Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society: Refining Privacy Impact Assessment,

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stefan Strauß: “This book offers an analysis of privacy impacts resulting from and reinforced by technology and discusses fundamental risks and challenges of protecting privacy in the digital age.

Privacy is among the most endangered “species” in our networked society: personal information is processed for various purposes beyond our control. Ultimately, this affects the natural interplay between privacy, personal identity and identification. This book investigates that interplay from a systemic, socio-technical perspective by combining research from the social and computer sciences. It sheds light on the basic functions of privacy, their relation to identity, and how they alter with digital identification practices. The analysis reveals a general privacy control dilemma of (digital) identification shaped by several interrelated socio-political, economic and technical factors. Uncontrolled increases in the identification modalities inherent to digital technology reinforce this dilemma and benefit surveillance practices, thereby complicating the detection of privacy risks and the creation of appropriate safeguards.

Easing this problem requires a novel approach to privacy impact assessment (PIA), and this book proposes an alternative PIA framework which, at its core, comprises a basic typology of (personally and technically) identifiable information. This approach contributes to the theoretical and practical understanding of privacy impacts and thus, to the development of more effective protection standards….(More)”.

Social Media Monitoring: How the Department of Homeland Security Uses Digital Data in the Name of National Security

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Brennan Center for Justice: “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is rapidly expanding its collection of social media information and using it to evaluate the security risks posed by foreign and American travelers. This year marks a major expansion. The visa applications vetted by DHS will include social media handles that the State Department is set to collect from some 15 million travelers per year.1 Social media can provide a vast trove of information about individuals, including their personal preferences, political and religious views, physical and mental health, and the identity of their friends and family. But it is susceptible to misinterpretation, and wholesale monitoring of social media creates serious risks to privacy and free speech. Moreover, despite the rush to implement these programs, there is scant evidence that they actually meet the goals for which they are deployed…(More)”

Smart and Digital Cities: From Computational Intelligence to Applied Social Sciences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Vitor Nazário Coelho, Igor Machado Coelho, Thays A.Oliveira and Luiz Satoru  Ochi: “This book presents up-to-date information on the future digital and smart cities. In particular, it describes novel insights about the use of computational intelligence techniques and decentralized technologies, covering urban aspects and services, cities governance and social sciences. The topics covered here range from state-of-the-art computational techniques to current discussions regarding drones, blockchain, smart contracts and cryptocurrencies.


The idealization of this material emerged with a journey of free knowledge exchange from a diverse group of authors, who met each other through four different events (workshops and special sessions) organized with the purpose of boosting the concepts surrounding smart cities.
We believe that this book comprises innovative and precise information regarding state-of-the-art applications and ideas for the future of cities and society. It will surely be useful not only for the academic community but also to the industry professionals and city managers….(More)”.

Smart Villages in the EU and Beyond

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Anna Visvizi, Miltiadis D. Lytras, and György Mudri: “Written by leading academics and practitioners in the field, Smart Villages in the EU and Beyond offers a detailed insight into issues and developments that shape the debate on smart villages, together with concepts, developments and policymaking initiatives including the EU Action for Smart Villages.This book derives from the realization that the implications of the increasing depopulation of rural areas across the EU is a pending disaster. This edited collection establishes a framework for action today, which will lead to sustainable revitalization of rural areas tomorrow.Using country-specific case studies, the chapters examine how integrated and ICT-conscious strategies and policy actions focused on wellbeing, sustainability and solidarity could provide a long-term solution in the revitalization of villages across the EU and elsewhere. Best practices pertinent to precision farming, energy diversification, tourism, entrepreneurship are discussed in detail.As an in-depth exploration of the Smart Village on a multinational scale, this book will serve as an indispensable resource for students, researchers and policy leaders in the fields of politics, strategic management and urban and rural studies….(More)”.

