Marie Paterson (Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, University of Melbourne), Huw Price (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge), Stefaan G. Verhulst (The GovLab, New York University), Yi Zeng (Research Center for AI Ethics and Safety, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence), and Adrian Weller (The Allan Turing Institute).

If you or your organization is interested in the GAIEC — Global AI Ethics Consortium please contact us at [email protected]…(More)”.

The Atlas of Inequality and Cuebiq’s Data for Good Initiative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Data Collaborative Case Study by Michelle Winowatan, Andrew Young, and Stefaan Verhulst: “The Atlas of Inequality is a research initiative led by scientists at the MIT Media Lab and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. It is a project within the larger Human Dynamics research initiative at the MIT Media Lab, which investigates how computational social science can improve society, government, and companies. Using multiple big data sources, MIT Media Lab researchers seek to understand how people move in urban spaces and how that movement influences or is influenced by income. Among the datasets used in this initiative was location data provided by Cuebiq, through its Data for Good initiative. Cuebiq offers location-intelligence services to approved research and nonprofit organizations seeking to address public problems. To date, the Atlas has published maps of inequality in eleven cities in the United States. Through the Atlas, the researchers hope to raise public awareness about segregation of social mobility in United States cities resulting from economic inequality and support evidence-based policymaking to address the issue.

Data Collaborative Model: Based on the typology of data collaborative practice areas developed by The GovLab, the use of Cuebiq’s location data by MIT Media Lab researchers for the Atlas of Inequality initiative is an example of the research and analysis partnership model of data collaboration, specifically a data transfer approach. In this approach, companies provide data to partners for analysis, sometimes under the banner of “data philanthropy.” Access to data remains highly restrictive, with only specific partners able to analyze the assets provided. Approved uses are also determined in a somewhat cooperative manner, often with some agreement outlining how and why parties requesting access to data will put it to use….(More)”.

A Data Ecosystem to Defeat COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bapon Fakhruddin: “…A wide range of approaches could be applied to understand transmission, outbreak assessment, risk communication, cascading impacts assessment on essential and other services. The network-based modelling of System of Systems (SOS), mobile technology, frequentist statistics and maximum-likelihood estimation, interactive data visualization, geostatistics, graph theory, Bayesian statistics, mathematical modelling, evidence synthesis approaches and complex thinking frameworks for systems interactions on COVID-19 impacts could be utilized. An example of tools and technologies that could be utilized to act decisively and early to prevent the further spread or quickly suppress the transmission of COVID-19, strengthen the resilience of health systems and save lives and urgent support to developing countries with businesses and corporations are shown in Figure 2. There are also WHO guidance on ‘Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management[8]’, UNDRR supported ‘Public Health Scorecard Addendum[9]’, and other guidelines (e.g. WHO practical considerations and recommendations for religious leaders and faith-based communities in the context of COVID-19[10]) that could enhance pandemic response plan. It needs to be ensured that any such use is proportionate, specific and protected and does not increase civil liberties’ risk. It is essential therefore to examine in detail the challenge of maximising data use in emergency situations, while ensuring it is task-limited, proportionate and respectful of necessary protections and limitations. This is a complex task and the COVID-19 wil provide us with important test cases. It is also important that data is interpreted accurately. Otherwise, misinterpretations could lead each sector down to incorrect paths.

Figure 2: Tools to strengthen resilience for COVID-19

Many countries are still learning how to make use of data for their decision making in this critical time. The COVID-19 pandemic will provide important lessons on the need for cross-domain research and on how, in such emergencies, to balance the use of technological opportunities and data to counter pandemics against fundamental protections….(More)”.

Epistemic Humility—Knowing Your Limits in a Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Erik Angner: “Ignorance,” wrote Charles Darwin in 1871, “more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Darwin’s insight is worth keeping in mind when dealing with the current coronavirus crisis. That includes those of us who are behavioral scientists. Overconfidence—and a lack of epistemic humility more broadly—can cause real harm.

In the middle of a pandemic, knowledge is in short supply. We don’t know how many people are infected, or how many people will be. We have much to learn about how to treat the people who are sick—and how to help prevent infection in those who aren’t. There’s reasonable disagreement on the best policies to pursue, whether about health care, economics, or supply distribution. Although scientists worldwide are working hard and in concert to address these questions, final answers are some ways away.

