We Want Privacy, but Can’t Stop Sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kate Murphy in the New York Times: “Well, that’s essentially the state of affairs on the Internet. There is no privacy. If those creepy targeted ads on Google hadn’t tipped you off, then surely Edward J. Snowden’s revelations, or, more recently, Jennifer Lawrence’s nude selfies, made your vulnerability to cybersnooping abundantly clear.

You need only read George Orwell’s “1984” or watch the film “Minority Report” to understand how surveillance is incompatible with a free society. And increasingly, people are coming to understand how their online data might be used against them. You might not get a job, a loan or a date because of an indiscreet tweet or if your address on Google Street View shows your brother-in-law’s clunker in the driveway. But less obvious is the psychic toll of the current data free-for-all.

“With all the focus on the legal aspects of privacy and the impact on global trade there’s been little discussion of why you want privacy and why it’s intrinsically important to you as an individual,” said Adam Joinson, professor of behavior change at the University of the West of England in Bristol, who coined the term “digital crowding” to describe excessive social contact and loss of personal space online.

Perhaps that’s because there is no agreement over what constitutes private information. It varies among cultures, genders and individuals. Moreover, it’s hard to argue for the value of privacy when people eagerly share so much achingly personal information on social media.

But the history of privacy (loosely defined as freedom from being observed) is one of status. Those who are institutionalized for criminal behavior or ill health, children and the impoverished have less privacy than those who are upstanding, healthy, mature and wealthy. Think of crowded tenements versus mansions behind high hedges.

“The implication is that if you don’t have it, you haven’t earned the right or aren’t capable or trustworthy,” said Christena Nippert-Eng, professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and author of “Islands of Privacy.”

So it’s not surprising that privacy research in both online and offline environments has shown that just the perception, let alone the reality, of being watched results in feelings of low self-esteem, depression and anxiety. Whether observed by a supervisor at work or Facebook friends, people are inclined to conform and demonstrate less individuality and creativity. Their performance of tasks suffers and they have elevated pulse rates and levels of stress hormones.

An analogy in the psychological literature is that privacy is like sleep….”

A Vision for Happier Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Post by at the Huffington Post:“…Governments such as Bhutan and Venezuela are creating departments of happiness, and in both the US and UK, ‘nudge’ teams have been set up to focus on behavioral psychology. This gets more interesting when we bring in urban planning and neuroscience research, which shows that community aesthetics are a key contributor to our happiness at the same time positive emotions can change our thoughts, and lead to changes in our behaviors.
It was only after moving to New York City that I realized all my experiences… painting, advising executive boards, creative workshops, statistics and writing books about organizational change…gave me a unique set of tools to create the Dept. of Well Being and start a global social impact initiative, which is powered by public art installations entitled Happy Street Signs™.
New York City got the first Happy Street Signs last November. I used my paintings containing positive phrases like “Honk Less Love More” and “New York Loves You” to manufacture 200 government-specification street signs. They were then installed by a team of fifty volunteers around Manhattan and Brooklyn in 90 minutes. Whilst it was unofficial, the objective was to generate smiles for New Yorkers and then survey reactions. We got clipboards out and asked over 600 New Yorkers if they liked the Happy Street Signs and if they wanted more: 92.5 percent of those people said yes!…”

Announcing New U.S. Open Government Commitments on the Third Anniversary of the Open Government Partnership