Re-Use Of Public Sector Open Data: Characterising The Phenomena

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Josefin Lassinantti at the International Journal of Public Information Systems: “Despite the growing number of open data, re-use of this data is not reaching the expected levels and now this phenomenon seems hampered in its evolvement. Therefore, this study sets out to characterize the re-use of open data from public sector in order to increase our elaborate understanding of this practice, and does so by performing a literature review inspired by the processes for defining concepts, and contextualized within the historical evolvement of European open data policies. Apart from the identification of three main research approaches towards open data re-use and an elaborated definition of re-use, the findings led to the creation of a framework enabling us to see open data re-use as an iterative value-creating process in two different contexts, the public task context and the non-public task context. This process builds on three categories of meta-activities for reuse practice: 1) gaining access to and understanding data, 2) handling and re-purposing the data, and 3) creating broader value of data, as well as indications of value for whom. Lastly, implications of this re-use process and framework was discussed, along with implications of an identified practice-policy mismatch that risk hampering the future evolvement of open data re-use….(More)”.

Microsoft’s Open Notre Dame initiative calls for sharing of open data in restoration effort

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hamza Jawad at Neowin: “On April 15, a disastrous fire ravaged the famous Notre-Dame cathedral in France. In the wake of the episode, tech companies, such as Apple, announced that they would be donating to help in rebuilding efforts. On the other hand, some companies, like Ubisoft, took a different approach to support the restorations that followed.

A few days ago, Microsoft and Iconem announced the “Open Notre Dame” initiative to contribute towards the restoration of the ‘Lady of Paris’. The open data project is said to help gather and analyze existing documents on the monument, while simultaneously producing and sharing its 3D models. Today, the company has once again detailed the workings of this initiative, along with a call for the sharing of open data to help quicken the restoration efforts….

GitHub will host temporal models of the building, which can then be easily shared to and accessed by various other initiatives in a concerted effort to maintain accuracy as much as possible. Many companies, including Ubisoft, have already provided data that will help form the foundation for these open source models. More details regarding the project can be obtained on the original blog post….(More)”.

Data Protection and Digital Agency for Refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dragana Kaurin: “For the millions of refugees fleeing conflict and persecution every year, access to information about their rights and control over their personal data are crucial for their ability to assess risk and navigate the asylum process. While asylum seekers are required to provide significant amounts of personal information on their journey to safety, they are rarely fully informed of their data rights by UN agencies or local border control and law enforcement staff tasked with obtaining and processing their personal information. Despite recent improvements in data protection mechanisms in the European Union, refugees’ informed consent for the collection and use of their personal data is rarely sought. Using examples drawn from interviews with refugees who have arrived in Europe since 2013, and an analysis of the impacts of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal on migration, this paper analyzes how the vast amount of data collected from refugees is gathered, stored and shared today, and considers the additional risks this collection process poses to an already vulnerable population navigating a perilous information-decision gap….(More)”.

Humans and Big Data: New Hope? Harnessing the Power of Person-Centred Data Analytics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Carmel Martin, Keith Stockman and Joachim P. Sturmberg: “Big data provide the hope of major health innovation and improvement. However, there is a risk of precision medicine based on predictive biometrics and service metrics overwhelming anticipatory human centered sense-making, in the fuzzy emergence of personalized (big data) medicine. This is a pressing issue, given the paucity of individual sense-making data approaches. A human-centric model is described to address the gap in personal particulars and experiences in individual health journeys. The Patient Journey Record System (PaJR) was developed to improve human-centric healthcare by harnessing the power of person-centred data analytics using complexity theory, iterative health services and information systems applications over a 10 year period. PaJR is a web-based service supporting usually bi-weekly telephone calls by care guides to individuals at risk of readmissions.

