Open Access Book edited by Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo et al: “…explores how privacy impacts knowledge production, community formation, and collaborative governance in diverse contexts, ranging from academia and IoT, to social media and mental health. Using nine new case studies and a meta-analysis of previous knowledge commons literature, the book integrates the Governing Knowledge Commons framework with Helen Nissenbaum’s Contextual Integrity framework. The multidisciplinary case studies show that personal information is often a key component of the resources created by knowledge commons. Moreover, even when it is not the focus of the commons, personal information governance may require community participation and boundaries. Taken together, the chapters illustrate the importance of exit and voice in constructing and sustaining knowledge commons through appropriate personal information flows. They also shed light on the shortcomings of current notice-and-consent style regulation of social media platforms….(More)”.
Digital Inclusion is a Social Determinant of Health
Paper by Jill Castek et al: “Efforts to improve digital literacies and internet access are valuable tools to reduce health disparities. The costs of equipping a person to use the internet are substantially lower than treating health conditions, and the benefits are multiple….
Those who do not have access to affordable broadband internet services, digital devices, digital literacies training, and technical support, face numerous challenges video-conferencing with their doctor, checking test results, filling prescriptions, and much more. Many individuals require significant support developing the digital literacies needed to engage in telehealth with the greatest need among older individuals, racial/ethnic minorities, and low-income communities. Taken in context, the costs of equipping a person to use the internet are substantially lower than treating health conditions, and the benefits are both persistent and significant.2
“Super” Social Determinants of Health
Digital literacies and internet connectivity have been called the “super social determinants of health” because they encompass all other social determinants of health (SDOH). Access to information, supports, and services are increasingly, and sometimes exclusively, accessible only online.
The social determinants of health shown in Figure 1. Digital Literacies & Access, include the neighborhood and physical environment, economic sustainability, healthcare system, community and social context, food, and education.4 Together these factors impact an individual’s ability to access healthcare services, education, housing, transportation, online banking, and sustain relationships with family members and friends. Digital literacies and access impacts all facets of a person’s life and affects behavioral and environmental outcomes such as shopping choices, housing, support systems, and health coverage….(More)”
Figure 1. Digital Literacies & Access.
Vancouver launches health data dashboard to drive collective action
Sarah Wray at Cities Today: “Vancouver has published a new open data dashboard to track progress against 23 health and wellbeing indicators.
These include datasets on the number of children living below the poverty line, the number of households spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and the proportion of adults who have a sense of community belonging. As well as the most recent data for each indicator, the dashboard includes target figures and the current status of the city’s progress towards that goal…
The launch represents the first phase of the project and there are plans to expand the dashboard to include additional indicators, as well as neighbourhood-level and disaggregated data for different populations. The city is also working with Indigenous communities to identify more decolonised ways of collecting and analysing the data.
A report published last year by British Columbia’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner called for provincial governments to collect and use disaggregated demographic and race-based data to address systemic racism and inequities. It emphasised that the process must include the community.
“One important piece that we’re still working on is data governance,” Zak said. “As we publish more disaggregated data that shows which communities in Vancouver are most impacted by health inequities, we need to do it in a way that is not just the local government telling stories about a community, but instead is telling a story with the community that leads to policy change.”…
Technical and financial support for the dashboard was provided by the Partnership for Healthy Cities, a global network of cities for preventing noncommunicable diseases and injuries. The partnership is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies in partnership with the World Health Organization and the public health organisation Vital Strategies….(More)”.
Administrative Law in the Automated State
Paper by Cary Coglianese: “In the future, administrative agencies will rely increasingly on digital automation powered by machine learning algorithms. Can U.S. administrative law accommodate such a future? Not only might a highly automated state readily meet longstanding administrative law principles, but the responsible use of machine learning algorithms might perform even better than the status quo in terms of fulfilling administrative law’s core values of expert decision-making and democratic accountability. Algorithmic governance clearly promises more accurate, data-driven decisions. Moreover, due to their mathematical properties, algorithms might well prove to be more faithful agents of democratic institutions. Yet even if an automated state were smarter and more accountable, it might risk being less empathic. Although the degree of empathy in existing human-driven bureaucracies should not be overstated, a large-scale shift to government by algorithm will pose a new challenge for administrative law: ensuring that an automated state is also an empathic one….(More)”.
Control Creep: When the Data Always Travels, So Do the Harms
Essay by Sun-ha Hong: “In 2014, a Canadian firm made history. Calgary-based McLeod Law brought the first known case in which Fitbit data would be used to support a legal claim. The device’s loyalty was clear: the young woman’s personal injury claim would be supported by her own Fitbit data, which would help prove that her activity levels had dipped post-injury. Yet the case had opened up a wider horizon for data use, both for and against the owners of such devices. Leading artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Kate Crawford noted at the time that the machines we use for “self-tracking” may be opening up a “new age of quantified self incrimination.”