Another thing that’s in short supply is the realization of how little we know. Even a quick glance at social or traditional media will reveal many people who express themselves with way more confidence than they should…

Frequent expressions of supreme confidence might seem odd in light of our obvious and inevitable ignorance about a new threat. The thing about overconfidence, though, is that it afflicts most of us much of the time. That’s according to cognitive psychologists, who’ve studied the phenomenon systematically for half a century. Overconfidence has been called “the mother of all psychological biases.” The research has led to findings that are at the same time hilarious and depressing. In one classic study, for example, 93 percent of U.S. drivers claimed to be more skillful than the median—which is not possible.

“But surely,” you might object, “overconfidence is only for amateurs—experts would not behave like this.” Sadly, being an expert in some domain does not protect against overconfidence. Some research suggests that the more knowledgeable are more prone to overconfidence. In a famous study of clinical psychologists and psychology students, researchers asked a series of questions about a real person described in psychological literature. As the participants received more and more information about the case, their confidence in their judgment grew—but the quality of their judgment did not. And psychologists with a Ph.D. did no better than the students….(More)”.

Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mirco Nanni: “The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the phase 2 of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking.

We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively, voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity.

This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates – if and when they want, for specific aims – with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society….(More)”

We Have the Power to Destroy Ourselves Without the Wisdom to Ensure That We Don’t

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

EdgeCast by Toby Ord: “Lately, I’ve been asking myself questions about the future of humanity, not just about the next five years or even the next hundred years, but about everything humanity might be able to achieve in the time to come.

The past of humanity is about 200,000 years. That’s how long Homo sapiens have been around according to our current best guess (it might be a little bit longer). Maybe we should even include some of our other hominid ancestors and think about humanity somewhat more broadly. If we play our cards right, we could live hundreds of thousands of years more. In fact, there’s not much stopping us living millions of years. The typical species lives about a million years. Our 200,000 years so far would put us about in our adolescence, just old enough to be getting ourselves in trouble, but not wise enough to have thought through how we should act.

But a million years isn’t an upper bound for how long we could live. The horseshoe crab, for example, has lived for 450 million years so far. The Earth should remain habitable for at least that long. So, if we can survive as long as the horseshoe crab, we could have a future stretching millions of centuries from now. That’s millions of centuries of human progress, human achievement, and human flourishing. And if we could learn over that time how to reach out a little bit further into the cosmos to get to the planets around other stars, then we could have longer yet. If we went seven light-years at a time just making jumps of that distance, we could reach almost every star in the galaxy by continually spreading out from the new location. There are already plans in progress to send spacecraft these types of distances. If we could do that, the whole galaxy would open up to us….

Humanity is not a typical species. One of the things that most worries me is the way in which our technology might put us at risk. If we look back at the history of humanity these 2000 centuries, we see this initially gradual accumulation of knowledge and power. If you think back to the earliest humans, they weren’t that remarkable compared to the other species around them. An individual human is not that remarkable on the Savanna compared to a cheetah, or lion, or gazelle, but what set us apart was our ability to work together, to cooperate with other humans to form something greater than ourselves. It was teamwork, the ability to work together with those of us in the same tribe that let us expand to dozens of humans working together in cooperation. But much more important than that was our ability to cooperate across time, across the generations. By making small innovations and passing them on to our children, we were able to set a chain in motion wherein generations of people worked across time, slowly building up these innovations and technologies and accumulating power….(More)”.

Tracking coronavirus: big data and the challenge to privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nic Fildes and Javier Espinoza at the Financial Times: “When the World Health Organization launched a 2007 initiative to eliminate malaria on Zanzibar, it turned to an unusual source to track the spread of the disease between the island and mainland Africa: mobile phones sold by Tanzania’s telecoms groups including Vodafone, the UK mobile operator.

Working together with researchers at Southampton university, Vodafone began compiling sets of location data from mobile phones in the areas where cases of the disease had been recorded. 

Mapping how populations move between locations has proved invaluable in tracking and responding to epidemics. The Zanzibar project has been replicated by academics across the continent to monitor other deadly diseases, including Ebola in west Africa….

With much of Europe at a standstill as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, politicians want the telecoms operators to provide similar data from smartphones. Thierry Breton, the former chief executive of France Telecom who is now the European commissioner for the internal market, has called on operators to hand over aggregated location data to track how the virus is spreading and to identify spots where help is most needed.

Both politicians and the industry insist that the data sets will be “anonymised”, meaning that customers’ individual identities will be scrubbed out. Mr Breton told the Financial Times: “In no way are we going to track individuals. That’s absolutely not the case. We are talking about fully anonymised, aggregated data to anticipate the development of the pandemic.”

But the use of such data to track the virus has triggered fears of growing surveillance, including questions about how the data might be used once the crisis is over and whether such data sets are ever truly anonymous….(More)”.