media

Ethics & Algorithms Toolkit

Curated on September 25, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Toolkit: “Government leaders and staff who leverage algorithms are facing increasing pressure from the public, the media, and academic institutions to be more transparent and accountable about their use. Every day, stories come out describing the unintended or undesirable consequences of algorithms. Governments have not had the tools they need to understand and manage this new class of risk.

GovEx, the City and County of San Francisco, Harvard DataSmart, and Data Community DC have collaborated on a practical toolkit for cities to use to help them understand the implications of using an algorithm, clearly articulate the potential risks, and identify ways to mitigate them….We developed this because:

We saw a gap. There are many calls to arms and lots of policy papers, one of which was a DataSF research paper, but nothing practitioner-facing with a repeatable, manageable process.
We wanted an approach which governments are already familiar with: risk management. By identifing and quantifying levels of risk, we can recommend specific mitigations.. …(More)”.

United Nations accidentally exposed passwords and sensitive information to the whole internet

Curated on September 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Micah Lee at The Intercept: “The United Nations accidentally published passwords, internal documents, and technical details about websites when it misconfigured popular project management service Trello, issue tracking app Jira, and office suite Google Docs.

The mistakes made sensitive material available online to anyone with the proper link, rather than only to specific users who should have access. Affected data included credentials for a U.N. file server, the video conferencing system at the U.N.’s language school, and a web development environment for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Security researcher Kushagra Pathak discovered the accidental leak and notified the U.N. about what he found a little over a month ago. As of today, much of the material appears to have been taken down.

In an online chat, Pathak said he found the sensitive information by running searches on Google. The searches, in turn, produced public Trello pages, some of which contained links to the public Google Docs and Jira pages.

Trello projects are organized into “boards” that contain lists of tasks called “cards.” Boards can be public or private. After finding one public Trello board run by the U.N., Pathak found additional public U.N. boards by using “tricks like by checking if the users of one Trello board are also active on some other boards and so on.” One U.N. Trello board contained links to an issue tracker hosted on Jira, which itself contained even more sensitive information. Pathak also discovered links to documents hosted on Google Docs and Google Drive that were configured to be accessible to anyone who knew their web addresses. Some of these documents contained passwords….Here is just some of the sensitive information that the U.N. accidentally made accessible to anyone who Googled for it:

A social media team promoting the U.N.’s “peace and security” efforts published credentials to access a U.N. remote file access, or FTP, server in a Trello card coordinating promotion of the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers. It is not clear what information was on the server; Pathak said he did not connect to it.
The U.N.’s Language and Communication Programme, which offers language courses at U.N. Headquarters in New York City, published credentials for a Google account and a Vimeo account. The program also exposed, on a publicly visible Trello board, credentials for a test environment for a human resources web app. It also made public a Google Docs spreadsheet, linked from a public Trello board, that included a detailed meeting schedule for 2018, along with passwords to remotely access the program’s video conference system to join these meetings.
One public Trello board used by the developers of Humanitarian Response and ReliefWeb, both websites run by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, included sensitive information like internal task lists and meeting notes. One public card from the board had a PDF, marked “for internal use only,” that contained a map of all U.N. buildings in New York City. …(More)”.

Digital Deceit II: A Policy Agenda to Fight Disinformation on the Internet

Curated on September 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott at New America: “The crisis for democracy posed by digital disinformation demands a new social contract for the internet rooted in transparency, privacy and competition. This is the conclusion we have reached through careful study of the problem of digital disinformation and reflection on potential solutions. …Digital media platforms did not cause the fractured and irrational politics that plague modern societies. But the economic logic of digital markets too often serves to compound social division by feeding pre-existing biases, affirming false beliefs, and fragmenting media audiences. The companies that control this market are among the most powerful and valuable the world has ever seen. We cannot expect them to regulate themselves. As a democratic society, we must intervene to steer the power and promise of technology to benefit the many rather than the few.

We have developed here a broad policy framework to address the digital threat to democracy, building upon basic principles to recommend a set of specific proposals.

Transparency: As citizens, we have the right to know who is trying to influence our political views and how they are doing it. We must have explicit disclosure about the operation of dominant digital media platforms — including:

Real-time and archived information about targeted political advertising;
Clear accountability for the social impact of automated decision-making;
Explicit indicators for the presence of non-human accounts in digital media.

Privacy: As individuals with the right to personal autonomy, we must be given more control over how our data is collected, used, and monetized — especially when it comes to sensitive information that shapes political decision-making. A baseline data privacy law must include:

Consumer control over data through stronger rights to access and removal;
Transparency for the user of the full extent of data usage and meaningful consent;
Stronger enforcement with resources and authority for agency rule-making.

