How Do You Control 1.4 Billion People?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert Foyle Hunwick at The New Republic: China’s “social credit system”, which becomes mandatory in 2020, aims to funnel all behavior into a credit score….The quoted text is from a 2014 State Council resolution which promises that every involuntary participant will be rated according to their “commercial sincerity,” “social security,” “trust breaking” and “judicial credibility.”

Some residents welcome it. Decades of political upheaval and endemic corruption has bred widespread mistrust; most still rely on close familial networks (guanxi) to get ahead, rather than public institutions. An endemic lack of trust is corroding society; frequent incidents of “bystander effect”—people refusing to help injured strangers for fear of being held responsible—have become a national embarrassment. Even the most enthusiastic middle-class supporters of the ruling Communist Party (CCP) feel perpetually insecure. “Fraud has become ever more common,” Lian Weiliang, vice chairman of the CCP’s National Development and Reform Commission, recently admitted. “Swindlers must pay a price.”

The solution, apparently, lies in a data-driven system that automatically separates the good, the bad, and the ugly…

once compulsory state “social credit” goes national in 2020, these shadowy algorithms will become even more opaque. Social credit will align with Communist Party policy to become another form of law enforcement. Since Beijing relaxed its One Child Policy to cope with an aging population (400 million seniors by 2035), the government has increasingly indulged in a form of nationalist natalism to encourage more two-child families. Will women be penalized for staying single, and rewarded for swapping their careers for childbirth? In April, one of the country’s largest social-media companies banned homosexual content from its Weibo platform in order to “create a bright and harmonious community environment” (the decision was later rescinded in favor of cracking down on all sexual content). Will people once again be forced to hide non-normative sexual orientations in order to maintain their rights? An investigation by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab also warns that social credit policies would be used to discourage protest.

State media has defended social credit against Orwellian charges, arguing that China’s maturing economy requires a “well-functioning” apparatus like the U.S.’s FICO credit score system. But, counters Lubman, “the U.S. systems, maintained by three companies, collect only financially related information.” In the UK, citizens are entitled to an Equifax report itemizing their credit status. In China, only the security services have access to an individual’s dang’an, the personal file containing every scrap of information the state keeps on them, from exam results to their religious and political views….(More)”.

Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Woodrow Hartzog: “Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves—even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.

In Privacy’s Blueprint, Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust….(More)”.

The digital economy is disrupting our old models

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Diane Coyle at The Financial Times: “One of the many episodes of culture shock I experienced as a British student in the US came when I first visited the university health centre. They gave me my medical notes to take away. Once I was over the surprise, I concluded this was entirely proper. After all, the true data was me, my body. I was reminded of this moment from the early 1980s when reflecting on the debate about Facebook and data, one of the collective conclusions of which seems to be that personal data are personal property so there need to be stronger rights of ownership. If I do not like what Facebook is doing with my data, I should be able to withdraw them. Yet this fix for the problem is not straightforward.

“My” data are inextricably linked with that of other people, who are in my photographs or in my network. Once the patterns and correlations have been extracted from it, withdrawing my underlying data is neither here nor there, for the value lies in the patterns. The social character of information can be seen from the recent example of Strava accidentally publishing maps of secret American military bases because the aggregated route data revealed all the service personnel were running around the edge of their camps. One or two withdrawals of personal data would have made no difference. To put it in economic jargon, we are in the territory of externalities and public goods. Information once shared cannot be unshared.
The digital economy is one of externalities and public goods to a far greater degree than in the past. We have not begun to get to grips with how to analyse it, still less to develop policies for the common good. There are two questions at the heart of the challenge: what norms and laws about property rights over intangibles such as data or ideas or algorithms are going to be needed? And what will the best balance between collective and individual actions be or, to put it another way, between government and market?
Tussles about rights over intangible or intellectual property have been going on for a while: patent trolls on the one hand, open source creators on the other. However, the issue is far from settled. Do we really want to accept, for example, that John Deere, in selling an expensive tractor to a farmer, is only in fact renting it out because it claims property rights over the installed software?

