Paper by Stephane Luchini et al:” The radical uncertainty around the current COVID19 pandemics requires that governments around the world should be able to track in real time not only how the virus spreads but, most importantly, what policies are effective in keeping the spread of the disease under check. To improve the quality of health decision-making, we argue that it is necessary to monitor and compare acceleration/deceleration of confirmed cases over health policy responses, across countries. To do so, we provide a simple mathematical tool to estimate the convexity/concavity of trends in epidemiological surveillance data. Had it been applied at the onset of the crisis, it would have offered more opportunities to measure the impact of the policies undertaken in different Asian countries, and to allow European and North-American governments to draw quicker lessons from these Asian experiences when making policy decisions. Our tool can be especially useful as the epidemic is currently extending to lower-income African and South American countries, some of which have weaker health systems….(More)”.
Human migration: the big data perspective
Alina Sîrbu et al at the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics: “How can big data help to understand the migration phenomenon? In this paper, we try to answer this question through an analysis of various phases of migration, comparing traditional and novel data sources and models at each phase. We concentrate on three phases of migration, at each phase describing the state of the art and recent developments and ideas. The first phase includes the journey, and we study migration flows and stocks, providing examples where big data can have an impact. The second phase discusses the stay, i.e. migrant integration in the destination country. We explore various data sets and models that can be used to quantify and understand migrant integration, with the final aim of providing the basis for the construction of a novel multi-level integration index. The last phase is related to the effects of migration on the source countries and the return of migrants….(More)”.
Why we need responsible data for children
Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst at The Conversation: “…Without question, the increased use of data poses unique risks for and responsibilities to children. While practitioners may have well-intended purposes to leverage data for and about children, the data systems used are often designed with (consenting) adults in mind without a focus on the unique needs and vulnerabilities of children. This can lead to the collection of inaccurate and unreliable data as well as the inappropriate and potentially harmful use of data for and about children….
Research undertaken in the context of the RD4C initiative uncovered the following trends and realities. These issues make clear why we need a dedicated data responsibility approach for children.
- Today’s children are the first generation growing up at a time of rapid datafication where almost all aspects of their lives, both on and off-line, are turned into data points. An entire generation of young people is being datafied – often starting even before birth. Every year the average child will have more data collected about them in their lifetime than would a similar child born any year prior. The potential uses of such large volumes of data and the impact on children’s lives are unpredictable, and could potentially be used against them.
- Children typically do not have full agency to make decisions about their participation in programs or services which may generate and record personal data. Children may also lack the understanding to assess a decision’s purported risks and benefits. Privacy terms and conditions are often barely understood by educated adults, let alone children. As a result, there is a higher duty of care for children’s data.
- Disaggregating data according to socio-demographic characteristics can improve service delivery and assist with policy development. However, it also creates risks for group privacy. Children can be identified, exposing them to possible harms. Disaggregated data for groups such as child-headed households and children experiencing gender-based violence can put vulnerable communities and children at risk. Data about children’s location itself can be risky, especially if they have some additional vulnerability that could expose them to harm.
- Mishandling data can cause children to lose trust in institutions that deliver essential services including vaccines, medicine, and nutrition supplies. For organizations dealing with child well-being, these retreats can have severe consequences. Distrust can cause families and children to refuse health, education, child protection and other public services. Such privacy protective behavior can impact children throughout the course of their lifetime, and potentially exacerbate existing inequities and vulnerabilities.
- As volumes of collected and stored data increase, obligations and protections traditionally put in place for children may be difficult or impossible to uphold. The interests of children are not always prioritized when organizations define their legitimate interest to access or share personal information of children. The immediate benefit of a service provided does not always justify the risk or harm that might be caused by it in the future. Data analysis may be undertaken by people who do not have expertise in the area of child rights, as opposed to traditional research where practitioners are specifically educated in child subject research. Similarly, service providers collecting children’s data are not always specially trained to handle it, as international standards recommend.
- Recent events around the world reveal the promise and pitfalls of algorithmic decision-making. While it can expedite certain processes, algorithms and their inferences can possess biases that can have adverse effects on people, for example those seeking medical care and attempting to secure jobs. The danger posed by algorithmic bias is especially pronounced for children and other vulnerable populations. These groups often lack the awareness or resources necessary to respond to instances of bias or to rectify any misconceptions or inaccuracies in their data.
- Many of the children served by child welfare organizations have suffered trauma. Whether physical, social, emotional in nature, repeatedly making children register for services or provide confidential personal information can amount to revictimization – re-exposing them to traumas or instigating unwarranted feelings of shame and guilt.
These trends and realities make clear the need for new approaches for maximizing the value of data to improve children’s lives, while mitigating the risks posed by our increasingly datafied society….(More)”.
