Paper by Theodora Gazi: “Data collection is valuable before, during and after interventions in order to increase the effectiveness of humanitarian projects. Although the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets forth rules for the processing of personal data, its implementation by humanitarian aid actors is crucial and presents challenges. Failure to comply triggers severe risks for both data subjects and the reputation of the actor. This article provides insights into the implementation of the guiding principles of the GDPR, the legal bases for data processing, data subjects’ rights and data sharing during the provision of humanitarian assistance…(More)”
This app is helping mothers in the Brazilian favelas survive the pandemic
Daniel Avelar at Open Democracy: “As Brazil faces one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the world, a smartphone app is helping residents of impoverished areas known as favelas survive the virus threat amid sudden mass unemployment.
So far, the Latin American country has recorded over 115.000 deaths caused by COVID-19. The shutdown of economic activity wiped out 7.8 million jobs, mostly affecting low-skilled informal workers who form the bulk of the population in the favelas. Emergency income distributed by the government is limited to 60% of the minimum wage, so families are struggling to make ends meet.
Many blame president Jair Bolsonaro for the tragedy. Bolsonaro, a far-right populist, has consistently rallied against science-based policies in the management of the pandemic and pushed for an end to stay-at-home orders. A precocious reopening of the economy is likely to increase infection rates and cause more deaths.
In an attempt to stop the looming humanitarian catastrophe, a coalition of activists in the favelas and corporate partners developed an app that is facilitating the distribution of food and emergency income to thousands of women spearheading families. The app has a facial recognition feature that helps volunteers identify and register recipients of aid and prevents fraud.
So far, the Favela Mothers project has distributed the equivalent to US$ 26 million in food parcels and cash allowances to more than 1.1 million families in 5,000 neighborhoods across the country….(More)”.
From Desert Battlefields To Coral Reefs, Private Satellites Revolutionize The View
NPR Story: “As the U.S. military and its allies attacked the last Islamic State holdouts last year, it wasn’t clear how many civilians were still in the besieged desert town of Baghouz, Syria.
So Human Rights Watch asked a private satellite company, Planet, for its regular daily photos and also made a special request for video.
“That live video actually was instrumental in convincing us that there were thousands of civilians trapped in this pocket,” said Josh Lyons of Human Rights Watch. “Therefore, the coalition forces absolutely had an obligation to stop and to avoid bombardment of that pocket at that time.”
Which they did until the civilians fled.
Lyons, who’s based in Geneva, has a job title you wouldn’t expect at a human rights group: director of geospatial analysis. He says satellite imagery is increasingly a crucial component of human rights investigations, bolstering traditional eyewitness accounts, especially in areas where it’s too dangerous to send researchers.
“Then we have this magical sort of fusion of data between open-source, eyewitness testimony and data from space. And that becomes essentially a new gold standard for investigations,” he said.
‘A string of pearls’
Satellite photos used to be restricted to the U.S. government and a handful of other nations. Now such imagery is available to everyone, creating a new world of possibilities for human rights groups, environmentalists and researchers who monitor nuclear programs.
They get those images from a handful of private, commercial satellite companies, like Planet and Maxar….(More)”.
Rethinking Readiness: A Brief Guide to Twenty-First-Century Megadisasters
Book by Jeff Schlegelmilch: “As human society continues to develop, we have increased the risk of large-scale disasters. From health care to infrastructure to national security, systems designed to keep us safe have also heightened the potential for catastrophe. The constant pressure of climate change, geopolitical conflict, and our tendency to ignore what is hard to grasp exacerbates potential dangers. How can we prepare for and prevent the twenty-first-century disasters on the horizon?
