Parliament and the people

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Rebecca Rumbul, Gemma Moulder, and Alex Parsons at MySociety: “The publication and dissemination of parliamentary information in developed countries has been shown to improve citizen engagement in governance and reduce the distance between the representative and the represented. While it is clear that these channels are being used, it is not clear how they are being used, or why some digital tools achieve greater reach or influence than others.

With the support of the Indigo Trust, mySociety has undertaken research to better understand how digital tools for parliamentary openness and engagement are operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, and how future tools can be better designed and targeted to achieve greater social impact. Read the executive summary of the report’s conclusions.

The report provides an analysis of the data and digital landscapes of four case study countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda), and interrogates how digital channels are being used in those countries to create and disseminate information on parliamentary activity. It examines the existing academic and practitioner literature in this field, compares and contrasts the landscape in each case study country, and provides a thematic overview of common and relevant factors in the operation of digital platforms for democratic engagement in parliamentary activity…(More)”.

Big Data Ethics and Politics: Toward New Understandings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introductory paper by Wenhong Chen and Anabel Quan-Haase of Special Issue of the Social Science Computer Review:  “The hype around big data does not seem to abate nor do the scandals. Privacy breaches in the collection, use, and sharing of big data have affected all the major tech players, be it Facebook, Google, Apple, or Uber, and go beyond the corporate world including governments, municipalities, and educational and health institutions. What has come to light is that enabled by the rapid growth of social media and mobile apps, various stakeholders collect and use large amounts of data, disregarding the ethics and politics.

As big data touch on many realms of daily life and have profound impacts in the social world, the scrutiny around big data practice becomes increasingly relevant. This special issue investigates the ethics and politics of big data using a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. Together, the articles provide new understandings of the many dimensions of big data ethics and politics, showing it is important to understand and increase awareness of the biases and limitations inherent in big data analysis and practices….(More)”

What do we learn from Machine Learning?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Giovanni Buttarelli: “…There are few authorities monitoring the impact of new technologies on fundamental rights so closely and intensively as data protection and privacy commissioners. At the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, the 40th ICDPPC (which the EDPS had the honour to host), they continued the discussion on AI which began in Marrakesh two years ago with a reflection paper prepared by EDPS experts. In the meantime, many national data protection authorities have invested considerable efforts and provided important contributions to the discussion. To name only a few, the data protection authorities from Norway, France, the UK and Schleswig-Holstein have published research and reflections on AI, ethics and fundamental rights. We all see that some applications of AI raise immediate concerns about data protection and privacy; but it also seems generally accepted that there are far wider-reaching ethical implications, as a group of AI researchers also recently concluded. Data protection and privacy commissioners have now made a forceful intervention by adopting a declaration on ethics and data protection in artificial intelligence which spells out six principles for the future development and use of AI – fairness, accountability, transparency, privacy by design, empowerment and non-discrimination – and demands concerted international efforts  to implement such governance principles. Conference members will contribute to these efforts, including through a new permanent working group on Ethics and Data Protection in Artificial Intelligence.

The ICDPPC was also chosen by an alliance of NGOs and individuals, The Public Voice, as the moment to launch its own Universal Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence (UGAI). The twelve principles laid down in these guidelines extend and complement those of the ICDPPC declaration.

We are only at the beginning of this debate. More voices will be heard: think tanks such as CIPL are coming forward with their suggestions, and so will many other organisations.

At international level, the Council of Europe has invested efforts in assessing the impact of AI, and has announced a report and guidelines to be published soon. The European Commission has appointed an expert group which will, among other tasks, give recommendations on future-related policy development and on ethical, legal and societal issues related to AI, including socio-economic challenges.

As I already pointed out in an earlier blogpost, it is our responsibility to ensure that the technologies which will determine the way we and future generations communicate, work and live together, are developed in such a way that the respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law are supported and not undermined….(More)”.

Declaration of Cities Coalition for Digital Rights

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New York City, Barcelona and Amsterdam: “We, the undersigned cities, formally come together to form the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, to protect and uphold human rights on the internet at the local and global level.