Data Collaboratives in Response to COVID19
Living Repository: “This document is part of a call for action to build a responsible infrastructure for data-driven pandemic response.
It serves as a living repository for data collaboratives seeking to address the spread of COVID-19 and its secondary effects.
> You can find ongoing data collaborative projects here
> Requests for data and expertise that might lead to data collaboratives can be found here.
> Data competitions, challenges, and calls for proposals, which can lead to useful tools to combat COVID-19, can be found here.
The repository aims to include projects that show a commitment to privacy protection, data responsibility, and overall user well-being.
It will be updated regularly as we receive projects and proposals or otherwise become aware of them.
| HELP US MAKE THIS REPOSITORY BETTER: Individuals are encouraged to edit the repo and/or suggest additions to this document if a project is not currently listed. |
See full Living Repository here.
Location Surveillance to Counter COVID-19: Efficacy Is What Matters
Susan Landau at Lawfare: “…Some government officials believe that the location information that phones can provide will be useful in the current crisis. After all, if cellphone location information can be used to track terrorists and discover who robbed a bank, perhaps it can be used to determine whether you rubbed shoulders yesterday with someone who today was diagnosed as having COVID-19, the respiratory disease that the novel coronavirus causes. But such thinking ignores the reality of how phone-tracking technology works.
Let’s look at the details of what we can glean from cellphone location information. Cell towers track which phones are in their locale—but that is a very rough measure, useful perhaps for tracking bank robbers, but not for the six-foot proximity one wants in order to determine who might have been infected by the coronavirus.
Finer precision comes from GPS signals, but these can only work outside. That means the location information supplied by your phone—if your phone and that of another person are both on—can tell you if you both went into the same subway stop around the same time. But it won’t tell you whether you rode the same subway car. And the location information from your phone isn’t fully precise. So not only can’t it reveal if, for example, you were in the same aisle in the supermarket as the ill person, but sometimes it will make errors about whether you made it into the store, as opposed to just sitting on a bench outside. What’s more, many people won’t have the location information available because GPS drains the battery, so they’ll shut it off when they’re not using it. Their phones don’t have the location information—and neither do the providers, at least not at the granularity to determine coronavirus exposure.
GPS is not the only way that cellphones can collect location information. Various other ways exist, including through the WiFi network to which a phone is connected. But while two individuals using the same WiFi network are likely to be close together inside a building, the WiFi data would typically not be able to determine whether they were in that important six-foot proximity range.
Other devices can also get within that range, including Bluetooth beacons. These are used within stores, seeking to determine precisely what people are—and aren’t—buying; they track peoples’ locations indoors within inches. But like WiFi, they’re not ubiquitous, so their ability to track exposure will be limited.
If the apps lead to the government’s dogging people’s whereabouts at work, school, in the supermarket and at church, will people still be willing to download the tracking apps that get them get discounts when they’re passing the beer aisle? China follows this kind of surveillance model, but such a surveillance-state solution is highly unlikely to be acceptable in the United States. Yet anything less is unlikely to pinpoint individuals exposed to the virus.
South Korea took a different route. In precisely tracking coronavirus exposure, the country used additional digital records, including documentation of medical and pharmacy visits, history of credit card transactions, and CCTV videos, to determine where potentially exposed people had been—then followed up with interviews not just of infected people but also of their acquaintances, to determine where they had traveled.
Validating such records is labor intensive. And for the United States, it may not be the best use of resources at this time. There’s an even more critical reason that the Korean solution won’t work for the U.S.: South Korea was able to test exposed people. The U.S. can’t do this. Currently the country has a critical shortage of test kits; patients who are not sufficiently ill as to be hospitalized are not being tested. The shortage of test kits is sufficiently acute that in New York City, the current epicenter of the pandemic, the rule is, “unless you are hospitalized and a diagnosis will impact your care, you will not be tested.” With this in mind, moving to the South Korean model of tracking potentially exposed individuals won’t change the advice from federal and state governments that everyone should engage in social distancing—but employing such tracking would divert government resources and thus be counterproductive.
Currently, phone tracking in the United States is not efficacious. It cannot be unless all people are required to carry such location-tracking devices at all times; have location tracking on; and other forms of information tracking, including much wider use of CCTV cameras, Bluetooth beacons, and the like, are also in use. There are societies like this. But so far, even in the current crisis, no one is seriously contemplating the U.S. heading in that direction….(More)”.
Cellphone tracking could help stem the spread of coronavirus. Is privacy the price?
