Reframing Data Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Recently, the Centre for Information Policy Leadership (“CIPL”) at Hunton & Williams LLP, a privacy and information policy think tank based in Brussels, London and Washington, D.C., and Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications company in the world, issued a joint white paper on Reframing Data Transparency (the “white paper”). The white paper was the outcome of a June 2016 roundtable held by the two organizations in London, in which senior business leaders, Data Privacy Officers, lawyers and academics discussed the importance of user-centric transparency to the data driven economy….The issues explored during the roundtable and in the white paper include the following:

  • The transparency deficit in the digital age. There is a growing gap between traditional, legal privacy notices and user-centric transparency that is capable of delivering understandable and actionable information concerning an organization’s data use policies and practices, including why it processes data, what the benefits are to individuals and society, how it protects the data and how users can manage and control the use of their data.
  • The impact of the transparency deficit. The transparency deficit undermines customer trust and customers’ ability to participate more effectively in the digital economy.
  • Challenges of delivering user-centric transparency. In a connected world where there may be no direct relationship between companies and their end users, both transparency and consent as a basis for processing are particularly challenging.
  • Transparency as a multistakeholder challenge. Transparency is not solely a legal issue, but a multistakeholder challenge, which requires engagement of regulators, companies, individuals, behavioral economists, social scientists, psychologists and user experience specialists.
  • The role of data protection authorities (“DPAs”). DPAs play a key role in promoting and incentivizing effective data transparency approaches and tools.
  • The role of companies. Data transparency is a critical business issue because transparency drives digital trust as well as business opportunities. Organizations must innovate on how to deliver user-centric transparency. Data driven companies must research and develop new approaches to transparency that explain the value exchange between customers and companies and the companies’ data practices, and create tools that enable their customers to exercise effective engagement and control.
  • The importance of empowering individuals. It is crucial to support and enhance individuals’ digital literacy, which includes an understanding of the uses of personal data and the benefits of data processing, as well as knowledge of relevant privacy rights and the data management tools that are available to them. Government bodies, regulators and industry should be involved in educating the public regarding digital literacy. Such education should take place in schools and universities, and through consumer education campaigns. Transparency is the foundation and sine qua non of individual empowerment.
  • The role of behavioral economists, social scientists, psychologists and user experience specialists. Experts from these disciplines will be crucial in developing user-centric transparency and controls….(More)”.

How Companies Can Help Cities Close the Data Gap

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Shamina Singh in Governing: “Recent advances in data analytics have revolutionized the way many companies do business. Starbucks, for example, rolls out new beverages and chooses its store locations by analyzing customer, economic and other data. And as Amazon’s customers know so well, the company makes purchase recommendations to them in real time based on items they’ve viewed or bought. So why aren’t more of our cities leveraging data in the same way to improve services for their residents?

According to a recent report by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities initiative, city officials say they simply lack the capacity to do so. Nearly half pointed to a shortage of staff and financial resources dedicated to gathering and evaluating data.

This gap between companies’ and cities’ ability to use data is not surprising. Businesses have invested heavily in data and analytics in recent years, and they are spending an average of $7 million annually per company on data-related activities. These investments are made with the understanding that they will improve the companies’ bottom line, and they have started paying off.

City halls, on the other hand, find themselves hamstrung when it comes to investing in data and analytics. Despite recent growth, city revenues remain below pre-recession levels, with spending demands on the rise. Furthermore, many cities face the need to balance long-term opportunity with real short-term needs. Do you hire a data scientist — who may command a salary north of $200,000 — to research strategies to reduce crime in the long run, or do you hire more police officers to keep neighborhoods safe today?….

One way companies can help is through data philanthropy, leveraging their data analytics and capabilities to advance social progress. A step beyond conventional philanthropy and traditional corporate social-responsibility initiatives, data philanthropy is a new kind of response to social issues.

