Survey: Majority of Americans Willing to Share Their Most Sensitive Personal Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Center for Data Innovation: “Most Americans (58 percent) are willing to allow third parties to collect at least some sensitive personal data, according to a new survey from the Center for Data Innovation.

While many surveys measure public opinions on privacy, few ask consumers about their willingness to make tradeoffs, such as sharing certain personal information in exchange for services or benefits they want. In this survey, the Center asked respondents whether they would allow a mobile app to collect their biometrics or location data for purposes such as making it easier to sign into an account or getting free navigational help, and it asked whether they would allow medical researchers to collect sensitive data about their health if it would lead to medical cures for their families or others. Only one-third of respondents (33 percent) were unwilling to let mobile apps collect either their biometrics or location data under any of the described scenarios. And overall, nearly 6 in 10 respondents (58 percent) were willing to let a third party collect at least one piece of sensitive personal data, such as biometric, location, or medical data, in exchange for a service or benefit….(More)”.

How Data Sharing Can Improve Frontline Worker Development

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Digital Promise: “Frontline workers, or the workers who interact directly with customers and provide services in industries like retail, healthcare, food service, and hospitality, help make up the backbone of today’s workforce.

However, frontline workforce talent development presents numerous challenges. Frontline workers may not be receiving the education and training they need to advance in their careers and sustain gainful employment. They also likely do not have access to data regarding their own skills and learning, and do not know what skills employers seek in quality workers.

Today, Digital Promise, a nonprofit authorized by Congress to support comprehensive research and development of programs to advance innovation in education, launched “Tapping Data for Frontline Talent Development,” a new, interactive report that shares how the seamless and secure sharing of data is key to creating more effective learning and career pathways for frontline service workers.

The research revealed that the current learning ecosystem that serves frontline workers—which includes stakeholders like education and training providers, funders, and employers—is complex, siloed, and removes agency from the worker.

Although many data types are collected, in today’s system much of the data is duplicative and rarely used to inform impact and long-term outcomes. The processes and systems in the ecosystem do not support the flow of data between stakeholders or frontline workers.

And yet, data sharing systems and collaborations are beginning to emerge as providers, funders, and employers recognize the power in data-driven decision-making and the benefits to data sharing. Not only can data sharing help to improve programs and services, it can create more personalized interventions for education providers supporting frontline workers, and it can also improve talent pipelines for employers.

In addition to providing three case studies with valuable examples of employers, a community, and a state focused on driving change based on data, this new report identifies key recommendations that have the potential to move the current system toward a more data-driven, collaborative, worker-centered learning ecosystem, including:

  1. Creating awareness and demand among stakeholders
  2. Ensuring equity and inclusion for workers/learners through access and awareness
  3. Creating data sharing resources
  4. Advocating for data standards
  5. Advocating for policies and incentives
  6. Spurring the creation of technology systems that enable data sharing/interoperability

We invite you to read our new report today for more information, and sign up for updates on this important work….(More)”

Contracts for Data Collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The GovLab: “The road to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals is complex and challenging. Policymakers around the world need both new solutions and new ways to become more innovative. This includes evidence-based policy and program design, as well as improved monitoring of progress made.

Unlocking privately processed data through data collaboratives — a new form of public-private partnership in which private industry, government and civil society work together to release previously siloed data — has become essential to address the challenges of our era.

Yet while research has proven its promise and value, several barriers to scaling data collaboration exist.

Ensuring trust and shared responsibility in how the data will be handled and used proves particularly challenging, because of the high transaction costs involved in drafting contracts and agreements of sharing.

Ensuring Trust in Data Collaboration

The goal of the Contracts for Data Collaboration (C4DC) initiative is to address the inefficiencies of developing contractual agreements for public-private data collaboration.

The intent is to inform and guide those seeking to establish a data collaborative by developing and making available a shared repository of contractual clauses (taken from existing data sharing agreements) that covers a host of issues, including (non –exclusive):

  • The provenance, quality and purpose of data;
  • Security and privacy concerns;
  • Roles and responsibilities of participants;
  • Access provisions; and use limitations;
  • Governance mechanisms;
  • Other contextual mechanisms

In addition to the searchable library of contractual clauses, the repository will house use cases, guides and other information that analyse common patterns, language and best practices.

Help Us Scale Data Collaboration

Contracts for Data Collaboration builds on efforts from member organizations that have experience in developing and managing data collaboratives; and have documented the legal challenges and opportunities of data collaboration.

The initiative is an open collaborative with charter members from the GovLab at NYU, UN SDSN Thematic Research Network on Data and Statistics (TReNDS), University of Washington and the World Economic Forum.