Rethinking Readiness offers an expert introduction to human-made threats and vulnerabilities, with a focus on opportunities to reimagine how we approach disaster preparedness. Jeff Schlegelmilch identifies and explores the most critical threats facing the world today, detailing the dangers of pandemics, climate change, infrastructure collapse, cyberattacks, and nuclear conflict. Drawing on the latest research from leading experts, he provides an accessible overview of the causes and potential effects of these looming megadisasters. The book highlights the potential for building resilient, adaptable, and sustainable systems so that we can be better prepared to respond to and recover from future crises. Thoroughly grounded in scientific and policy expertise, Rethinking Readiness is an essential guide to this century’s biggest challenges in disaster management…(More)”.
Digital in the Time of the Coronavirus: Data Science and Technology as a Force for Inclusion
Blog by Aleem Walji: “Crises do not create inequity and fault lines in society, they expose them. The systems and structures that give rise to inequality and inequity are deep-rooted and powerful. In recent months, we have seen the coronavirus bring into high relief many social and economic vulnerabilities across the world. It is now clear that Hispanics and Blacks are even more vulnerable to Covid-19 because of underlying health conditions, more frequent exposure to the virus, and broken social safety nets. This trend will only accelerate as the virus gains a foothold in Africa, parts of Asia, and Latin America.
The impact of the virus in places where health systems are weak, poverty is high, and large numbers of people are immunocompromised could be devastating. How do we mitigate the medium-term and second-order effects of a pandemic that will shrink economic growth and exacerbate inequality? This year alone, more than 500 million people are expected to fall into poverty, mostly in Africa and Asia. To defeat a virus that does not respect geographic boundaries, it is urgent for public and private actors, philanthropies, and global development institutions to use every tool available to alleviate a global humanitarian emergency and attendant economic collapse.
Technology, data science, and digital readiness are crucial elements for an effective emergency response and foundational to sustain a long-term recovery. Already, scientists and researchers across the world are leveraging data and digital platforms to accelerate the development of a vaccine, fast-track clinical trials, and contact tracing using mobile-enabled tools. Sensors are collecting huge amounts of data, and machine learning algorithms are helping policymakers decide when to relax physical distancing and where to open the economy and for how long.
Access to reliable information for decisionmaking, however, is not evenly spread. High frequency, granular, and anonymized datasets are essential for public-health officials and community health workers to target interventions and reach vulnerable populations faster and at a lower cost. Equipped with reliable data, civic technologists can leverage tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning to flatten the curve of Covid-19 and also the curve of inequity and unequal access to services and support.
This will not happen on its own. Preventing a much deeper digital divide will require forward-leaning policymakers, far-sighted investors and grant makers, civic-minded tech innovators and businesses, and a robust, digitally savvy civil society to work collaboratively for social and economic inclusion. It will require political will and improved data governance to deploy digital platforms to serve populations furthest behind. It is in our collective interest to ensure the health and well-being of every segment of society. Digital inclusion is part of the solution.
There are certain pathways public, private and social actors can follow to leverage data science, digital tools, and platforms today….(More)”.
The detection and location estimation of disasters using Twitter and the identification of Non-Governmental Organisations using crowdsourcing
Paper by Christopher Loynes, Jamal Ouenniche & Johannes De Smedt: “This paper provides the humanitarian community with an automated tool that can detect a disaster using tweets posted on Twitter, alongside a portal to identify local and regional Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that are best-positioned to provide support to people adversely affected by a disaster. The proposed disaster detection tool uses a linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC) to detect man-made and natural disasters, and a density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to accurately estimate a disaster’s geographic location. This paper provides two original contributions. The first is combining the automated disaster detection tool with the prototype portal for NGO identification. This unique combination could help reduce the time taken to raise awareness of the disaster detected, improve the coordination of aid, increase the amount of aid delivered as a percentage of initial donations and improve aid effectiveness. The second contribution is a general framework that categorises the different approaches that can be adopted for disaster detection. Furthermore, this paper uses responses obtained from an on-the-ground survey with NGOs in the disaster-hit region of Uttar Pradesh, India, to provide actionable insights into how the portal can be developed further…(More)”.