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

US White House Fact Sheet: “Three years ago, President Obama joined with the leaders of seven other nations to launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international partnership between governments and civil society to promote transparency, fight corruption, energize civic engagement, and leverage new technologies to open up governments worldwide.  The United States and other founding countries pledged to transform the way that governments serve their citizens in the 21st century.  Today, as heads of state of OGP participating countries gather at the UN General Assembly, this partnership has grown from 8 to 65 nations and hundreds of civil society organizations around the world. These countries are embracing the challenge by taking steps in partnership with civil society to increase the ability of citizens to engage their governments, access government data to fuel entrepreneurship and innovation, and promote accountability….
The United States is committed to continuing to lead by example in OGP.  Since assuming office, President Obama has prioritized making government more open and accountable and has taken substantial steps to increase citizen participation, collaboration with civil society, and transparency in government.  The United States will remain a global leader of international efforts to promote transparency, stem corruption and hold to account those who exploit the public’s trust for private gain.  Yesterday, President Obama announced several steps the United States is taking to deepen our support for civil society globally.
Today, to mark the third anniversary of OGP, President Obama is announcing four new and expanded open government initiatives that will advance our efforts through the end of 2015.
1.      Promote Open Education to Increase Awareness and Engagement
Open education is the open sharing of digital learning materials, tools, and practices that ensures free access to and legal adoption of learning resources.  The United States is committed to open education and will:

  • Raise open education awareness and identify new partnerships. The U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy will jointly host a workshop on challenges and opportunities in open education internationally with stakeholders from academia, industry, and government.
  • Pilot new models for using open educational resources to support learning.  The State Department will conduct three pilots overseas by December 2015 that use open educational resources to support learning in formal and informal learning contexts. The pilots’ results, including best practices, will be made publicly available for interested educators.
  • Launch an online skills academy. The Department of Labor (DOL), with cooperation from the Department of Education, will award $25 million through competitive grants to launch an online skills academy in 2015 that will offer open online courses of study, using technology to create high-quality, free, or low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, and other employer-recognized credentials.

2.      Deliver Government Services More Effectively Through Information Technology
The Administration is committed to serving the American people more effectively and efficiently through smarter IT delivery. The newly launched U.S. Digital Service will work to remove barriers to digital service delivery and remake the experience that people and businesses have with their government. To improve delivery of Federal services, information, and benefits, the Administration will:

  • Expand digital service delivery expertise in government. Throughout 2015, the Administration will continue recruiting top digital talent from the private and public sectors to expand services across the government. These individuals —who have expertise in technology, procurement, human resources, and financing —will serve as digital professionals in a number of capacities in the Federal government, including the new U.S. Digital Service and 18F digital delivery team within the U.S. General Services Administration, as well as within Federal agencies. These teams will take best practices from the public and private sectors and scale them across agencies with a focus on the customer experience.
  • Build digital services in the open. The Administration will expand its efforts to build digital services in the open. This includes using open and transparent processes intended to better understand user needs, testing pilot digital projects, and designing and developing digital services at scale. In addition, building on the recently published Digital Services Playbook, the Administration will continue to openly publish best practices on collaborative websites that enable the public to suggest improvements.
  • Adopt an open source software policy. Using and contributing back to open source software can fuel innovation, lower costs, and benefit the public. No later than December 31, 2015, the Administration will work through the Federal agencies to develop an open source software policy that, together with the Digital Services Playbook, will support improved access to custom software code developed for the Federal government.

3.      Increase Transparency in Spending
The Administration has made an increasing amount of Federal spending data publicly available and searchable, allowing nationwide stakeholders to perform analysis of Federal spending. The Administration will build on these efforts by committing to:

  • Improve USAspending.gov. In 2015, the Administration will launch a refreshed USAspending.gov website that will improve the site’s design and user experience, including better enabling users to explore the data using interactive maps and improving the search functionality and application programming interface.
  • Improve accessibility and reusability of Federal financial data.  In 2015, as part of implementation of the DATA Act,[2] the Administration will work to improve the accessibility and reusability of Federal financial data by issuing data element definition standards and standards for exchanging financial data. The Administration, through the Office of Management and Budget, will leverage industry data exchange standards to the extent practicable to maximize the sharing and utilization of Federal financial data.
  • Explore options for visualization and publication of additional Federal financial data.  The Administration, through the Treasury Department, will use small-scale pilots to help explore options for visualizing and publishing Federal financial data from across the government as required by the DATA Act.
  • Continue to engage stakeholders. The Administration will continue to engage with a broad group of stakeholders to seek input on Federal financial transparency initiatives including DATA Act implementation, by hosting town hall meetings, conducting interactive workshops, and seeking input via open innovation collaboration tools.