Organizations interested in joining the initiative should contact the individuals noted below; or share any agreements they have used for data sharing activities (without any sensitive or identifiable information): Stefaan Verhulst, GovLab ([email protected]) …(More)

“Giving something back”: A systematic review and ethical enquiry into public views on the use of patient data for research in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jessica Stockdale, Jackie Cassell and Elizabeth Ford: “The use of patients’ medical data for secondary purposes such as health research, audit, and service planning is well established in the UK, and technological innovation in analytical methods for new discoveries using these data resources is developing quickly. Data scientists have developed, and are improving, many ways to extract and process information in medical records. This continues to lead to an exciting range of health related discoveries, improving population health and saving lives. Nevertheless, as the development of analytic technologies accelerates, the decision-making and governance environment as well as public views and understanding about this work, has been lagging behind1.

Public opinion and data use

A range of small studies canvassing patient views, mainly in the USA, have found an overall positive orientation to the use of patient data for societal benefit2–7. However, recent case studies, like NHS England’s ill-fated Care.data scheme, indicate that certain schemes for secondary data use can prove unpopular in the UK. Launched in 2013, Care.data aimed to extract and upload the whole population’s general practice patient records to a central database for prevalence studies and service planning8. Despite the stated intention of Care.data to “make major advances in quality and patient safety”8, this programme was met with a widely reported public outcry leading to its suspension and eventual closure in 2016. Several factors may have been involved in this failure, from the poor public communication about the project, lack of social licence9, or as pressure group MedConfidential suggests, dislike of selling data to profit-making companies10. However, beyond these specific explanations for the project’s failure, what ignited public controversy was a concern with the impact that its aim to collect and share data on a large scale might have on patient privacy. The case of Care.data indicates a reluctance on behalf of the public to share their patient data, and it is still not wholly clear whether the public are willing to accept future attempts at extracting and linking large datasets of medical information. The picture of mixed opinion makes taking an evidence-based position, drawing on social consensus, difficult for legislators, regulators, and data custodians who may respond to personal or media generated perceptions of public views. However, despite differing results of studies canvassing public views, we hypothesise that there may be underlying ethical principles that could be extracted from the literature on public views, which may provide guidance to policy-makers for future data-sharing….(More)”.

This Startup Is Challenging Google Maps—and It Needs You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Aarian Marshall at Wired: “A whole lifetime in New York City, and Christiana Ting didn’t realize just how many urgent care facilities there were until the app told her to start looking for them. “They were giving extra points for medical offices, and I found them, I think, on every block,” she says. “I’m not sure what that says about the neighborhood where I work.”

Ting was one of 761 New Yorkers who downloaded, played with, and occasionally became obsessed with an app called MapNYC this fall, vying for their share of an 8-bitcoin prize (worth about $50,000 at the time). The month-long contest, run by a new mapping startup called StreetCred, was really an experiment. StreetCred’s main research question: How do you convince regular people to build and verify mappingdata?

It turns out that the maps that guide you to the nearest Arby’s, or help your Lyft driver find your house, don’t just materialize. “I took mapping for granted until I started the competition,” Ting says, even though she pulls up Google Maps at least twice a day. “But it’s such an inconvenience if the info on the map is wrong, especially in a place like New York, that’s changing all the time.”

For regular folk, detailed, reliable mapping info is helpful. For businesses, it can be crucial. Some want to be found when a map user searches for the nearest sandwich shop. Others use products that rely on base maps—think Uber, the Weather Channel, your car’s navigation system—and require up-to-date location data. “One of the huge challenges to any geographic database is its currency,” says Renee Sieber, a geographer who studies participatory mapping at McGill University. That is to say, yesterday’s map is no good to anybody doing business today.

StreetCred sees that as an opportunity. “There’s a lot of companies, none of whom I can name, who have location data, and that data needs improvement,” says Randy Meech, CEO of the small startup. (Meech’s last open-source mapping company, a Samsung subsidiary called Mapzen, shut down in January.) Maybe a client found a data set online or purchased one from another company. Either way, it’s static, and that means it’s only a matter of time before it fails to represent reality.

Google Maps, the giant in this space, has created its extensive database through years of web scraping, Streetview roaming, purchasing and collecting satellite data, and both paying and asking volunteers to verify that the businesses it identifies are still in the same place. But the company doesn’t provide all of its specific location or “point of interest” data to developers—where that Thai restaurant is, or where the hiking trail starts, or where the hospital parking lot is located. When it and other mapping services like HERE Technologies, TomTom, and Foursquare do offer that intel, it can be pricey. StreetCred wants to make that info free for customers who don’t need that much data and cheaper for those that do….(More)”.