UN Data Strategy
United Nations: “As structural UN reforms consolidate, we are focused on building the data, digital, technology and innovation capabilities that the UN needs to succeed in the 21st century. The Secretary General’s “Data Strategy for Action by Everyone, Everywhere” is our agenda for the data-driven transformation.
Data permeates all aspects of our work, and its power—harnessed responsibly—is critical to the global agendas we serve. The UN family’s footprint, expertise and connectedness create unique opportunities to advance global “data action” with insight, impact and integrity. To help unlock more potential, 50 UN entities jointly designed this Strategy as a comprehensive playbook for data-driven change based on global best practice…
Our strategy pursues a simple idea: we focus not on process, but on learning, iteratively, to deliver data use cases that add value for stakeholders based on our vision, outcomes and principles. Use cases – purposes for which data is used – already permeate our organization. We will systematically identify and deliver them through dedicated data action portfolios. While new capabilities will in part emerge through “learning by doing”, we will also strengthen organizational enablers to deliver on our vision, including shifts in people and culture, partnerships, data governance and technology….(More)”.
Rapid Multi-Dimensional Impact Assessment of Floods
Paper by David Pastor-Escuredo et al: “Natural disasters affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide every year. The impact assessment of a disaster is key to improve the response and mitigate how a natural hazard turns into a social disaster. An actionable quantification of impact must be integratively multi-dimensional. We propose a rapid impact assessment framework that comprises detailed geographical and temporal landmarks as well as the potential socio-economic magnitude of the disaster based on heterogeneous data sources: Environment sensor data, social media, remote sensing, digital topography, and mobile phone data.
As dynamics of floods greatly vary depending on their causes, the framework may support different phases of decision-making during the disaster management cycle. To evaluate its usability and scope, we explored four flooding cases with variable conditions. The results show that social media proxies provide a robust identification with daily granularity even when rainfall detectors fail. The detection also provides information of the magnitude of the flood, which is potentially useful for planning. Network analysis was applied to the social media to extract patterns of social effects after the flood. This analysis showed significant variability in the obtained proxies, which encourages the scaling of schemes to comparatively characterize patterns across many floods with different contexts and cultural factors.
This framework is presented as a module of a larger data-driven system designed to be the basis for responsive and more resilient systems in urban and rural areas. The impact-driven approach presented may facilitate public–private collaboration and data sharing by providing real-time evidence with aggregated data to support the requests of private data with higher granularity, which is the current most important limitation in implementing fully data-driven systems for disaster response from both local and international actors…(More)”.
Big data, privacy and COVID-19 – learning from humanitarian expertise in data protection
Andrej Zwitter & Oskar J. Gstrein at the Journal of International Humanitarian Action: “The use of location data to control the coronavirus pandemic can be fruitful and might improve the ability of governments and research institutions to combat the threat more quickly. It is important to note that location data is not the only useful data that can be used to curb the current crisis. Genetic data can be relevant for AI enhanced searches for vaccines and monitoring online communication on social media might be helpful to keep an eye on peace and security (Taulli n.d.). However, the use of such large amounts of data comes at a price for individual freedom and collective autonomy. The risks of the use of such data should ideally be mitigated through dedicated legal frameworks which describe the purpose and objectives of data use, its collection, analysis, storage and sharing, as well as the erasure of ‘raw’ data once insights have been extracted. In the absence of such clear and democratically legitimized norms, one can only resort to fundamental rights provisions such as Article 8 paragraph 2 of the ECHR that reminds us that any infringement of rights such as privacy need to be in accordance with law, necessary in a democratic society, pursuing a legitimate objective and proportionate in their application.
However as shown above, legal frameworks including human rights standards are currently not capable of effectively ensuring data protection, since they focus too much on the individual as the point of departure. Hence, we submit that currently applicable guidelines and standards for responsible data use in the humanitarian sector should also be fully applicable to corporate, academic and state efforts which are currently enacted to curb the COVID-19 crisis globally. Instead of ‘re-calibrating’ the expectations of individuals on their own privacy and collective autonomy, the requirements for the use of data should be broader and more comprehensive. Applicable principles and standards as developed by OCHA, the 510 project of the Dutch Red Cross, or by academic initiatives such as the Signal Code are valid minimum standards during a humanitarian crisis. Hence, they are also applicable minimum standards during the current pandemic.