4.      Use Big Data to Support Greater Openness and Accountability
President Obama has recognized the growing importance of “big data” technologies for our economy and the advancement of public good in areas such as education, energy conservation, and healthcare. The Administration is taking action to ensure responsible uses of big data to promote greater openness and accountability across a range of areas and sectors. As part of the work it is doing in this area, the Administration has committed to:

  • Enhance sharing of best practices on data privacy for state and local law enforcement.  Federal agencies with expertise in law enforcement, privacy, and data practices will seek to enhance collaboration and information sharing about privacy best practices among state and local law enforcement agencies receiving Federal grants.
  • Ensure privacy protection for big data analyses in health. Big data introduces new opportunities to advance medicine and science, improve health care, and support better public health. To ensure that individual privacy is protected while capitalizing on new technologies and data, the Administration, led by the Department of Health and Human Services, will: (1) consult with stakeholders to assess how Federal laws and regulations can best accommodate big data analyses that promise to advance medical science and reduce health care costs; and (2) develop recommendations for ways to promote and facilitate research through access to data while safeguarding patient privacy and autonomy.
  • Expand technical expertise in government to stop discrimination. U.S. Government departments and agencies will work to expand their technical expertise to identify outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that may have a discriminatory impact on protected classes. …”

#OpenGovNow: Open Government and how it benefits you

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

#OpenGovNow:  “Open Governments are built on two things: information and participation. A government that is open, actively discloses information about what it does with its money and resources in a way that all citizens can understand. Equally important, an Open Government is one that actively involves all citizens to be participants in government decision-making. This two-way relationship between citizens and governments, in which governments and citizens share information with one another and work together, is the foundation of Open Government….

Why should I care?

The water that you drink, the public schools that children go to, the roads that you use every day: governments make those a reality. Governments and what they do affect each and every one of us. How governments operate and how they spend scarce public resources have a direct impact on our everyday lives and the future of our communities. For instance, it is estimated that $9.5 trillion US dollars are spent by governments all over the world through contracts — therefore you have a role to play in making sure that your share in that public money is not lost, stolen, or misused….
The Global Opening Government Survey was conducted as a response to the growing demand to better understand citizens’ views on the current state and the potential impact of openness. Using the innovative “random domain intercept technology,” the survey was based on a brief questionnaire and collected complete responses from over 65,000 web-enabled individuals in the first 61 member countries of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) plus India. The survey methodology, as any other, has its advantages and its limitations. More details about the methodology can be found in the Additional Resources section of this page..

Mapping the Next Frontier of Open Data: Corporate Data Sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst at the GovLab (cross-posted at the UN Global Pulse Blog): “When it comes to data, we are living in the Cambrian Age. About ninety percent of the data that exists today has been generated within the last two years. We create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data on a daily basis—equivalent to a “new Google every four days.”
All of this means that we are certain to witness a rapid intensification in the process of “datafication”– already well underway. Use of data will grow increasingly critical. Data will confer strategic advantages; it will become essential to addressing many of our most important social, economic and political challenges.
This explains–at least in large part–why the Open Data movement has grown so rapidly in recent years. More and more, it has become evident that questions surrounding data access and use are emerging as one of the transformational opportunities of our time.
Today, it is estimated that over one million datasets have been made open or public. The vast majority of this open data is government data—information collected by agencies and departments in countries as varied as India, Uganda and the United States. But what of the terabyte after terabyte of data that is collected and stored by corporations? This data is also quite valuable, but it has been harder to access.
The topic of private sector data sharing was the focus of a recent conference organized by the Responsible Data Forum, Data and Society Research Institute and Global Pulse (see event summary). Participants at the conference, which was hosted by The Rockefeller Foundation in New York City, included representatives from a variety of sectors who converged to discuss ways to improve access to private data; the data held by private entities and corporations. The purpose for that access was rooted in a broad recognition that private data has the potential to foster much public good. At the same time, a variety of constraints—notably privacy and security, but also proprietary interests and data protectionism on the part of some companies—hold back this potential.
The framing for issues surrounding sharing private data has been broadly referred to under the rubric of “corporate data philanthropy.” The term refers to an emerging trend whereby companies have started sharing anonymized and aggregated data with third-party users who can then look for patterns or otherwise analyze the data in ways that lead to policy insights and other public good. The term was coined at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, in 2011, and has gained wider currency through Global Pulse, a United Nations data project that has popularized the notion of a global “data commons.”
Although still far from prevalent, some examples of corporate data sharing exist….

