To Thrive, Our Democracy Needs Digital Public Infrastructure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Eli Pariser and Danielle Allen: “The story of how the internet has become so broken is already familiar. More and more of our public life takes place on big tech platforms optimized for clicks, shares, and virality. The result is that we spend our online time largely in rule-less spaces that reward our worst impulses, trap us in bubbles of like-minded opinion, and leave us susceptible to harassment, lies and misinformation. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube each took first steps to rein in the worst behavior on their platforms in the heat of the election, but none have confronted how their spaces were structured to become ideal venues for outrage and incitement…

The first step in the process is realizing that the problems we’re experiencing in digital life — how to gather strangers together in public in ways that make it so people generally behave themselves — aren’t new. They’re problems that physical communities have wrestled with for centuries. In physical communities, businesses play a critical role — but so do public libraries, schools, parks and roads. These spaces are often the groundwork that private industry builds itself around: Schools teach and train the next generation of workers; new public parks and plazas often spur private real estate development; businesses transport goods on publicly funded roads; and so on. Public spaces and private industry work symbiotically, if sometimes imperfectly.

Beyond their instrumental value for prosperity, we need public spaces and institutions to weave and maintain our social fabric. In physical communities, parks and libraries aren’t just places for exercise or book-borrowing — they also create social connections, a sense of community identity, and a venue in which differences and inequalities can be surfaced and addressed. Public spaces provide access to essential resources for people who couldn’t otherwise access them — whether it’s an outdoor workout station, basketball court, or books in a library — but they are some of the few spaces in a community where we get a glimpse of each other’s lives and help us see ourselves as part of a pluralistic but cohesive society….

If mission, design and governance are important ingredients, the final component is what might be called digital essential workers — professionals like librarians whose job is to manage, steward, and care for the people in these spaces. This care work is one of the pillars of successful physical communities which has been abstracted away by the existing tech platforms. Scholar Joan Donovan has called for 10,000 librarians for the Internet, while Sarah R. Roberts has pointed out that doing curation at scale would be impossible within the current social media business model. At a time when our country is pulling apart and many Americans need work, it’s worth considering whether we need an AmeriCorps for digital space.

How might we pay for this? A two-year project one of us helped lead at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a final report that recommended taxing what’s known as “targeted advertising” — the kind Google and Facebook rely on for their revenue — in order to support the democratic functions social platforms have had a hand in dismantling, like local journalism. The truth is that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have displaced and sucked the revenue out of an entire ecosystem of local journalistic enterprises and other institutions that served some of these public functions. Those three companies alone made nearly $33 billion in profits in the third quarter of 2020 alone — and that profit margin in part comes from not having to pay for the negative externalities they create or the public goods they erode. Using some of those funds to support public digital infrastructure seems eminently reasonable….(More)”.

Augmented Reality and the Surveillance Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Pesce at IEEE Spectrum: “First articulated in a 1965 white paper by Ivan Sutherland, titled “The Ultimate Display,” augmented reality (AR) lay beyond our technical capacities for 50 years. That changed when smartphones began providing people with a combination of cheap sensors, powerful processors, and high-bandwidth networking—the trifecta needed for AR to generate its spatial illusions. Among today’s emerging technologies, AR stands out as particularly demanding—for computational power, for sensed data, and, I’d argue, for attention to the danger it poses.

Unlike virtual-reality (VR) gear, which creates for the user a completely synthetic experience, AR gear adds to the user’s perception of her environment. To do that effectively, AR systems need to know where in space the user is located. VR systems originally used expensive and fragile systems for tracking user movements from the outside in, often requiring external sensors to be set up in the room. But the new generation of VR accomplishes this through a set of techniques collectively known as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). These systems harvest a rich stream of observational data—mostly from cameras affixed to the user’s headgear, but sometimes also from sonar, lidar, structured light, and time-of-flight sensors—using those measurements to update a continuously evolving model of the user’s spatial environment.