Subsequent cases have demonstrated some of those possibilities. In 2015, a Connecticut man reported that his wife had been murdered by a masked intruder. Based partly on the victim’s Fitbit data, and other devices such as the family house alarm, detectives charged the man — not a masked intruder — with the crime. “In 2016, a Pennsylvania woman claimed she was sexually assaulted, but police argued that the woman’s own Fitbit data suggested otherwise, and charged her with false reporting.” In the courts and elsewhere, data initially gathered for self-tracking is increasingly being used to contradict or overrule the self — despite academic research and even a class action lawsuit alleging high rates of error in Fitbit data.
The data always travels, creating new possibilities for judging and predicting human lives. We might call it control creep: data-driven technologies tend to be pitched for a particular context and purpose, but quickly expand into new forms of control. Although we often think about data use in terms of trade-offs or bargains, such frameworks can be deeply misleading. What does it mean to “trade” personal data for the convenience of, say, an Amazon Echo, when the other side of that trade is constantly arranging new ways to sell and use that data in ways we cannot anticipate? As technology scholars Jake Goldenfein, Ben Green and Salomé Viljoen argue, the familiar trade-off of “privacy vs. X” rarely results in full respect for both values but instead tends to normalize a further stripping of privacy….(More)”.
Data Brokers Are a Threat to Democracy
Justin Sherman at Wired: “Enter the data brokerage industry, the multibillion dollar economy of selling consumers’ and citizens’ intimate details. Much of the privacy discourse has rightly pointed fingers at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, which collect users’ information directly. But a far broader ecosystem of buying up, licensing, selling, and sharing data exists around those platforms. Data brokerage firms are middlemen of surveillance capitalism—purchasing, aggregating, and repackaging data from a variety of other companies, all with the aim of selling or further distributing it.
Data brokerage is a threat to democracy. Without robust national privacy safeguards, entire databases of citizen information are ready for purchase, whether to predatory loan companies, law enforcement agencies, or even malicious foreign actors. Federal privacy bills that don’t give sufficient attention to data brokerage will therefore fail to tackle an enormous portion of the data surveillance economy, and will leave civil rights, national security, and public-private boundaries vulnerable in the process.
Large data brokers—like Acxiom, CoreLogic, and Epsilon—tout the detail of their data on millions or even billions of people. CoreLogic, for instance, advertises its real estate and property information on 99.9 percent of the US population. Acxiom promotes 11,000-plus “data attributes,” from auto loan information to travel preferences, on 2.5 billion people (all to help brands connect with people “ethically,” it adds). This level of data collection and aggregation enables remarkably specific profiling.
Need to run ads targeting poor families in rural areas? Check out one data broker’s “Rural and Barely Making It” data set. Or how about racially profiling financial vulnerability? Buy another company’s “Ethnic Second-City Strugglers” data set. These are just some of the disturbing titles captured in a 2013 Senate report on the industry’s data products, which have only expanded since. Many other brokers advertise their ability to identify subgroups upon subgroups of individuals through criteria like race, gender, marital status, and income level, all sensitive characteristics that citizens likely didn’t know would end up in a database—let alone up for sale….(More)”.
A Resurgence of Democracy in 2040?
Blog by Steven Aftergood: “The world will be “increasingly out of balance and contested at every level” over the next twenty years due to the pressures of demographic, environmental, economic and technological change, a new forecast from the National Intelligence Council called Global Trends 2040 said last week.
But among the mostly grim possible futures that can be plausibly anticipated — international chaos, political paralysis, resource depletion, mounting poverty — one optimistic scenario stands out: “In 2040, the world is in the midst of a resurgence of open democracies led by the United States and its allies.”
How could such a global renaissance of democracy possibly come about?
The report posits that between now and 2040 technological innovation in open societies will lead to economic growth, which will enable solutions to domestic problems, build public confidence, reduce vulnerabilities and establish an attractive model for emulation by others. Transparency is both a precondition and a consequence of this process.
“Open, democratic systems proved better able to foster scientific research and technological innovation, catalyzing an economic boom. Strong economic growth, in turn, enabled democracies to meet many domestic needs, address global challenges, and counter rivals,” the report assessed in this potential scenario.
“With greater resources and improving services, these democracies launched initiatives to crack down on corruption, increase transparency, and improve accountability worldwide, boosting public trust. These efforts helped to reverse years of social fragmentation and to restore a sense of civic nationalism.”
“The combination of rapid innovation, a stronger economy, and greater societal cohesion enabled steady progress on climate and other challenges. Democratic societies became more resilient to disinformation because of greater public awareness and education initiatives and new technologies that quickly identify and debunk erroneous information. This environment restored a culture of vigorous but civil debate over values, goals, and policies.”
“Strong differences in public preferences and beliefs remained but these were worked out democratically.”