Help us map the field

A more comprehensive mapping of the field of corporate data sharing would draw on a wide range of case studies and examples to identify opportunities and gaps, and to inspire more corporations to allow access to their data (consider, for instance, the GovLab Open Data 500 mapping for open government data) . From a research point of view, the following questions would be important to ask:

  • What types of data sharing have proven most successful, and which ones least?
  • Who are the users of corporate shared data, and for what purposes?
  • What conditions encourage companies to share, and what are the concerns that prevent sharing?
  • What incentives can be created (economic, regulatory, etc.) to encourage corporate data philanthropy?
  • What differences (if any) exist between shared government data and shared private sector data?
  • What steps need to be taken to minimize potential harms (e.g., to privacy and security) when sharing data?
  • What’s the value created from using shared private data?

We (the GovLab; Global Pulse; and Data & Society) welcome your input to add to this list of questions, or to help us answer them by providing case studies and examples of corporate data philanthropy. Please add your examples below, use our Google Form or email them to us at corporatedata@thegovlab.org”

DrivenData

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

DrivenData Blog: “As we begin launching our first competitions, we thought it would be a good idea to lay out what exactly we’re trying to do and why….
At DrivenData, we want to bring cutting-edge practices in data science and crowdsourcing to some of the world’s biggest social challenges and the organizations taking them on. We host online challenges, usually lasting 2-3 months, where a global community of data scientists competes to come up with the best statistical model for difficult predictive problems that make a difference.
Just like every major corporation today, nonprofits and NGOs have more data than ever before. And just like those corporations, they are trying to figure out how to make the best use of their data. We work with mission-driven organizations to identify specific predictive questions that they care about answering and can use their data to tackle.
Then we host the online competitions, where experts from around the world vie to come up with the best solution. Some competitors are experienced data scientists in the private sector, analyzing corporate data by day, saving the world by night, and testing their mettle on complex questions of impact. Others are smart, sophisticated students and researchers looking to hone their skills on real-world datasets and real-world problems. Still more have extensive experience with social sector data and want to bring their expertise to bear on new, meaningful challenges – with immediate feedback on how well their solution performs.
Like any data competition platform, we want to harness the power of crowds combined with the increasing prevalence of large, relevant datasets. Unlike other data competition platforms, our primary goal is to create actual, measurable, lasting positive change in the world with our competitions. At the end of each challenge, we work with the sponsoring organization to integrate the winning solutions, giving them the tools to drive real improvements in their impact….
We are launching soon and we want you to join us!
If you want to get updates about our launch this fall with exciting, real competitions, please sign up for our mailing list here and follow us on Twitter: @drivendataorg.
If you are a data scientist, feel free to create an account and start playing with our first sandbox competitions.
If you are a nonprofit or public sector organization, and want to squeeze every drop of mission effectiveness out of your data, check out the info on our site and let us know! “

The Stasi, casinos and the Big Data rush

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book Review by Hannah Kuchler of “What Stays in Vegas” (by Adam Tanner) in the Financial Times: “Books with sexy titles and decidedly unsexy topics – like, say, data – have a tendency to disappoint. But What Stays in Vegas is an engrossing, story-packed takedown of the data industry.