The internet has become inseparable from our daily lives. Yet, every day, there are new cases of digital rights abuse, misuse and misinformation and concentration of power around the world: freedom of expression being censored; personal information, including our movements and communications, monitored, being shared and sold without consent; ‘black box’ algorithms being used to make unaccountable decisions; social media being used as a tool of harassment and hate speech; and democratic processes and public opinion being undermined.

As cities, the closest democratic institutions to the people, we are committed to eliminating impediments to harnessing technological opportunities that improve the lives of our constituents, and to providing trustworthy and secure digital services and infrastructures that support our communities. We strongly believe that human rights principles such as privacy, freedom of expression, and democracy must be incorporated by design into digital platforms starting with locally-controlled digital infrastructures and services.

As a coalition, and with the support of the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat), we will share best practices, learn from each other’s challenges and successes, and coordinate common initiatives and actions. Inspired by the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition (IRPC), the work of 300 international stakeholders over the past ten years, we are committed to the following five evolving principles:

01.Universal and equal access to the internet, and digital literacy

02.Privacy, data protection and security

03.Transparency, accountability, and non-discrimination of data, content and algorithms

04.Participatory Democracy, diversity and inclusion

05.Open and ethical digital service standards”

The Janus Face of the Liberal Information Order

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman: “…Domestically, policy-makers and scholars argued that information openness, like economic openness, would go hand-in-glove with political liberalization and the spread of democratic values. This was perhaps, in part an accident of timing: the Internet – which seemed to many to be inherently resistant to censorship – burgeoned shortly after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Politicians celebrated the dawn of a new era of open communication, while scholars began to argue that the spread of the Internet would lead to the spread of democracy (Diamond 2010;Shirky 2008).

A second wave of literature suggested that Internet-based social media had played a crucial role in spreading freedom in the Arab Spring (Howard 2010; Hussain and Howard 2013). There were some skeptics who highlighted the vexed relationship between open networks and the closed national politics of autocracies (Goldsmith and Wu 2006), or who pointed out that the Internet was nowhere near as censorship-resistant as early optimists had supposed (Deibert et al. 2008). Even these pessimists seemed to believe that the Internet could bolster liberalism in healthy democracies, although it would by no means necessarily prevail over tyranny.

The international liberal order for information, however, finds itself increasingly on shaky ground. Non-democratic regimes ranging from China to Saudi Arabia have created domestic technological infrastructures, which undermine and provide an alternative to the core principles of the regime (Boas 2006; Deibert 2008).

The European Union, while still generally supportive of open communication and free speech, has grown skeptical of the regime’s focus on unfettered economic access and has used privacy and anti-trust policy to challenge its most neo-liberal elements (Newman 2008). Non-state actors like Wikileaks have relied on information openness as a channel of disruption and perhaps manipulation. 

More troubling are the arguments of a new literature – that open information flows are less a harbinger of democracy than a vector of attack…

How can IR scholars make sense of this Janus-face quality of information? In this brief memo, we argue that much of the existing work on information technology and information flows suffers from two key deficiencies.

First – there has been an unhelpful separation between two important debates about information flows and liberalism. One – primarily focused on the international level – concerned global governance of information networks, examining how states (especially the US) arrived at and justified their policy stances, and how power dynamics shaped the battles between liberal and illiberal states over what the relevant governance arrangements should be (Klein 2002; Singh 2008; Mueller 2009). …

This leads to the second problem – that research has failed to appreciate the dynamics of contestation over time…(More)”

Declaration on Ethics and Data Protection in Artifical Intelligence

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Declaration: “…The 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners considers that any creation, development and use of artificial intelligence systems shall fully respect human rights, particularly the rights to the protection of personal data and to privacy, as well as human dignity, non-discrimination and fundamental values, and shall provide solutions to allow individuals to maintain control and understanding of artificial intelligence systems.