Kelly Servick at Science: “…At its simplest, digital contact tracing might work like this: Phones log their own locations; when the owner of a phone tests positive for COVID-19, a record of their recent movements is shared with health officials; owners of any other phones that recently came close to that phone get notified of their risk of infection and are advised to self-isolate. But designers of a tracking system will have to work out key details: how to determine the proximity among phones and the health status of users, where that information gets stored, who sees it, and in what format.
Digital contact tracing systems are already running in several countries, but details are scarce and privacy concerns abound. Protests greeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rollout this week of a surveillance program that uses the country’s domestic security agency to track the locations of people potentially infected with the virus. South Korea has released detailed information on infected individuals—including their recent movements—viewable through multiple private apps that send alerts to users in their vicinity. “They’re essentially texting people, saying, ‘Hey, there’s been a 60-year-old woman who’s positive for COVID. Click this for more information about her path,’” says Anne Liu, a global health expert at Columbia University. She warns that the South Korean approach risks unmasking and stigmatizing infected people and the businesses they frequent.
But digital tracking is probably “identifying more contacts than you would with traditional methods,” Liu says. A contact-tracing app might not have much impact in a city where a high volume of coronavirus cases and extensive community transmission has already shuttered businesses and forced citizens inside, she adds. But it could be powerful in areas, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, that are at an earlier stage of the outbreak, and where isolating potential cases could avert the need to shut down all schools and businesses. “If you can package this type of information in a way that protects individual privacy as best you can, it can be something positive,” she says.
Navigating privacy laws
In countries with strict data privacy laws, one option for collecting data is to ask telecommunications and other tech companies to share anonymous, aggregated information they’ve already gathered. Laws in the United States and the European Union are very specific about how app and device users must consent to the use of their data—and how much information companies must disclose about how those data will be used, stored, and shared. Working within those constraints, mobile carriers in Germany and Italy have started to share cellphone location data with health officials in an aggregated, anonymized format. Even though individual users aren’t identified, the data could reveal general trends about where and when people are congregating and risk spreading infection.
Google and Facebook are both in discussions with the U.S. government about sharing anonymized location data, The Washington Post reported this week. U.S. companies have to deal with a patchwork of state and federal privacy regulations, says Melissa Krasnow, a privacy and data security partner at VLP Law Group. App and devicemakers could face user lawsuits for sharing data in a way that wasn’t originally specified in their terms of service—unless federal or local officials pass legislation that would free them from liability. “Now you’ve got a global pandemic, so you would think that [you] would be able to use this information for the global good, but you can’t,” Krasnow says. “There’s expectations about privacy.”
Another option is to start fresh with a coronavirus-specific app that asks users to voluntarily share their location and health data. For example, a basic symptom-checking app could do more than just keeping people who don’t need urgent care out of overstretched emergency rooms, says Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University. Health researchers could use also use location data from the app to estimate the size of an outbreak. “That could be done, I think, without risking being evil,” he says.
For Scarpino, the calculus changes if governments want to track the movements of a specific person who has coronavirus relative to the paths of other people, as China and South Korea have apparently done. That kind of tracking “could easily swing towards a privacy violation that isn’t justified by the potential public health benefit,” he says….(More)”.
Governments could track COVID-19 lockdowns through social media posts
Alfred Ng at CNET: “Your posts on social media have been harvested for advertising. They’ve been taken to build up a massive facial recognition database. Now that same data could be used by companies and governments to help maintain quarantines during the coronavirus outbreak.
Ghost Data, a research group in Italy and the US, collected more than half a million Instagram posts in March, targeting regions in Italy where residents were supposed to be on lockdown. It provided those images and videos to LogoGrab, an image recognition company that can automatically identify people and places. The company found at least 33,120 people violated Italy’s quarantine orders.
Andrea Stroppa, the founder of Ghost Data, said his group has offered its research to the Italian government. Stroppa doesn’t consider the social media scraping to be a privacy concern because researchers anonymized the data by removing profile and specific location data before analyzing it. He also has public health on his mind.
“In our view, privacy is very important. It’s a fundamental human right,” Stroppa said. “However, it’s important to give our support to help the government and the authorities. Hundreds of people are dying every day.”…(More)” .
Can location data from smartphones help slow the coronavirus? Facebook is giving academics a chance to try
Rebecca Robbins at Statnews: “It’s emerging as one of the more promising — and potentially controversial — ideas to slow the spread of the coronavirus: collecting smartphone data to track where people have gone and who they’ve crossed paths with.
The White House has discussed the notion, and several companies are reportedly in talks with the Trump administration to share aggregated user data. Researchers in the U.K. are working on one such app, and a team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is building another, with an eye toward protecting user privacy. China and South Korea developed their own smartphone surveillance systems to try to clamp down on their own outbreaks, though their approaches likely wouldn’t be palatable in countries with greater expectations of privacy.