There are a number of ways cities could employ data philanthropy. For starters, they could partner with relevant apps to help ameliorate deteriorating roads. In Oklahoma City, for example, potholes are a particularly serious problem. Data from Waze, the community-based mapping and navigation app, could be leveraged to build a system through which residents could report potholes, allowing city services to efficiently fill them in.

Some data-philanthropy projects are already underway. Uber, for example, recently partnered with the city of Boston in the hopes that its data could help the city improve traffic congestion and community planning. Uber donates anonymized trip data by Zip code, allowing city officials to see the date and time of a trip, its duration and distance traveled. Boston’s transportation, neighborhood development and redevelopment agencies will have access to the data, equipping them with a new tool for more-effective policymaking.

While there is demonstrated enthusiasm from cities for more effective use of data to improve their residents’ lives, cities won’t be able to close the data gap on their own. Private-sector companies must answer the call. Helped in part by the better use of data, cities can create improved, more inclusive and stronger business environments. Who would argue with that goal?…(More)”

For Better Citizenship, Scratch and Win

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times: “China, with its largely cash economy, has a huge problem with tax evasion. Not just grand tax evasion, but the everyday “no receipt, please” kind, even though there have been harsh penalties: Before 2011, some forms of tax evasion were even punishable by death.

The country needed a different approach. So what did it do to get people to pay sales tax?
A. Hired a force of inspectors to raid restaurants and stores to catch people skipping the receipt, accompanied by big fines and prison terms.
B. Started an “It’s a citizen’s duty to denounce” exhortation campaign.
C. Installed cameras to photograph every transaction.
D. Turned receipts into scratch-off lottery games.

One of these things is not like the other, and that’s the answer: D. Instead of punishing under-the-table transactions, China wisely decided to encouragelegal transactions by starting a receipt lottery. Many places have done this — Brazil, Chile, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Taiwan, among others. In Taiwan, for example, every month the tax authorities post lottery numbers; match a few numbers for a small prize, or all of them to win more than $300,000.

China took it further. Customers need not store their receipts and wait until the end of the month to see if they’ve won money. Gratification is instant: Each receipt, known as a fapiao, is a scratch-off lottery ticket. People still game the system, but much less. The fapiao system has greatly raised collections of sales tax, business income tax and total tax. And it’s cheap to administer: one study found that new tax revenue totaled 30 times (PDF) the cost of the lottery prizes.

When a receipt is a lottery ticket, people ask for a receipt. They hope to get money, but just as important, they like to play games. Those axioms apply around the globe.

“We have groups that say: we can give out an incentive to our customers worth $15,” said Aron Ezra, chief executive of OfferCraft, an American company that designs games for businesses. “They could do that and have everyone get an incentive for $15. But they’d get better results for the same average price by having variability — some get $10, some get $100.” The lottery makes it exciting.

The huge popularity of lotteries shows this. Another example is the Save to Win program, which credit unions are using in seven states. Microscopic interest rates weren’t enough to get low-income customers to save. So instead, for every $25 they put into a savings account, depositors get one lottery entry. They can win a grand prize — in some states, $10,000 — or $100 prizes every month.

What else could lotteries do?

Los Angeles and Philadelphia have been the sites of experiments to increase dismal voter turnout in local elections by choosing a voter at random to win a large cash prize. In May 2015, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Los Angeles offered $25,000 to a random voter in one district during a school board election, in a project named Voteria.

Health-related lotteries aren’t new. In 1957, Glasgow held a mass X-ray campaign to diagnose tuberculosis. Health officials aimed to X-ray 250,000 people and in the end got three times that many. One reason for the enthusiasm: a weekly prize draw. A lovely vintage newsreel reported on the campaign.

More than 50 years later, researchers set up a lottery among young adults in Lesotho, designed to promote safe sex practices. Every four months the subjects were tested for two sexually transmitted diseases, syphilis and trichonomiasis. A negative test got them entered into a lottery to win either $50 (equivalent to a week’s average salary) or $100. The idea was to see if incentives to reduce the spread of syphilis would also protect against HIV.