In this hopeful future, openness provided practical advantages that left closed authoritarian societies lagging behind.
“In contrast to the culture of collaboration prevailing in open societies, Russia and China failed to cultivate the high-tech talent, investment, and environment necessary to sustain continuous innovation.”
“By the mid-2030s, the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia were the established global leaders in several technologies, including AI, robotics, the Internet of Things, biotech, energy storage, and additive manufacturing.”
The success of open societies in problem solving, along with their economic and social improvements, inspired other countries to adopt the democratic model.
“Technological success fostered a widely perceived view among emerging and developing countries that democracies were more adaptable and resilient and better able to cope with growing global challenges.”…(More)”.
The Case for Local Data Sharing Ordinances
Paper by Beatriz Botero Arcila: “Cities in the US have started to enact data-sharing rules and programs to access some of the data that technology companies operating under their jurisdiction – like short-term rental or ride hailing companies – collect. This information allows cities to adapt too to the challenges and benefits of the digital information economy. It allows them to understand what their impact is on congestion, the housing market, the local job market and even the use of public spaces. It also empowers them to act accordingly by, for example, setting vehicle caps or mandating a tailored minimum pay for gig-workers. These companies, however, sometimes argue that sharing this information attempts against their users’ privacy rights and their privacy rights, because this information is theirs; it’s part of their business records. The question is thus what those rights are, and whether it should and could be possible for local governments to access that information to advance equity and sustainability, without harming the legitimate privacy interests of both individuals and companies. This Article argues that within current Fourth Amendment doctrine and privacy law there is space for data-sharing programs. Privacy law, however, is being mobilized to alter the distribution of power and welfare between local governments, companies, and citizens within current digital information capitalism to extend those rights beyond their fair share and preempt permissible data-sharing requests. The Article warns that if the companies succeed in their challenges, privacy law will have helped shield corporate power from regulatory oversight, while still leaving individuals largely unprotected and submitting local governments further to corporate interests….(More)”.
How medical AI devices are evaluated: limitations and recommendations from an analysis of FDA approvals
Paper by Eric Wu et al: “Medical artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms are being increasingly proposed for the assessment and care of patients. Although the academic community has started to develop reporting guidelines for AI clinical trials, there are no established best practices for evaluating commercially available algorithms to ensure their reliability and safety. The path to safe and robust clinical AI requires that important regulatory questions be addressed. Are medical devices able to demonstrate performance that can be generalized to the entire intended population? Are commonly faced shortcomings of AI (overfitting to training data, vulnerability to data shifts, and bias against underrepresented patient subgroups) adequately quantified and addressed?
In the USA, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for approving commercially marketed medical AI devices. The FDA releases publicly available information on approved devices in the form of a summary document that generally contains information about the device description, indications for use, and performance data of the device’s evaluation study. The FDA has recently called for improvement of test-data quality, improvement of trust and transparency with users, monitoring of algorithmic performance and bias on the intended population, and testing with clinicians in the loop. To understand the extent to which these concerns are addressed in practice, we have created an annotated database of FDA-approved medical AI devices and systematically analyzed how these devices were evaluated before approval. Additionally, we have conducted a case study of pneumothorax-triage devices and found that evaluating deep-learning models at a single site alone, which is often done, can mask weaknesses in the models and lead to worse performance across sites.
Fig. 1: Breakdown of 130 FDA-approved medical AI devices by body area.
Devices are categorized by risk level (square, high risk; circle, low risk). Blue indicates that a multi-site evaluation was reported; otherwise, symbols are gray. Red outline indicates a prospective study (key, right margin). Numbers in key indicate the number of devices with each characteristic….(More)”.
Our Tomorrows- A Community Sensemaking Approach
OPSI Case Study: “The Kansas vision for the early childhood system is: All children will have their basic needs met and have equitable access to quality early childhood care and educational opportunities, so they are prepared to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. In 2019, the State of Kansas received a large federal grant (the Preschool Development Grant) to conduct a needs assessment and craft a strategic plan for the early childhood system where all children can thrive. The grant leadership team of state agencies utilized this opportunity to harness the power of Our Tomorrows’ innovative Community Sensemaking Approach to map families’ lived experiences and create policies and programming adaptive to families’ needs.
In this context, Our Tomorrows set out to achieve three goals:
1. Gather stories about thriving and surviving from families across Kansas utilizing a complexity-informed narrative research approach called SenseMaker.
2. Make sense of patterns that emerged from the stories through Community Sensemaking Workshops with stakeholders at various levels of the system.
3. Take action and ennoble bottom-up change through Community Action Labs.
From a complexity perspective, these goals translate to developing a ‘human sensor network,’ embedding citizen feedback loops and sensemaking processes into governance, and complexity-informed intervention via portfolios of safe-to-fail probes….(More)“