It begins, far from America’s gambling capital, in communist East Germany. The author, Adam Tanner, now a fellow at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, was in the late 1980s a travel writer taking notes on Dresden. What he did not realise was that the Stasi was busy taking notes on him – 50 pages in all – which he found when the files were opened after reunification. The secret police knew where he had stopped to consult a map, to whom he asked questions and when he looked in on a hotel.
Today, Tanner explains: “Thanks to meticulous data gathering from both public documents and commercial records, companies . . . know far more about typical consumers than the feared East German secret police recorded about me.”
Shining a light on how businesses outside the tech sector have become data addicts, Tanner focuses on Las Vegas casinos, which spotted the value in data decades ago. He was given access to Caesar’s Entertainment, one of the world’s largest casino operators. When chief executive Gary Loveman joined in the late 1990s, the former Harvard Business School professor bet the company’s future on harvesting personal data from its loyalty scheme. Rather than wooing the “whales” who spent the most, the company would use the data to decide which freebies were worth giving away to lure in mid-spenders who came back often – a strategy credited with helping the business grow.
The real revelations come when Tanner examines the data brokers’ “Cheez Whiz”. Like the maker of a popular processed dairy spread, he argues, data brokers blend ingredients from a range of sources, such as public records, marketing lists and commercial records, to create a detailed picture of your identity – and you will never quite be able to pin down the origin of any component…
The Big Data rush has gone into overdrive since the global economic crisis as marketers from different industries have sought new methods to grab the limited consumer spending available. Tanner argues that while users have in theory given permission for much of this information to be made public in bits and pieces, increasingly industrial-scale aggregation often feels like an invasion of privacy.
Privacy policies are so long and obtuse (one study Tanner quotes found that it would take a person more than a month, working full-time, to read all the privacy statements they come across in a year), people are unwittingly littering their data all over the internet. Anyway, marketers can intuit what we are like from the people we are connected to online. And as the data brokers’ lists are usually private, there is no way to check the compilers have got their facts right…”

Goodbye, Organization Man

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Brooks in the New York Times:”…The result, right now, is unnecessary deaths from the Ebola virus in Africa. …. At root, this is a governance failure. The disease spreads fastest in places where the health care infrastructure is lacking or nonexistent. Liberia, for example, is being overrun while Ivory Coast has put in a series of policies to prevent an outbreak. The few doctors and nurses in the affected places have trouble acquiring the safety basics: gloves and body bags. More than 100, so far, have died fighting the outbreak.

But it’s not just a failure of governance in Africa. It’s a failure of governance around the world. I wonder if we are looking at the results of a cultural shift.

A few generations ago, people grew up in and were comfortable with big organizations — the army, corporations and agencies. They organized huge construction projects in the 1930s, gigantic industrial mobilization during World War II, highway construction and corporate growth during the 1950s. Institutional stewardship, the care and reform of big organizations, was more prestigious.

Now nobody wants to be an Organization Man. We like start-ups, disrupters and rebels. Creativity is honored more than the administrative execution. Post-Internet, many people assume that big problems can be solved by swarms of small, loosely networked nonprofits and social entrepreneurs. Big hierarchical organizations are dinosaurs.

The Ebola crisis is another example that shows that this is misguided. The big, stolid agencies — the health ministries, the infrastructure builders, the procurement agencies — are the bulwarks of the civil and global order. Public and nonprofit management, the stuff that gets derided as “overhead,” really matters. It’s as important to attract talent to health ministries as it is to spend money on specific medicines.

As recent books by Francis Fukuyama and Philip Howard have detailed, this is an era of general institutional decay. New, mobile institutions languish on the drawing broad, while old ones are not reformed and tended. Executives at public agencies are robbed of discretionary power. Their hands are bound by court judgments and regulations.

When the boring tasks of governance are not performed, infrastructures don’t get built. Then, when epidemics strike, people die.”