The Urban Commons: How Data and Technology Can Rebuild Our Communities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Daniel T. O’Brien: “The future of smart cities has arrived, courtesy of citizens and their phones. To prove it, Daniel T. O’Brien explains the transformative insights gleaned from years researching Boston’s 311 reporting system, a sophisticated city management tool that has revolutionized how ordinary Bostonians use and maintain public spaces. Through its phone service, mobile app, website, and Twitter account, 311 catalogues complaints about potholes, broken street lights, graffiti, litter, vandalism, and other issues that are no one citizen’s responsibility but affect everyone’s quality of life. The Urban Commons offers a pioneering model of what modern digital data and technology can do for cities like Boston that seek both prosperous growth and sustainability.

Analyzing a rich trove of data, O’Brien discovers why certain neighborhoods embrace the idea of custodianship and willingly invest their time to monitor the city’s common environments and infrastructure. On the government’s side of the equation, he identifies best practices for implementing civic technologies that engage citizens, for deploying public services in collaborative ways, and for utilizing the data generated by these efforts.

Boston’s 311 system has narrowed the gap between residents and their communities, and between constituents and local leaders. The result, O’Brien shows, has been the creation of more effective policy and practices that reinvigorate the way citizens and city governments approach their mutual interests. By unpacking when, why, and how the 311 system has worked for Boston, The Urban Commons reveals the power and potential of this innovative system, and the lessons learned that other cities can adapt…(More)”.

The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer

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Press Release: “The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that trust has changed profoundly in the past year—people have shifted their trust to the relationships within their control, most notably their employers. Globally, 75 percent of people trust “my employer” to do what is right, significantly more than NGOs (57 percent), business (56 percent) and media (47 percent).

Divided by Trust

There is a 16-point gap between the more trusting informed public and the far-more-skeptical mass population, marking a return to record highs of trust inequality. The phenomenon fueling this divide was a pronounced rise in trust among the informed public. Markets such as the U.S., UK, Canada, South Korea and Hong Kong saw trust gains of 12 points or more among the informed public. In 18 markets, there is now a double-digit trust gap between the informed public and the mass population.

2019 Edelman Trust Barometer - Trust Inequality

An Urgent Desire for Change

Despite the divergence in trust between the informed public and mass population the world is united on one front—all share an urgent desire for change. Only one in five feels that the system is working for them, with nearly half of the mass population believing that the system is failing them.

In conjunction with pessimism and worry, there is a growing move toward engagement and action. In 2019, engagement with the news surged by 22 points; 40 percent not only consume news once a week or more, but they also routinely amplify it. But people are encountering roadblocks in their quest for facts, with 73 percent worried about fake news being used as a weapon.

Trust Barometer - News Engagement

The New Employer-Employee Contract

Despite a high lack of faith in the system, there is one relationship that remains strong: “my employer.” Fifty-eight percent of general population employees say they look to their employer to be a trustworthy source of information about contentious societal issues.

Employees are ready and willing to trust their employers, but the trust must be earned through more than “business as usual.” Employees’ expectation that prospective employers will join them in taking action on societal issues (67 percent) is nearly as high as their expectations of personal empowerment (74 percent) and job opportunity (80 percent)….(More)”.

Inside the world’s ‘what works’ teams

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jen Gold at What Works Blog: “There’s a small but growing band of government teams around the world dedicated to making experiments happen. The Cabinet Office’s What Works Team, set up in 2013, was the first of its kind. But you’ll now find them in Canada, the US, Finland, Australia, Colombia, and the UAE.

All of these teams work across government to champion the testing and evaluation of new approaches to public service delivery. This blog takes a look at the many ways in which we’re striving to make experimentation the norm in our governments.

Unsurprisingly we’re all operating in very different contexts. Some teams were set up in response to central requirements for greater experimentation. Take Canada, for instance. In 2016 the Treasury Board directed departments and agencies to devote a fixed proportion of programme funds to “experimenting with new approaches” (building on Prime Minister Trudeau’s earlier instruction to Ministers). An Innovation and Experimentation Team was then set up in the Treasury Board to provide some central support.

Finland’s Experimentation Office, based in the Prime Minister’s Office, is in a similar position. The team supports the delivery of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s 2016 national action plan that calls for “a culture of experimentation” in public services and a series of flagship policy experiments.

Others, like the US Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) and the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA), grew out of political interest in using behavioural science experiments in public policy. But these teams now run experiments in a much broader set of areas.

What unites us is a focus on helping public servants generate and use new evidence in policy decisions and service delivery….(More)”.