Competition: As consumers, we must have meaningful options to find, send and receive information over digital media. The rise of dominant digital platforms demonstrates how market structure influences social and political outcomes. A new competition policy agenda should include:

Stronger oversight of mergers and acquisitions;
Antitrust reform including new enforcement regimes, levies, and essential services regulation;
Robust data portability and interoperability between services.

There are no single-solution approaches to the problem of digital disinformation that are likely to change outcomes. … Awareness and education are the first steps toward organizing and action to build a new social contract for digital democracy….(More)”

To Secure Knowledge: Social Science Partnerships for the Common Good

Curated on September 17, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Social Science Research Council: “For decades, the social sciences have generated knowledge vital to guiding public policy, informing business, and understanding and improving the human condition. But today, the social sciences face serious threats. From dwindling federal funding to public mistrust in institutions to widespread skepticism about data, the infrastructure supporting the social sciences is shifting in ways that threaten to undercut research and knowledge production.

How can we secure social knowledge for future generations?

This question has guided the Social Science Research Council’s Task Force. Following eighteen months of consultation with key players as well as internal deliberation, we have identified both long-term developments and present threats that have created challenges for the social sciences, but also created unique opportunities. And we have generated recommendations to address these issues.

Our core finding focuses on the urgent need for new partnerships and collaborations among several key players: the federal government, academic institutions, donor organizations, and the private sector. Several decades ago, these institutions had clear zones of responsibility in producing social knowledge, with the federal government constituting the largest portion of funding for basic research. Today, private companies represent an increasingly large share not just of research and funding, but also the production of data that informs the social sciences, from smart phone usage to social media patterns.

In addition, today’s social scientists face unprecedented demands for accountability, speedy publication, and generation of novel results. These pressures have emerged from the fragmented institutional foundation that undergirds research. That foundation needs a redesign in order for the social sciences to continue helping our communities address problems ranging from income inequality to education reform.

To build a better future, we identify five areas of action: Funding, Data, Ethics, Research Quality, and Research Training. In each area, our recommendations range from enlarging corporate-academic pilot programs to improving social science training in digital literacy.

A consistent theme is that none of the measures, if taken unilaterally, can generate optimal outcomes. Instead, we have issued a call to forge a new research compact to harness the potential of the social sciences for improving human lives. That compact depends on partnerships, and we urge the key players in the construction of social science knowledge—including universities, government, foundations, and corporations—to act swiftly. With the right realignments, the security of social knowledge lies within our reach….(More)”

The Known Known

Curated on September 7, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book Review by Sue Halpern in The New York Review of Books of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America by Sarah E. Igo; Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar; Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Battle for Privacy by Mary Ziegler; Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies by Woodrow Hartzog: “In 1999, when Scott McNealy, the founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems, declared, “You have zero privacy…get over it,” most of us, still new to the World Wide Web, had no idea what he meant. Eleven years later, when Mark Zuckerberg said that “the social norms” of privacy had “evolved” because “people [had] really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” his words expressed what was becoming a common Silicon Valley trope: privacy was obsolete.

By then, Zuckerberg’s invention, Facebook, had 500 million users, was growing 4.5 percent a month, and had recently surpassed its rival, MySpace. Twitter had overcome skepticism that people would be interested in a zippy parade of 140-character posts; at the end of 2010 it had 54 million active users. (It now has 336 million.) YouTube was in its fifth year, the micro-blogging platform Tumblr was into its third, and Instagram had just been created. Social media, which encouraged and relied on people to share their thoughts, passions, interests, and images, making them the Web’s content providers, were ascendant.

Users found it empowering to bypass, and even supersede, the traditional gatekeepers of information and culture. The social Web appeared to bring to fruition the early promise of the Internet: that it would democratize the creation and dissemination of knowledge. If, in the process, individuals were uploading photos of drunken parties, and discussing their sexual fetishes, and pulling back the curtain on all sorts of previously hidden personal behaviors, wasn’t that liberating, too? How could anyone argue that privacy had been invaded or compromised or effaced when these revelations were voluntary?

The short answer is that they couldn’t. And they didn’t. Users, who in the early days of social media were predominantly young, were largely guileless and unconcerned about privacy. In a survey of sixty-four of her students at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2006, Susan Barnes found that they “wanted to keep information private, but did not seem to realize that Facebook is a public space.” When a random sample of young people was asked in 2007 by researchers from the Pew Research Center if “they had any concerns about publicly posted photos, most…said they were not worried about risks to their privacy.” (This was largely before Facebook and other tech companies began tracking and monetizing one’s every move on- and offline.)