The Conference therefore endorses the following guiding principles, as its core values to preserve human rights in the development of artificial intelligence:

  1. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies should be designed, developed and used in respect of fundamental human rights and in accordance with the fairness principle, in particular by:
  2. Considering individuals’ reasonable expectations by ensuring that the use of artificial intelligence systems remains consistent with their original purposes, and that the data are used in a way that is not incompatible with the original purpose of their collection,
  3. taking into consideration not only the impact that the use of artificial intelligence may have on the individual, but also the collective impact on groups and on society at large,
  4. ensuring that artificial intelligence systems are developed in a way that facilitates human development and does not obstruct or endanger it, thus recognizing the need for delineation and boundaries on certain uses,…(More)

How data helped visualize the family separation crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chava Gourarie at StoryBench: “Early this summer, at the height of the family separation crisis – where children were being forcibly separated from their parents at our nation’s border – a team of scholars pooled their skills to address the issue. The group of researchers – from a variety of humanities departments at multiple universities – spent a week of non-stop work mapping the immigration detention network that spans the United States. They named the project “Torn Apart/Separados” and published it online, to support the efforts of locating and reuniting the separated children with their parents.

The project utilizes the methods of the digital humanities, an emerging discipline that applies computational tools to fields within the humanities, like literature and history. It was led by members of Columbia University’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, which had previously used methods such as rapid deployment to responded to natural disasters.

The group has since expanded the project, publishing a second volume that focuses on the $5 billion immigration industry, based largely on public data about companies that contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The visualizations highlight the astounding growth in investment of ICE infrastructure (from $475 million 2014 to $5.1 billion in 2018), as well as who benefits from these contracts, and how the money is spent.

Storybench spoke with Columbia University’s Alex Gil, who worked on both phases of the project, about the process of building “Torn Apart/Separados,” about the design and messaging choices that were made and the ways in which methods of the digital humanities can cross pollinate with those of journalism…(More)”.

Governing artificial intelligence: ethical, legal, and technical opportunities and challenges

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Introduction to the Special Issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society by Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, Luciano Floridi and Corinne Cath: “Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly permeates every aspect of our society, from the critical, like urban infrastructure, law enforcement, banking, healthcare and humanitarian aid, to the mundane like dating. AI, including embodied AI in robotics and techniques like machine learning, can improve economic, social welfare and the exercise of human rights. Owing to the proliferation of AI in high-risk areas, the pressure is mounting to design and govern AI to be accountable, fair and transparent. How can this be achieved and through which frameworks? This is one of the central questions addressed in this special issue, in which eight authors present in-depth analyses of the ethical, legal-regulatory and technical challenges posed by developing governance regimes for AI systems. It also gives a brief overview of recent developments in AI governance, how much of the agenda for defining AI regulation, ethical frameworks and technical approaches is set, as well as providing some concrete suggestions to further the debate on AI governance…(More)”.

Governing Artificial Intelligence: Upholding Human Rights & Dignity

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Report by Mark Latonero that “…shows how human rights can serve as a “North Star” to guide the development and governance of artificial intelligence.

The report draws the connections between AI and human rights; reframes recent AI-related controversies through a human rights lens; and reviews current stakeholder efforts at the intersection of AI and human rights.

This report is intended for stakeholders–such as technology companies, governments, intergovernmental organizations, civil society groups, academia, and the United Nations (UN) system–looking to incorporate human rights into social and organizational contexts related to the development and governance of AI….(More)”.

Human Rights in the Big Data World

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Paper by Francis Kuriakose and Deepa Iyer: “Ethical approach to human rights conceives and evaluates law through the underlying value concerns. This paper examines human rights after the introduction of big data using an ethical approach to rights. First, the central value concerns such as equity, equality, sustainability and security are derived from the history of digital technological revolution. Then, the properties and characteristics of big data are analyzed to understand emerging value concerns such as accountability, transparency, tracability, explainability and disprovability.

Using these value points, this paper argues that big data calls for two types of evaluations regarding human rights. The first is the reassessment of existing human rights in the digital sphere predominantly through right to equality and right to work. The second is the conceptualization of new digital rights such as right to privacy and right against propensity-based discrimination. The paper concludes that as we increasingly share the world with intelligence systems, these new values expand and modify the existing human rights paradigm….(More)”.