The results were significant — a 21.4 percent reduction in the rate of new H.I.V. infections, and a 3.4 percent lower prevalence rate of HIV in the treatment group after two years. And the effect was lasting — the gains persisted a year after the experiment ended. The lottery worked in large part because it was most attractive to those most at risk: many people who take sexual risks also enjoy taking monetary risks, and might be eager to play a lottery.

The authors wrote in a blog post: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first H.I.V. prevention intervention focusing on sexual behavior changes (as opposed to medical interventions) to have been demonstrated to lead to a significant reduction in H.I.V. incidence, the ultimate objective of any H.I.V. prevention intervention.”…(More)”

Sustainable Smart Cities: Creating Spaces for Technological, Social and Business Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Peris-Ortiz, Marta, Bennett, Dag, and Pérez-Bustamante Yábar, Diana: “This volume provides the most current research on smart cities. Specifically, it focuses on the economic development and sustainability of smart cities and examines how to transform older industrial cities into sustainable smart cities.  It aims to identify the role of the following elements in the creation and management of smart cities:

  • Citizen participation and empowerment
  • Value creation mechanisms
  • Public administration
  • Quality of life and sustainability
  • Democracy
  • ICT
  • Private initiatives and entrepreneurship

Regardless of their size, all cities are ultimately agglomerations of people and institutions. Agglomeration economies make it possible to attain minimum efficiencies of scale in the organization and delivery of services. However, the economic benefits do not constitute the main advantage of a city. A city’s status rests on three dimensions: (1) political impetus, which is the result of citizens’ participation and the public administration’s agenda; (2) applications derived from technological advances (especially in ICT); and (3) cooperation between public and private initiatives in business development and entrepreneurship. These three dimensions determine which resources are necessary to create smart cities. But a smart city, ideal in the way it channels and resolves technological, social and economic-growth issues, requires many additional elements to function at a high-performance level, such as culture (an environment that empowers and engages citizens) and physical infrastructure designed to foster competition and collaboration, encourage new ideas and actions, and set the stage for new business creation. …(More)”.

Facebook, World Bank and OECD Link Up to Gather Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paul Hannon in the Wall Street Journal: “Social media potentially offers cheaper and more timely way to survey firms and gauge the economy…Facebook has teamed up with the World Bank and the OECD to launch a new measure of business sentiment based on questioning companies that use their Facebook pages to connect with customers.

The three partners on Wednesday launched a new measure of business sentiment based on questioning companies that use their Facebook pages to connect with customers. Known as the Future of Business Survey, the report has been in testing since February and received responses to 15 queries from a total of 90,000 small and midsize firms across 22 countries.

Its first public release shows that those businesses are more optimistic about their prospects than other companies surveyed by more traditional means.

But the real interest for the three partners is the potential to drill down into the factors that affect the growth of small businesses, a process that until now has involved great expense and time, since it involves face-to-face interviews by polling professionals that are carried out over many months and are infrequently updated. “What I feel is appealing about this particular survey is that it’s potentially a more powerful tool for getting information more quickly and at a fraction of the cost,” said Augusto Lopez-Claros, director of the Global Indicators Group at the World Bank.

Even in developed countries with well funded and equipped statistics offices, timely information on very small businesses is hard to come by. In developing countries, that scarcity can be more acute. The ability to connect with business owners via Facebook or other social-media platforms could make it possible to gather such information, and acquire a more complete picture of what is happening in those economies.

The new approach to data gathering could even enable some smaller developing countries to skip the process of enlarging their statistics agencies. That is an opportunity Mr. Lopez Claros compares to the advent of mobile telephones, which enabled many African countries to skip the construction of expensive fixed-line infrastructure and improve communications at a fraction of that cost….(More)

See also Entrepreneurship at a Glance 2016 (OECD).

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ryan Avent: “None of us has ever lived through a genuine industrial revolution. Until now.