Core findings that can be extracted from these guidelines and standards for the practical implementation into data driven responses to COVIC-19 are:
- data sensitivity is highly contextual; one and the same data can be sensitive in different contexts. Location data during the current pandemic might be very useful for epidemiological analysis. However, if (ab-)used to re-calibrate political power relations, data can be open for misuse. Hence, any party supplying data and data analysis needs to check whether data and insights can be misused in the context they are presented.
- privacy and data protection are important values; they do not disappear during a crisis. Nevertheless, they have to be weighed against respective benefits and risks.
- data-breaches are inevitable; with time (t) approaching infinity, the chance of any system being hacked or becoming insecure approaches 100%. Hence, it is not a question of whether, but when. Therefore, organisations have to prepare sound data retention and deletion policies.
- data ethics is an obligation to provide high quality analysis; using machine learning and big data might be appealing for the moment, but the quality of source data might be low, and results might be unreliable, or even harmful. Biases in incomplete datasets, algorithms and human users are abundant and widely discussed. We must not forget that in times of crisis, the risk of bias is more pronounced, and more problematic due to the vulnerability of data subjects and groups. Therefore, working to the highest standards of data processing and analysis is an ethical obligation.
The adherence to these principles is particularly relevant in times of crisis such as now, where they mark the difference between societies that focus on control and repression on the one hand, and those who believe in freedom and autonomy on the other. Eventually, we will need to think of including data policies into legal frameworks for state of emergency regulations, and coordinate with corporate stakeholders as well as private organisations on how to best deal with such crises. Data-driven practices have to be used in a responsible manner. Furthermore, it will be important to observe whether data practices and surveillance assemblages introduced under current circumstances will be rolled back to status quo ante when returning to normalcy. If not, our rights will become hollowed out, just waiting for the next crisis to eventually become irrelevant….(More)”.
Protecting Data Privacy and Rights During a Crisis are Key to Helping the Most Vulnerable in Our Community
Blog by Amen Ra Mashariki: “Governments should protect the data and privacy rights of their communities even during emergencies. It is a false trade-off to require more data without protection. We can and should do both — collect the appropriate data and protect it. Establishing and protecting the data rights and privacy of our communities’ underserved, underrepresented, disabled, and vulnerable residents is the only way we can combat the negative impact of COVID-19 or any other crisis.
Building trust is critical. Governments can strengthen data privacy protocols, beef up transparency mechanisms, and protect the public’s data rights in the name of building trust — especially with the most vulnerable populations. Otherwise, residents will opt out of engaging with government, and without their information, leaders like first responders will be blind to their existence when making decisions and responding to emergencies, as we are seeing with COVID-19.
As Chief Analytics Officer of New York City, I often remembered the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, especially with regards to using data during emergencies, that there are “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, and we will always get hurt by the unknown unknowns.” Meaning the things we didn’t know — the data that we didn’t have — was always going to be what hurt us during times of emergencies….
There are three key steps that governments can do right now to use data most effectively to respond to emergencies — both for COVID-19 and in the future.
Seek Open Data First
In times of crisis and emergencies, many believe that government and private entities, either purposefully or inadvertently, are willing to trample on the data rights of the public in the name of appropriate crisis response. This should not be a trade-off. We can respond to crises while keeping data privacy and data rights in the forefront of our minds. Rather than dismissing data rights, governments can start using data that is already openly available. This seems like a simple step, but it does two very important things. First, it forces you to understand the data that is already available in your jurisdiction. Second, it grows your ability to fill the gaps with respect to what you know about the city by looking outside of city government. …(More)”.