…

Free digital goods of the open source kind are being cross-subsidised by their creators’ other sources of income. Free digital goods of the social media kind are being funded by various advertising services — and that turns out to be an ugly solution. Yet the network effects are so strong, the benefits they provide so great, that if Facebook and Google were shut down by antitrust action tomorrow, replacement digital groups could well emerge before too long. China seems to be in effect nationalising its big digital platforms but many in the west will find that even less appealing than a private data market. In short, neither “market” nor “state” looks like the right model for ownership and governance in an information economy pervaded by externalities and public goods. Finding alternative models for the creation and sharing of value in the digital world, when these are inherently collective and non-rival activities, is an urgent challenge….(More).

Lessons from DataRescue: The Limits of Grassroots Climate Change Data Preservation and the Need for Federal Records Law Reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Sarah Lamdan at the University of Pennsylvania Law Review: “Shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Presidential election, but before his inauguration, a group of concerned scholars organized in cities and college campuses across the United States, starting with the University of Pennsylvania, to prevent climate change data from disappearing from government websites. The move was led by Michelle Murphy, a scholar who had previously observed the destruction of climate change data and muzzling of government employees in Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration. The “guerrilla archiving” project soon swept the nation, drawing media attention as its volunteers scraped and preserved terabytes of climate change and other environmental data and materials from .gov websites. The archiving project felt urgent and necessary, as the federal government is the largest collector and archive of U.S. environmental data and information.

As it progressed, the guerrilla archiving movement became more defined: two organizations developed, the DataRefuge at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), which was a national collection of academics and non-profits. These groups co-hosted data gathering sessions called DataRescue events. I joined EDGI to help members work through administrative law concepts and file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The day-long archiving events were immensely popular and widely covered by media outlets. Each weekend, hundreds of volunteers would gather to participate in DataRescue events in U.S. cities. I helped organize the New York DataRescue event, which was held less than a month after the initial event in Pennsylvania. We had to turn people away as hundreds of local volunteers lined up to help and dozens more arrived in buses and cars, exceeding the space constraints of NYU’s cavernous MakerSpace engineering facility. Despite the popularity of the project, however, DataRescue’s goals seemed far-fetched: how could thousands of private citizens learn the contours of multitudes of federal environmental information warehouses, gather the data from all of them, and then re-post the materials in a publicly accessible format?…(More)”.

Leveraging the Power of Bots for Civil Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Allison Fine & Beth Kanter  at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Our work in technology has always centered around making sure that people are empowered, healthy, and feel heard in the networks within which they live and work. The arrival of the bots changes this equation. It’s not enough to make sure that people are heard; we now have to make sure that technology adds value to human interactions, rather than replacing them or steering social good in the wrong direction. If technology creates value in a human-centered way, then we will have more time to be people-centric.

So before the bots become involved with almost every facet of our lives, it is incumbent upon those of us in the nonprofit and social-change sectors to start a discussion on how we both hold on to and lead with our humanity, as opposed to allowing the bots to lead. We are unprepared for this moment, and it does not feel like an understatement to say that the future of humanity relies on our ability to make sure we’re in charge of the bots, not the other way around.

To Bot or Not to Bot?

History shows us that bots can be used in positive ways. Early adopter nonprofits have used bots to automate civic engagement, such as helping citizens register to vote, contact their elected officials, and elevate marginalized voices and issues. And nonprofits are beginning to use online conversational interfaces like Alexa for social good engagement. For example, the Audubon Society has released an Alexa skill to teach bird calls.

And for over a decade, Invisible People founder Mark Horvath has been providing “virtual case management” to homeless people who reach out to him through social media. Horvath says homeless agencies can use chat bots programmed to deliver basic information to people in need, and thus help them connect with services. This reduces the workload for case managers while making data entry more efficient. He explains it working like an airline reservation: The homeless person completes the “paperwork” for services by interacting with a bot and then later shows their ID at the agency. Bots can greatly reduce the need for a homeless person to wait long hours to get needed services. Certainly this is a much more compassionate use of bots than robot security guards who harass homeless people sleeping in front of a business.