In retrospect, the tendencies toward disclosure and prurience online should not have been surprising….(More)”.

Attempting the Impossible: A Thoughtful Meditation on Technology

Curated on September 6, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book review by Akash Kapur of A Life in Code By David Auerbach in the New York Times: “What began as a vague apprehension — unease over the amount of time we spend on our devices, a sense that our children are growing up distracted — has, since the presidential election of 2016, transformed into something like outright panic. Pundits and politicians debate the perils of social media; technology is vilified as an instigator of our social ills, rather than a symptom. Something about our digital life seems to inspire extremes: all that early enthusiasm, the utopian fervor over the internet, now collapsed into fear and recriminations.

“Bitwise: A Life in Code,” David Auerbach’s thoughtful meditation on technology and its place in society, is a welcome effort to reclaim the middle ground. Auerbach, a former professional programmer, now a journalist and writer, is “cautiously positive toward technology.” He recognizes the very real damage it is causing to our political, cultural and emotional lives. But he also loves computers and data, and is adept at conveying the awe that technology can summon, the bracing sense of discovery that Arthur C. Clarke memorably compared to touching magic. “Much joy and satisfaction can be found in chasing after the secrets and puzzles of the world,” Auerbach writes. “I felt that joy first with computers.”

The book is a hybrid of memoir, technical primer and social history. It is perhaps best characterized as a survey not just of technology, but of our recent relationship to technology. Auerbach is in a good position to conduct this survey. He has spent much of his life on the front lines, playing around as a kid with Turtle graphics, working on Microsoft’s Messenger Service after college, and then reveling in Google’s oceans of data. (Among his lasting contributions, for which he does not express adequate contrition, is being the first, while at Microsoft, to introduce smiley face emoticons to America.) He writes well about databases and servers, but what’s really distinctive about this book is his ability to dissect Joyce and Wittgenstein as easily as C++ code. One of Auerbach’s stated goals is to break down barriers, or at least initiate a conversation, between technology and the humanities, two often irreconcilable domains. He suggests that we need to be bitwise (i.e., understand the world through the lens of computers) as well as worldwise. We must “be able to translate our ideas between the two realms.”…(More).

Keeping Democracy Alive in Cities

Curated on September 4, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Myung J. Lee at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “It seems everywhere I go these days, people are talking and writing and podcasting about America’s lack of trust—how people don’t trust government and don’t trust each other. President Trump discourages us from trusting anything, especially the media. Even nonprofit organizations, which comprise the heart of civil society, are not exempt: A recent study found that trust in NGOsdropped by nine percent between 2017 and 2018. This fundamental lack of trust is eroding the shared public space where progress and even governance can happen, putting democracy at risk.

How did we get here? Perhaps it’s because Americans have taken our democratic way of life for granted. Perhaps it’s because people’s individual and collective beliefs are more polarized—and more out in the open—than ever before. Perhaps we’ve stopped believing we can solve problems together.

There are, however, opportunities to rebuild and fortify our sense of trust. This is especially true at the local level, where citizens can engage directly with elected leaders, nonprofit organizations, and each other.

As French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, “Municipal institutions constitute the strength of free nations. Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach; they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.” Through town halls and other means, cities are where citizens, elected leaders, and nonprofit organizations can most easily connect and work together to improve their communities.

Research shows that, while trust in government is low everywhere, it is highest in local government. This is likely because people can see that their votes influence issues they care about, and they can directly interact with their mayors and city council members. Unlike with members of Congress, citizens can form real relationships with local leaders through events like “walks with the mayor” and neighborhood cleanups. Some mayors do even more to connect with their constituents. In Detroit, for example, Mayor Michael Duggan meets with residents in their homes to help them solve problems and answer questions in person. Many mayors also join in neighborhood projects. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, for example, participates in a different community cleanup almost every week. Engaged citizens who participate in these activities are more likely to feel that their participation in democratic society is valuable and effective.

The role of nonprofit and community-based organizations, then, is partly to sustain democracy by being the bridge between city governments and citizens, helping them work together to solve concrete problems. It’s hard and important work. Time and again, this kind of relationship- and trust-building through action creates ripple effects that grow over time.

In my work with Cities of Service, which helps mayors and other city leaders effectively engage their citizens to solve problems, I’ve learned that local government works better when it is open to the ideas and talents of citizens. Citizen collaboration can take many forms, including defining and prioritizing problems, generating solutions, and volunteering time, creativity, and expertise to set positive change in motion. Citizens can leverage their own deep expertise about what’s best for their families and communities to deliver better services and solve public problems….(More)”.