Then there’s Facebook, which collects data from its users around the world who opt in to sharing their location when using its smartphone app. Facebook does not share this information with governments. But in recent weeks, the social media giant has been sharing these data — in aggregated and anonymized form — with academic and nonprofit researchers analyzing the spread of the coronavirus.
Among the universities where Covid-19 researchers are harnessing Facebook’s data: the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, University of Pavia in Italy, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The idea is to study where people move and how often they encounter each other, in the hope of better understanding the virus’ spread — and which places are likely to soon see a spike in cases….(More)”.
Commission tells carriers to hand over mobile data in coronavirus fight
Mark Scott, Laurens Cerulus and Laura Kayali at Politico: “The European Commission on Monday urged Europe’s telecoms giants including Deutsche Telekom and Orange to share reams of people’s mobile data from across the region to help predict the spread of the coronavirus.
In a conference call with telecoms executives, Thierry Breton, Europe’s internal market commissioner, called on the companies to hand over anonymized and aggregated data from people’s mobile phones to track how the virus was spreading, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The draft plans would allow the Commission — and not the carriers — to manage how the data was used, and give EU officials control over so-called metadata on hundreds of millions of people’s mobile phones. That represents a significant step for Brussels as it would make the EU executive liable for any hefty fines if the digital information was hacked or misused.
Speaking to POLITICO, Breton confirmed the request to carriers, adding that the Commission needed such aggregated metadata to track the spread of the virus and determine where people’s need for medical supplies was the most pressing.
“We will select one big operator by country,” Breton said. “We want to be very fast and follow this on a daily basis.”
The Commission insisted the operation would respect the bloc’s privacy rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, and e-privacy legislation. The European Data Protection Supervisor would also be involved, the EU executive added. ..
In recent weeks, mobile operators have started to share anonymized data with EU governments in response to the spread of COVID-19. Carriers involved in the discussions with the Commission said Breton’s request would likely include providing the same type of data, and would have to respect the region’s tough privacy rules….
By aiming to pool large amounts of European mobile data, the Commission is following in the footsteps of national agencies, many of which are already working with carriers to track the spread of the virus through such anonymized digital information.
In Norway, local researchers saw a 60 percent decline in people traveling between cities after a countrywide lockdown was introduced — figures that were taken from people’s mobile phone data provided by Telenor, the national carrier.
Yet as the crisis has continued, countries such as Spain and Poland have gone a step further by creating smartphone apps, which offer an even greater ability to track and monitor people’s movements compared to anonymized mobile data. In the U.K., an app is in the works but has not yet launched….(More)”.
Data Reveals the True Impact of the Coronavirus Outbreak
Gian Volpicelli at Wired: “Something was wrong with Malaysia’s internet. It was March 13, and the more Simon Angus looked at the data, the more he suspected that the country might be in the midst of a coronavirus crisis.
Angus is an academic at Monash University and the cofounder of Kaspr Datahaus, a Melbourne-based company that analyses the quality of global internet connection to glean economic and social insights. The company monitors millions of internet-connected devices to gauge internet speed across the world. For them, a sudden deterioration in a country’s internet speed means that something is putting the network under strain. In recent weeks Kaspr’s theory is that the “something” is linked to the Covid-19 epidemics – as people who are working from home, or quarantining, or staying home as a precaution start using the internet more intensely than usual.
“For people who are in lockdown, or in panic mode, or in self-isolation, the internet has become a fundamentally important part of their information source, and of their consumption of entertainment,” Angus says.
To put it bluntly, when millions more turn on Netflix, scroll through TikTok, start a Zoom call, play Fortnite, or simply scroll idly through Twitter, that has repercussions on the quality of the country’s internet. (That is why EU commissioner Thierry Breton asked Netflix to restrict high-definition streaming until the emergency is over.)
Now, Angus’ scanning had detected that Malaysia’s internet had become over five percent slower in the March 12 to 13 timespan—worse even than in locked-down Italy. Officially, though, Malaysia had only 129 confirmed coronavirus cases—a relatively low number, although it had been inching up for a week.
What was happening, though, was that the population was cottoning on to the government’s sloppy handling of the pandemic. In late February, in what would turn out to be a monumental blunder, authorities had allowed a religious mass gathering to go ahead in Kuala Lumpur. Once Covid-19 cases linked to the event started to emerge, the government scrambled to find all the attendees, but got the numbers wrong—first saying that only 5,000 people at the gathering were Malaysia residents, then updating the figure to 10,000 and then 14,500. With the mess laid bare, many Malaysians seemed to have decided to stay at home out of sheer self-preservation…(More)”.