Digital technology is transforming every corner of the economy, fundamentally altering the way things are done, who does them, and what they earn for their efforts. In The Wealth of Humans, Economist editor Ryan Avent brings up-to-the-minute research and reporting to bear on the major economic question of our time: can the modern world manage technological changes every bit as disruptive as those that shook the socioeconomic landscape of the 19th century?

Traveling from Shenzhen, to Gothenburg, to Mumbai, to Silicon Valley, Avent investigates the meaning of work in the twenty-first century: how technology is upending time-tested business models and thrusting workers of all kinds into a world wholly unlike that of a generation ago. It’s a world in which the relationships between capital and labor and between rich and poor have been overturned.

Past revolutions required rewriting the social contract: this one is unlikely to demand anything less. Avent looks to the history of the Industrial Revolution and the work of numerous experts for lessons in reordering society. The future needn’t be bleak, but as The Wealth of Humans explains, we can’t expect to restructure the world without a wrenching rethinking of what an economy should be….(More)”

Ethics in data project design: It’s about planning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anna Lauren Hoffmann at O’Reilly: “When I explain the value of ethics to students and professionals alike, I refer it as an “orientation.” As any good designer, scientist, or researcher knows, how you orient yourself toward a problem can have a big impact on the sort of solution you develop—and how you get there. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “perception is not whimsical, but fatal.” Your particular perspective, knowledge of, and approach to a problem shapes your solution, opening up certain paths forward and forestalling others.

Data-driven approaches to business help optimize measurable outcomes—but the early planning of a project needs to account for the ethical (and in many cases, the literal) landscape to avoid ethically treacherous territory. Several recent cases in the news illustrate this point and show the type of preparation that enables a way to move forward in both a data-driven and ethical fashion: Princeton Review’s ZIP-code-based pricing scheme, which turned out to unfairly target Asian-American families, and Amazon’s same-day-delivery areas, which neglect majority-Black neighborhoods.

You can approach a new project using a road trip analogy. The destination is straightforward—profit, revenue, or another measurable KPI. But the path you take to get there will need to be determined. If my wife and I, for example, want to drive from our apartment in Oakland (Point A) to visit my wife’s sister in Los Angeles (Point B), we have to figure out how we’d like to approach the trip. If we’re concerned primarily with efficiency, certain questions immediately come to the fore, namely: what’s the fastest route to LA? Determining the fastest route requires us to pay attention to certain features of the possible trip, such as traffic speeds, easily accessible gas stations, and traffic conditions.On the other hand, if my wife and I are interested in taking the most scenic route from Oakland to LA, a whole different set of concerns become salient. Gas stations are likely still relevant, but speed is less of a factor. We’ll also want to take into account things like notable landmarks and towns (and my tendency toward car sickness) along the way.

The destination is the same; the laws we have to abide by are the same, but how we get from Point A to Point B, then, is heavily determined by how we orient ourselves toward the trip in the first place.

The same goes for research or design projects: how you orient yourself or your team toward solving certain problems or achieving certain goals will fundamentally shape the journey you take. If you’re interested in reaching a goal as quickly as possible—if your only concern is speed or turnaround time—a particular set of concerns are going to be salient. But if you’re interested in reaching a goal not only efficiently but ethically, then a different set of concerns will pop up….(More)”

Next big thing: The ‘uberfication’ of crowdsourced news

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ken Doctor at Politico: “Get ready to hear a lot about the “uberfication” of user-generated content.

Yes, it’s a mouthful. But it’s also the next big thing. Fresco News, a two-year-old New York start-up, sees itself becoming a hot property as it cracks the code on local amateur content generation….Fresco News now enables local TV stations to assign, receive and quickly get on air and online lots of amateur-shot newsy videos in their metro area.

Its secret sauce: Uberizing the supply chain process from station assignment to Fresco “qualified” shooter to shooting smartphone video to uploading and optimizing its quality for quick delivery to consumers, online or on the air.

Meyer’s team of 40, which includes numerous part-timers, has assiduously worked through the many frictions. That’s one hallmark of successful Uberfication.