This chapter describes a case study of the timing and context of readmissions using human (biopsychosocial) particular data which is based on individual experiences and perceptions with differing patterns of instability. This Australian study, called MonashWatch, is a service pilot using the PaJR system in the Dandenong Hospital urban catchment area of the Monash Health network. State public hospital big data – the Victorian HealthLinks Chronic Care algorithm provides case finding for high risk of readmission based on disease and service metrics. Monash Watch was actively monitoring 272 of 376 intervention patients, with 195 controls over 22 months (ongoing) at the time of the study.

Three randomly selected intervention cases describe a dynamic interplay of self-reported change in health and health care, medication, drug and alcohol use, social support structure. While the three cases were at similar predicted risk initially, their cases represented different statistically different time series configurations and admission patterns. Fluctuations in admission were associated with (mal)alignment of bodily health with psychosocial and environmental influences. However human interpretation was required to make sense of the patterns as presented by the multiple levels of data.

A human-centric model and framework for health journey monitoring illustrates the potential for ‘small’ personal experience data to inform clinical care in the era of big data predominantly based on biometrics and medical industrial process. ….(More)”.

Open data could have helped us learn from another mining dam disaster

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paulo A. de Souza Jr. at Nature: “The recent Brumadinho dam disaster in Brazil is an example of infrastructure failure with catastrophic consequences. Over 300 people were reported dead or missing, and nearly 400 more were rescued alive. The environmental impact is massive and difficult to quantify. The frequency of these disasters demonstrates that the current assets for monitoring integrity and generating alerting managers, authorities and the public to ongoing change in tailings are, in many cases, not working as they should. There is also the need for adequate prevention procedures. Monitoring can be perfect, but without timely and appropriate action, it will be useless. Good management therefore requires quality data. Undisputedly, management practices of industrial sites, including audit procedures, must improve, and data and metadata available from preceding accidents should be better used. There is a rich literature available about design, construction, operation, maintenance and decommissioning of tailing facilities. These include guidelines, standards, case studies, technical reports, consultancy and audit practices, and scientific papers. Regulation varies from country to country and in some cases, like Australia and Canada, it is controlled by individual state agencies. There are, however, few datasets available that are shared with the technical and scientific community more globally; particularly for prior incidents. Conspicuously lacking are comprehensive data related to monitoring of large infrastructures such as mining dams.

Today, Scientific Data published a Data Descriptor presenting a dataset obtained from 54 laboratory experiments on the breaching of fluvial dikes because of flow overtopping. (Re)use of such data can help improve our understanding of fundamental processes underpinning industrial infrastructure collapse (e.g., fluvial dike breaching, mining dam failure), and assess the accuracy of numerical models for the prediction of such incidents. This is absolutely essential for better management of floods, mitigation of dam collapses, and similar accidents. The authors propose a framework that could exemplify how data involving similar infrastructure can be stored, shared, published, and reused…(More)”.

Problematizing data-driven urban practices: Insights from five Dutch ‘smart cities’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Damion J.Bunders and KrisztinaVarró: Recently, the concept of the smart city has gained growing popularity. As cities worldwide have set the aim to harness digital technologies to their development, increasing focus came to lie on the potential challenges and concerns related to data-driven urban practices. In the existing literature, these challenges and concerns have been dominantly approached from a pragmatic approach based on the a priori assumed ‘goodness’ of the smart city; for a small group of critics, the very notion of the smart city is questionable. This paper takes the middle-way by interrogating how municipal and civil society stakeholders problematize the challenges and concerns related to data-driven practices in five Dutch cities, and how they act on these concerns in practice.

The lens of problematization posits that the ways of problematizing data-driven practices contribute to their actual enactment, and that this is an inherently political process. The case study shows that stakeholders do not only perceive practical challenges but are widely aware of and are (partly) pro-actively engaging with perceived normative-ethical and societal concerns, leading to different (sometimes inter-related) technological, legal/political, organizational, informative and participative strategies. Nonetheless, the explicit contestation of smart city policies through these strategies remains limited in scope. The paper argues that more research is needed to uncover the structural-institutional dynamics that facilitate and/or prevent the repoliticization of smart city projects….(More)”.