But there are also examples where a bot’s usefulness seems limited. A UK-based social service charity, Mencap, which provides support and services to children with learning disabilities and their parents, has a chatbot on its website as part of a public education effort called #HereIAm. The campaign is intended to help people understand more about what it’s like having a learning disability, through the experience of a “learning disabled” chatbot named Aeren. However, this bot can only answer questions, not ask them, and it doesn’t become smarter through human interaction. Is this the best way for people to understand the nature of being learning disabled? Is it making the difficulties feel more or less real for the inquirers? It is clear Mencap thinks the interaction is valuable, as they reported a 3 percent increase in awareness of their charity….

The following discussion questions are the start of conversations we need to have within our organizations and as a sector on the ethical use of bots for social good:

  • What parts of our work will benefit from greater efficiency without reducing the humanness of our efforts? (“Humanness” meaning the power and opportunity for people to learn from and help one another.)
  • Do we have a privacy policy for the use and sharing of data collected through automation? Does the policy emphasize protecting the data of end users? Is the policy easily accessible by the public?
  • Do we make it clear to the people using the bot when they are interacting with a bot?
  • Do we regularly include clients, customers, and end users as advisors when developing programs and services that use bots for delivery?
  • Should bots designed for service delivery also have fundraising capabilities? If so, can we ensure that our donors are not emotionally coerced into giving more than they want to?
  • In order to truly understand our clients’ needs, motivations, and desires, have we designed our bots’ conversational interactions with empathy and compassion, or involved social workers in the design process?
  • Have we planned for weekly checks of the data generated by the bots to ensure that we are staying true to our values and original intentions, as AI helps them learn?….(More)”.

From Texts to Tweets to Satellites: The Power of Big Data to Fill Gender Data Gaps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at UN Foundation Blog: “Twitter posts, credit card purchases, phone calls, and satellites are all part of our day-to-day digital landscape.

Detailed data, known broadly as “big data” because of the massive amounts of passively collected and high-frequency information that such interactions generate, are produced every time we use one of these technologies. These digital traces have great potential and have already developed a track record for application in global development and humanitarian response.

Data2X has focused particularly on what big data can tell us about the lives of women and girls in resource-poor settings. Our research, released today in a new report, Big Data and the Well-Being of Women and Girls, demonstrates how four big data sources can be harnessed to fill gender data gaps and inform policy aimed at mitigating global gender inequality. Big data can complement traditional surveys and other data sources, offering a glimpse into dimensions of girls’ and women’s lives that have otherwise been overlooked and providing a level of precision and timeliness that policymakers need to make actionable decisions.

Here are three findings from our report that underscore the power and potential offered by big data to fill gender data gaps:

  1. Social media data can improve understanding of the mental health of girls and women.

Mental health conditions, from anxiety to depression, are thought to be significant contributors to the global burden of disease, particularly for young women, though precise data on mental health is sparse in most countries. However, research by Georgia Tech University, commissioned by Data2X, finds that social media provides an accurate barometer of mental health status…..

  1. Cell phone and credit card records can illustrate women’s economic and social patterns – and track impacts of shocks in the economy.

Our spending priorities and social habits often indicate economic status, and these activities can also expose economic disparities between women and men.

By compiling cell phone and credit card records, our research partners at MIT traced patterns of women’s expenditures, spending priorities, and physical mobility. The research found that women have less mobility diversity than men, live further away from city centers, and report less total expenditure per capita…..

  1. Satellite imagery can map rivers and roads, but it can also measure gender inequality.

Satellite imagery has the power to capture high-resolution, real-time data on everything from natural landscape features, like vegetation and river flows, to human infrastructure, like roads and schools. Research by our partners at the Flowminder Foundation finds that it is also able to measure gender inequality….(More)”.