Data Was Supposed to Fix the U.S. Education System. Here’s Why It Hasn’t.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Simon Rodberg at Harvard Business School: “For too long, the American education system failed too many kids, including far too many poor kids and kids of color, without enough public notice or accountability. To combat this, leaders of all political persuasions championed the use of testing to measure progress and drive better results. Measurement has become so common that in school districts from coast to coast you can now find calendars marked “Data Days,” when teachers are expected to spend time not on teaching, but on analyzing data like end-of-year and mid-year exams, interim assessments, science and social studies and teacher-created and computer-adaptive tests, surveys, attendance and behavior notes. It’s been this way for more than 30 years, and it’s time to try a different approach.

The big numbers are necessary, but the more they proliferate, the less value they add. Data-based answers lead to further data-based questions, testing, and analysis; and the psychology of leaders and policymakers means that the hunt for data gets in the way of actual learning. The drive for data responded to a real problem in education, but bad thinking about testing and data use has made the data cure worse than the disease….

The leadership decision at stake is how much data to collect. I’ve heard variations on “In God we trust; all others bring data” at any number of conferences and beginning-of-school-year speeches. But the mantra “we believe in data” is actually only shorthand for “we believe our actions should be informed by the best available data.” In education, that mostly means testing. In other fields, the kind of process is different, but the issue is the same. The key question is not, “will the data be useful?” (of course it can be) or, “will the data be interesting?” (Yes, again.) The proper question for leaders to ask is: will the data help us make better-enough decisions to be worth the cost of getting and using it? So far, the answer is “no.”

Nationwide data suggests that the growth of data-driven schooling hasn’t worked even by its own lights. Harvard professor Daniel Koretz says “The best estimate is that test-based accountability may have produced modest gains in elementary-school mathematics but no appreciable gains in either reading or high-school mathematics — even though reading and mathematics have been its primary focus.”

We wanted data to help us get past the problem of too many students learning too little, but it turns out that data is an insufficient, even misleading answer. It’s possible that all we’ve learned from our hyper-focus on data is that better instruction won’t come from more detailed information, but from changing what people do. That’s what data-driven reform is meant for, of course: convincing teachers of the need to change and focusing where they need to change….(More)”.

The Future of Civic Engagement

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Report by Hollie Russon Gilman: “The 2018 mid-term voter turnout was the highest in 50 years. While vital, voting can’t sustain civic engagement in the long term. So, how do we channel near-term activism into long-term civic engagement?  In her essay, Gilman paints a picture of how new institutional structures, enabled by new technologies, could lead to a new “civic layer” in society that results in “a more responsive, participatory, collaborative, and adaptive future for civic engagement in governance decision making.”

Creating a New “Civic Layer.” The longer-term future presents an opportunity to set up institutionalized structures for engagement across local, state, and federal levels of government—creating a “civic layer.” Its precise form will evolve, but the basic concept is to establish a centralized interface within a com- munity to engage residents in governance decision making that interweaves digital and in-person engagement. People will earn “civic points” for engagement across a variety of activities—including every time they sign a petition, report a pot hole, or volunteer in their local community.

While creating a civic layer will require new institutional approaches, emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and distributed ledger (e.g., blockchain) will also play a critical enabling role. These technologies will allow new institutional models to expand the concept of citizen coproduction of services in building a more responsive, connected, and engaged citizenry.

The following examples show different collaborative governance and technology components that will comprise the civic layer.  Each could be expanded and become interwoven into the fabric of civic life.

Use Collaborative Policymaking Models to Build a Civic Layer.  While we currently think of elections as a primary mode of citizen engagement with government, in the medium- to long-range future we could see collaborative policy models that become the de facto way people engage to supplement elections. Several of these engagement models are on the local level. However, with the formation of a civic layer these forms of engagement could become integrated into a federated structure enabling more scale, scope, and impact. Following are two promising models.

  • Participatory Budgeting can be broadly defined as the participation of citizens in the decision-making process of how to allocate their community’s budget among different priorities and in the monitoring of public spending. The process first came to the United States in 2009 through the work of the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project. Unlike traditional budget consultations held by some governments—which often amount to “selective listening” exercises—with participatory budgeting, citizens have an actual say in how a portion of a government’s investment budget is spent, with more money often allocated to poorer communities. Experts estimate that up to 2,500 local governments around the world have implemented participatory budgeting,
  • Citizens’Jury is another promising collaborative policymaking engagement model, pioneered in the 1980s and currently advocated by the nonprofit Jefferson Center in Minnesota. Three counties in rural Minnesota use this method as a foundation for Rural Climate Dialogues—regular gatherings where local residents hear from rural experts, work directly with their neighbors to design actionable community and policy recommendations, and share their feedback with public officials at a statewide meeting of rural Minnesota citizens, state agency representatives, and nonprofit organizations….(More)”.