For safety’s sake, VR systems must be restricted to certain tightly constrained areas, lest someone blinded by VR goggles tumble down a staircase. AR doesn’t hide the real world, though, so people can use it anywhere. That’s important because the purpose of AR is to add helpful (or perhaps just entertaining) digital illusions to the user’s perceptions. But AR has a second, less appreciated, facet: It also functions as a sophisticated mobile surveillance system.

This second quality is what makes Facebook’s recent Project Aria experiment so unnerving. Nearly four years ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s goal to create AR “spectacles”—consumer-grade devices that could one day rival the smartphone in utility and ubiquity. That’s a substantial technical ask, so Facebook’s research team has taken an incremental approach. Project Aria packs the sensors necessary for SLAM within a form factor that resembles a pair of sunglasses. Wearers collect copious amounts of data, which is fed back to Facebook for analysis. This information will presumably help the company to refine the design of an eventual Facebook AR product.

The concern here is obvious: When it comes to market in a few years, these glasses will transform their users into data-gathering minions for Facebook. Tens, then hundreds of millions of these AR spectacles will be mapping the contours of the world, along with all of its people, pets, possessions, and peccadilloes. The prospect of such intensive surveillance at planetary scale poses some tough questions about who will be doing all this watching and why….(More)”.

Inside India’s booming dark data economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Snigdha Poonam and Samarath Bansal at the Rest of the World: “…The black market for data, as it exists online in India, resembles those for wholesale vegetables or smuggled goods. Customers are encouraged to buy in bulk, and the variety of what’s on offer is mind-boggling: There are databases about parents, cable customers, pregnant women, pizza eaters, mutual funds investors, and almost any niche group one can imagine. A typical database consists of a spreadsheet with row after row of names and key details: Sheila Gupta, 35, lives in Kolkata, runs a travel agency, and owns a BMW; Irfaan Khan, 52, lives in Greater Noida, and has a son who just applied to engineering college. The databases are usually updated every three months (the older one is, the less it is worth), and if you buy several at the same time, you’ll get a discount. Business is always brisk, and transactions are conducted quickly. No one will ask you for your name, let alone inquire why you want the phone numbers of five million people who have applied for bank loans.

There isn’t a reliable estimate of the size of India’s data economy or of how much money it generates annually. Regarding the former, each broker we spoke to had a different guess: One said only about one or two hundred professionals make up the top tier, another that every big Indian city has at least a thousand people trading data. To find them, potential customers need only look for their ads on social media or run searches with industry keywords and hashtags — “data,” “leads,” “database” — combined with detailed information about the kind of data they want and the city they want it from.

Privacy experts believe that the data-brokering industry has existed since the early days of the internet’s arrival in India. “Databases have been bought and sold in India for at least 15 years now. I remember a case from way back in 2006 of leaked employee data from Naukri.com (one of India’s first online job portals) being sold on CDs,” says Nikhil Pahwa, the editor and publisher of MediaNama, which covers technology policy. By 2009, data brokers were running SMS-marketing companies that offered complementary services: procuring targeted data and sending text messages in bulk. Back then, there was simply less data, “and those who had it could sell it at whatever price,” says Himanshu Bhatt, a data broker who claims to be retired. That is no longer the case: “Today, everyone has every kind of data,” he said.

No broker we contacted would openly discuss their methods of hunting, harvesting, and selling data. But the day-to-day work generally consists of following the trails that people leave during their travels around the internet. Brokers trawl data storage websites armed with a digital fishing net. “I was shocked when I was surfing [cloud-hosted data sites] one day and came across Aadhaar cards,” Bhatt remarked, referring to India’s state-issued biometric ID cards. Images of them were available to download in bulk, alongside completed loan applications and salary sheets.

Again, the legal boundaries here are far from clear. Anybody who has ever filled out a form on a coupon website or requested a refund for a movie ticket has effectively entered their information into a database that can be sold without their consent by the company it belongs to. A neighborhood cell phone store can sell demographic information to a political party for hyperlocal campaigning, and a fintech company can stealthily transfer an individual’s details from an astrology app onto its own server, to gauge that person’s creditworthiness. When somebody shares employment history on LinkedIn or contact details on a public directory, brokers can use basic software such as web scrapers to extract that data.