“We just did a tremendous amount of just non-stop testing,” he says. “I would say, even with simple things like user acquisition, which is a major part of our process and entering new markets. We’ve tested hundreds of different ad types, graphics that we’ve designed internally that effectively, and I would say cheaply, bring in prospective citizen journalists.”

Stations can assign easily. Would-be shooters can see assignments, geographically displayed, on a single screen. The upload works well and stations’ ability to quickly use the videos is a strong selling point. Fresco, then, handles the billing and payment processes, much as Uber does.

As with once-taxi rides, individual transaction amounts compute small. Shooters get $50 for each video used by a TV station or $20 for a still photo. Stations pay $75 for a video and $30 for a still. As a standalone business, Fresco News is a scale play.

It’s not a new idea.

UGC – or user-generated content – was supposed to be huge. The late ’90s notion: the Internet could make anyone and everyone a reporter, and make it easy for them to share their work widely and cheaply. Many newspaper chains bought into the idea, and tested it unevenly, hoping that UGC could provide what was, for awhile called, “local-local” content. Local-local meaning neighborhood plus, that kind of locally differentiating news coverage that publishers thought readers wanted, but coverage publishers believed cost too much if they had to pay professional reporters to do it.

Short story: It didn’t work for the chains. In part, the technology was immature. More importantly, it turns out that reporting – and writing – remains, even the Internet age, largely a professional skill. Publishers couldn’t find enough dependable local amateurs, and besides, they never really iterated a business model around the idea.

Then, there were the national start-up efforts. NowPublic, one memorable one partnered with the Associated Press, launched in 2005 …but never found traction. Today, several other companies ply the territory, with Storyful a standard of quality. Importantly, Storyful focuses on national and global content. Fresco News aims squarely at local – first across the 3,000-mile breadth of the U.S.

The dots tell the story

Take a look at the many dots on the Philly map above. Each blue dot represents an active, signed-up Fresco video shooter in the area. Each yellow dot shows current assignments. In this August visualization, visually, you get a sense of quickly and energetically local TV station Fox 29, WTXF, has deployed – and uses – Fresco News.as earned “preferred” status at Fresco, has been around journalistic operations for a long time and looks forward to contributing news tips as Fresco might expand what its tech can do for local stations…(More)”

Twitter, UN Global Pulse announce data partnership

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “Twitter and UN Global Pulse today announced a partnership that will provide the United Nations with access to Twitter’s data tools to support efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted by world leaders last year.

Every day, people around the world send hundreds of millions of Tweets in dozens of languages. This public data contains real-time information on many issues including the cost of food, availability of jobs, access to health care, quality of education, and reports of natural disasters. This partnership will allow the development and humanitarian agencies of the UN to turn these social conversations into actionable information to aid communities around the globe.

“The Sustainable Development Goals are first and foremost about people, and Twitter’s unique data stream can help us truly take a real-time pulse on priorities and concerns — particularly in regions where social media use is common — to strengthen decision-making. Strong public-private partnerships like this show the vast potential of big data to serve the public good,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of UN Global Pulse.

“We are incredibly proud to partner with the UN in support of the Sustainable Development Goals,” said Chris Moody, Twitter’s VP of Data Services. “Twitter data provides a live window into the public conversations that communities around the world are having, and we believe that the increased potential for research and innovation through this partnership will further the UN’s efforts to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Organizations and business around the world currently use Twitter data in many meaningful ways, and this unique data source enables them to leverage public information at scale to better inform their policies and decisions. These partnerships enable innovative uses of Twitter data, while protecting the privacy and safety of Twitter users.

UN Global Pulse’s new collaboration with Twitter builds on existing R&D that has shown the power of social media for social impact, like measuring the impact of public health campaigns, tracking reports of rising food prices, or prioritizing needs after natural disasters….(More)”

The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Samuel Bowles: “Why do policies and business practices that ignore the moral and generous side of human nature often fail?

Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire.

But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends….(More)”