Participatory Budgeting: Step to Building Active Citizenship or a Distraction from Democratic Backsliding?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Sasaki: “Is there any there there? That’s what we wanted to uncover beneath the hype and skepticism surrounding participatory budgeting, an innovation in democracy that began in Brazil in 1989 and has quickly spread to nearly every corner of the world like a viral hashtag….We ended up selecting two groups of consultants for two phases of work. The first phase was led by three academic researchers — Brian Wampler, Mike Touchton and Stephanie McNulty — to synthesize what we know broadly about PB’s impact and where there are gaps in the evidence. mySociety led the second phase, which originally intended to identify the opportunities and challenges faced by civil society organizations and public officials that implement participatory budgeting. However, a number of unforeseen circumstances, including contested elections in Kenya and a major earthquake in Mexico, shifted mySociety’s focus to take a global, field-wide perspective.

In the end, we were left with two reports that were similar in scope and differed in perspective. Together they make for compelling reading. And while they come from different perspectives, they settle on similar recommendations. I’ll focus on just three: 1) the need for better research, 2) the lack of global coordination, and 3) the emerging opportunity to link natural resource governance with participatory budgeting….

As we consider some preliminary opportunities to advance participatory budgeting, we are clear-eyed about the risks and challenges. In the face of democratic backsliding and the concern that liberal democracy may not survive the 21st century, are these efforts to deepen local democracy merely a distraction from a larger threat, or is this a way to build active citizenship? Also, implementing PB is expensive — both in terms of money and time; is it worth the investment? Is PB just the latest checkbox for governments that want a reputation for supporting citizen participation without investing in the values and process it entails? Just like the proliferation of fake “consultation meetings,” fake PB could merely exacerbate our disappointment with democracy. What should we make of the rise of participatory budgeting in quasi-authoritarian contexts like China and Russia? Is PB a tool for undemocratic central governments to keep local governments in check while giving citizens a simulacrum of democratic participation? Crucially, without intentional efforts to be inclusive like we’ve seen in Boston, PB could merely direct public resources to those neighborhoods with the most outspoken and powerful residents.

On the other hand, we don’t want to dismiss the significant opportunities that come with PB’s rapid global expansion. For example, what happens when social movements lose their momentum between election cycles? Participatory budgeting could create a civic space for social movements to pursue concrete outcomes while engaging with neighbors and public officials. (In China, it has even helped address the urban-rural divide on perspectives toward development policy.) Meanwhile, social media have exacerbated our human tendency to complain, but participatory budgeting requires us to shift our perspective from complaints to engaging with others on solutions. It could even serve as a gateway to deeper forms of democratic participation and increased trust between governments, civil society organizations, and citizens. Perhaps participatory budgeting is the first step we need to rebuild our civic infrastructure and make space for more diverse voices to steer our complex public institutions.

Until we have more research and evidence, however, these possibilities remain speculative….(More)”.

A Tool to Help Nonprofits Find Each Other, Pursue Funding and Collaborate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

DrexelNow: “…More than 40 percent of Philly nonprofit organizations operate on margins of zero or less, and fewer can be considered financially strong. With more than half of Philly’s nonprofits operating on a slim-to-none budget with limited support staff – one Drexel University researcher sought to help streamline their fundraising process by giving them easy access to data from the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Census. His goal: Create a tool that makes information about nonprofit organizations, and the communities they’re striving to help, more accessible to likeminded charities and the philanthropic organizations that seek to fund them.

When the IRS recently released millions of records on the finances and operations of nonprofit organizations in format that can be downloaded and analyzed, it was expected that this would usher in a new era of transparency and innovation for the nonprofit sector. Instead, many technical issues made the data virtually unusable by nonprofit organizations.

Single-page location intelligence tool: http://bit.ly/PhillyNPOs
Single-page location intelligence tool: http://bit.ly/PhillyNPOs

 Neville Vakharia, an assistant professor and research director in Drexel’s graduate Arts Administration program in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, tackled this issue by creating ImpactView Philadelphia, an online tool and resource that uses the publicly available data on nonprofit organizations to present an easy-to-access snapshot of Philadelphia’s nonprofit ecosystem.

