The Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2013 is dedicated this year to Personal Data: “The value of personal data has traditionally been understood in ethical terms as a safeguard for personality rights such as human dignity and privacy. However, we have entered an era where personal data are mined, traded and monetized in the process of creating added value – often in terms of free services including efficient search, support for social networking and personalized communications. This volume investigates whether the economic value of personal data can be realized without compromising privacy, fairness and contextual integrity. It brings scholars and scientists... (More >)
Riding the Waves or Caught in the Tide? Navigating the Evolving Information Environment
IFLA Trend Report: “In the global information environment, time moves quickly and there’s an abundance of commentators trying to keep up. With each new technological development, a new report emerges assessing its impact on different sectors of society. The IFLA Trend Report takes a broader approach and identifies five high level trends shaping the information society, spanning access to education, privacy, civic engagement and transformation. Its findings reflect a year’s consultation with a range of experts and stakeholders from different disciplines to map broader societal changes occurring, or likely to occur in the information environment. The IFLA Trend Report... (More >)
A Theory of Creepy: Technology, Privacy and Shifting Social Norms
Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky in Yale Journal of Law & Technology: “The rapid evolution of digital technologies has hurled to the forefront of public and legal discourse dense social and ethical dilemmas that we have hardly begun to map and understand. In the near past, general community norms helped guide a clear sense of ethical boundaries with respect to privacy. One does not peek into the window of a house even if it is left open. One does not hire a private detective to investigate a casual date or the social life of a prospective employee. Yet with... (More >)
OECD's Revised Guidelines on Privacy
OECD: “Over many decades the OECD has played an important role in promoting respect for privacy as a fundamental value and a condition for the free flow of personal data across borders. The cornerstone of OECD work on privacy is its newly revised Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data (2013). Another key component of work in this area aims to improve cross-border co-operation among privacy law enforcement authorities. This work produced an OECD Recommendation on Cross-border Co-operation in the Enforcement of Laws Protecting Privacy in 2007 and inspired the formation of the Global... (More >)
(Appropriate) Big Data for Climate Resilience?
Amy Luers at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “The answer to whether big data can help communities build resilience to climate change is yes—there are huge opportunities, but there are also risks. Opportunities Feedback: Strong negative feedback is core to resilience. A simple example is our body’s response to heat stress—sweating, which is a natural feedback to cool down our body. In social systems, feedbacks are also critical for maintaining functions under stress. For example, communication by affected communities after a hurricane provides feedback for how and where organizations and individuals can provide help. While this kind of feedback... (More >)
From Networked Publics to Issue Publics: Reconsidering the Public/Private Distinction in Web Science
New paper by Andreas Birkbak: “As an increasing part of everyday life becomes connected with the web in many areas of the globe, the question of how the web mediates political processes becomes still more urgent. Several scholars have started to address this question by thinking about the web in terms of a public space. In this paper, we aim to make a twofold contribution towards the development of the concept of publics in web science. First, we propose that although the notion of publics raises a variety of issues, two major concerns continue to be user privacy and... (More >)
Public Open Data: The Good, the Bad, the Future
Camille Crittenden at IDEALAB: “Some of the most powerful tools combine official public data with social media or other citizen input, such as the recent partnership between Yelp and the public health departments in New York and San Francisco for restaurant hygiene inspection ratings. In other contexts, such tools can help uncover and ultimately reduce corruption by making it easier to “follow the money.” Despite the opportunities offered by “free data,” this trend also raises new challenges and concerns, among them, personal privacy and security. While attention has been devoted to the unsettling power of big data analysis and... (More >)
Index: The Data Universe
The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on the data universe and was originally published in 2013. How much data exists in the digital universe as of 2012: 2.7 zetabytes* Increase in the quantity of Internet data from 2005 to 2012: +1,696% Percent of the world’s data created in the last two years: 90 Number of exabytes (=1 billion gigabytes) created every day in 2012: 2.5; that number doubles every month Percent of the digital universe in 2005 created by the U.S.... (More >)
How Much Transparency Do We Really Want?
William Galston in the Wall Street Journal: “Transparency is very nearly the opposite of privacy. In the current controversy, it is a demand that the government make public matters it conducts in private and wants to keep private. The argument for disclosure goes like this: If the government is acting in the name of the people, the people need to know what their government is doing. How else can they judge these activities? Democratic government means accountability to the public, and accountability requires disclosure. History testifies to the link between secrecy and the abuse of public power. Without disclosure,... (More >)
White House Expands Guidance on Promoting Open Data
NextGov: “White House officials have announced expanded technical guidance to help agencies make more data accessible to the public in machine-readable formats. Following up on President Obama’s May executive order linking the pursuit of open data to economic growth, innovation and government efficiency, two budget and science office spokesmen on Friday published a blog post highlighting new instructions and answers to frequently asked questions. Nick Sinai, deputy chief technology officer at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Dominic Sale, supervisory policy analyst at the Office of Management and Budget, noted that the policy now in place means... (More >)