EU: GLOW (Global Legislative Openness Week)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GLOW is a celebration of open, participatory legislative processes around the world as well as an opportunity for diverse stakeholders to collaborate with one another and make progress toward adopting and implementing open-government commitments. The week is being led by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership, which is co-anchored by the National Democratic Institute and the Congress of Chile. 
The campaign kicks off with the International Day of Democracy on September 15, and throughout the 10 days you are invited to share your ideas and experiences, kickstart new transparency tools and engage members of your community in dialogue. Learn more about the global open government movement at OGP, and stay tuned into GLOW events by following this site and #OpenParl2014.
Where will GLOW be happening?
GLOW will connect a range of legislative openness activities, organized independently by civil society organizations and parliaments around the world. You can follow the action on Twitter by using the hashtag #OpenParl2014. We hope the GLOW campaign will inspire you to design and organize your own event or activity during this week. If you’d like to share your event and collaborate with others during GLOW, please send us a note.
The week’s festivities will be anchored by two Working Group meetings of civil society and parliamentary members. Beginning on the International Day of Democracy, September 15, the Working Group will host a regional meeting on expanding civic engagement through parliamentary openness in Podgorica, Montenegro, hosted in partnership with the Parliament of Montenegro. The week will conclude with the Working Group’s annual meeting in Chile, on September 25 and 26, 2014, where members will discuss progress made in the year since the Working Group’s launch. This meeting coincides with the 11th Plenary Assembly of ParlAmericas, an independent network composed of the national legislatures of the 35 independent states of the Americas, which will also consider issues of legislative openness as part of its meeting….” (More)

Rethinking Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dani Rodrik at Project Syndicate: “By many measures, the world has never been more democratic. Virtually every government at least pays lip service to democracy and human rights. Though elections may not be free and fair, massive electoral manipulation is rare and the days when only males, whites, or the rich could vote are long gone. Freedom House’s global surveys show a steady increase from the 1970s in the share of countries that are “free” – a trend that the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington dubbed the “third wave” of democratization….

A true democracy, one that combines majority rule with respect for minority rights, requires two sets of institutions. First, institutions of representation, such as political parties, parliaments, and electoral systems, are needed to elicit popular preferences and turn them into policy action. Second, democracy requires institutions of restraint, such as an independent judiciary and media, to uphold fundamental rights like freedom of speech and prevent governments from abusing their power. Representation without restraint – elections without the rule of law – is a recipe for the tyranny of the majority.

Democracy in this sense – what many call “liberal democracy” – flourished only after the emergence of the nation-state and the popular upheaval and mobilization produced by the Industrial Revolution. So it should come as no surprise that the crisis of liberal democracy that many of its oldest practitioners currently are experiencing is a reflection of the stress under which the nation-state finds itself….

In developing countries, it is more often the institutions of restraint that are failing. Governments that come to power through the ballot box often become corrupt and power-hungry. They replicate the practices of the elitist regimes they replaced, clamping down on the press and civil liberties and emasculating (or capturing) the judiciary. The result has been called “illiberal democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism.” Venezuela, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand are some of the better-known recent examples.

When democracy fails to deliver economically or politically, perhaps it is to be expected that some people will look for authoritarian solutions. And, for many economists, delegating economic policy to technocratic bodies in order to insulate them from the “folly of the masses” almost always is the preferred approach.

…

Effective institutions of restraint do not emerge overnight; and it might seem like those in power would never want to create them. But if there is some likelihood that I will be voted out of office and that the opposition will take over, such institutions will protect me from others’ abuses tomorrow as much as they protect others from my abuses today. So strong prospects for sustained political competition are a key prerequisite for illiberal democracies to turn into liberal ones over time.

Optimists believe that new technologies and modes of governance will resolve all problems and send democracies centered on the nation-state the way of the horse-drawn carriage. Pessimists fear that today’s liberal democracies will be no match for the external challenges mounted by illiberal states like China and Russia, which are guided only by hardnosed realpolitik. Either way, if democracy is to have a future, it will need to be rethought.”