Vakharia combined the publicly available data from the IRS with the most recent American Community Survey data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. These data were combined with a map of Philadelphia to create a visual database easily searchable by organization, address or zip code. Once an organization is selected, the analysis tools allow the user to see data on the map, alongside measures of households and individuals surrounding the organization — important information for nonprofits to have when they are applying for grants or looking for partners.

“Through the location intelligence visualizer, users can immediately find areas of need and potential collaborators. The data are automatically visualized and mapped on-screen, identifying, for example, pockets of high poverty with large populations of children as well as the nonprofit service providers in these areas,” said Vakharia. “Making this data accessible for nonprofits will cut down on time spent seeking information and improve the ability to make data-informed decisions, while also helping with case making and grant applications.”…(More)”.

To serve a free society, social media must evolve beyond data mining

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Barbara Romzek and Aram Sinnreich at The Conversation: “…For years, watchdogs have been warning about sharing information with data-collecting companies, firms engaged in the relatively new line of business called some academics have called “surveillance capitalism.” Most casual internet users are only now realizing how easy – and common – it is for unaccountable and unknown organizations to assemble detailed digital profiles of them. They do this by combining the discrete bits of information consumers have given up to e-tailers, health sites, quiz apps and countless other digital services.

As scholars of public accountability and digital media systems, we know that the business of social media is based on extracting user data and offering it for sale. There’s no simple way for them to protect data as many users might expect. Like the social pollution of fake news, bullying and spam that Facebook’s platform spreads, the company’s privacy crisis also stems from a power imbalance: Facebook knows nearly everything about its users, who know little to nothing about it.

It’s not enough for people to delete their Facebook accounts. Nor is it likely that anyone will successfully replace it with a nonprofit alternativecentering on privacy, transparency and accountability. Furthermore, this problem is not specific just to Facebook. Other companies, including Google and Amazon, also gather and exploit extensive personal data, and are locked in a digital arms race that we believe threatens to destroy privacy altogether….

Governments need to be better guardians of public welfare – including privacy. Many companies using various aspects of technology in new ways have so far avoided regulation by stoking fears that rules might stifle innovation. Facebook and others have often claimed that they’re better at regulating themselves in an ever-changing environment than a slow-moving legislative process could be….

To encourage companies to serve democratic principles and focus on improving people’s lives, we believe the chief business model of the internet needs to shift to building trust and verifying information. While it won’t be an immediate change, social media companies pride themselves on their adaptability and should be able to take on this challenge.

The alternative, of course, could be far more severe. In the 1980s, when federal regulators decided that AT&T was using its power in the telephone market to hurt competition and consumers, they forced the massive conglomerate to break up. A similar but less dramatic change happened in the early 2000s when cellphone companies were forced to let people keep their phone numbers even if they switched carriers.

Data, and particularly individuals’ personal data, are the precious metals of the internet age. Protecting individual data while expanding access to the internet and its many social benefits is a fundamental challenge for free societies. Creating, using and protecting data properly will be crucial to preserving and improving human rights and civil liberties in this still young century. To meet this challenge will require both vigilance and vision, from businesses and their customers, as well as governments and their citizens….(More).

A New Model for Industry-Academic Partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Working Paper by Gary King and Nathaniel Persily: “The mission of the academic social sciences is to understand and ameliorate society’s greatest challenges. The data held by private companies holds vast potential to further this mission. Yet, because of its interaction with highly politicized issues, customer privacy, proprietary content, and differing goals of firms and academics, these data are often inaccessible to university researchers.

We propose here a new model for industry-academic partnerships that addresses these problems via a novel organizational structure: Respected scholars form a commission which, as a trusted third party, receives access to all relevant firm information and systems, and then recruits independent academics to do research in specific areas following standard peer review protocols organized and funded by nonprofit foundations.

We also report on a partnership we helped forge under this model to make data available about the extremely visible and highly politicized issues surrounding the impact of social media on elections and democracy. In our partnership, Facebook will provide privacy-preserving data and access; seven major politically and substantively diverse nonprofit foundations will fund the research; and the Social Science Research Council will oversee the peer review process for funding and data access….(More)”.