But why bother hacking into a database when you can buy it outright? More often, “brokers will directly approach a bank employee and tell them, ‘I need the high-end database’,” Bhatt said. And as demand for information increases, so, too, does data vulnerability. A 2019 survey found that 69% of Indian companies haven’t set up reliable data security systems; 44% have experienced at least one breach already. “In the past 12 months, we have seen an increasing trend of Indians’ data [appearing] on the dark web,” says Beenu Arora, the CEO of the global cyberintelligence firm Cyble….(More)”.

Is a racially-biased algorithm delaying health care for one million Black people?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jyoti Madhusoodanan at Nature: “One million Black adults in the United States might be treated earlier for kidney disease if doctors were to remove a controversial ‘race-based correction factor’ from an algorithm they use to diagnose people and decide whether to administer medication, a comprehensive analysis finds.

Critics of the factor question its medical validity and say it potentially perpetuates racial bias — and that the latest study, published on 2 December in JAMA1, strengthens growing calls to discontinue its use.

“A population that is marginalized and much less likely to have necessary resources and support is the last group we want to put in a situation where they’re going to have delays in diagnosis and treatment,” says nephrologist Keith Norris at the University of California, Los Angeles, who argues for retiring the correction until there’s clear evidence that it’s necessary.

On the flip side, others say that the correction is based on scientific data that can’t be ignored, although they, too, agree that its basis on race is a problem….(More)”.

Challenging the ‘Great Reset’ theory of pandemics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Mark Honigsbaum: “Few events are as compelling as an epidemic. When sufficiently severe, an epidemic evokes responses from every sector of society, laying bare social and economic fault lines and presenting politicians with fraught medical and moral choices. In the most extreme cases, an epidemic can foment a full-blown political crisis. Thus, Thucydides describes how the repeated visitations of plague to Athens in 430-426 BC provoked widespread social disorder and the breakdown of civic norms.

‘Men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane,’ writes Thucydides. ‘All the burial rites before in use were entirely upset and… many had recourse to the most shameless sepulchres.’

As the plague progresses, Thucydides describes how Athenians were swept up in a wave of hedonism and lawlessness, threatening the foundations of Athenian democracy: ‘Men now coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner… fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them.’

The resulting crisis, Thucydides claimed, undermined Athenians’ faith in the rule of law and the democratic principles that underpinned the Greek city state, paving the way for the installation of a Spartan oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants. Even though the Spartans were later ejected, Athens never regained its confidence.

Covid-19 appears to have engendered a similar crisis in our world, the main difference being in scale. Whereas the crisis Thucydides describes was confined to Athens, the coronavirus pandemic has destabilized governments from Brazil to Belarus, not just that of a 5th century city-state. The political reckoning has been particularly rapid in the United States, where Donald Trump’s inability or unwillingness to check the spread of the coronavirus was a key factor in his recent election defeat. Now, the lockdowns and social distancing measures look set to plunge the world into the worst economic depression since the 1930s, raising the spectre of further political instability.

Given the wide-ranging social, economic and political impacts of Covid-19, it is natural to assume that the same must have been true of past epidemics and pandemics. But is this the case? Do pandemics really have the historical impacts that are often claimed for them or are these claims simply the product of particular narratives and readings of history? …(More)”.

Getting Everyone Vaccinated, With ‘Nudges’ and Charity Auctions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard Thaler at the New York Times: “The good news is that safe and effective vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer appear to be on the way soon and that more are likely to follow.

The bad news is an usual combination: There won’t be enough vaccine on hand to meet initial demand, yet there is also a need to urge everyone to get shots.

I have some suggestions: An unusual type of charity auction, a bit of technology and a few nudges can help….

Economic theory offers a standard method for dealing with shortages. It is, basically: Let markets work. This would mean that those willing to pay the most would get the vaccine first.

Wisely, policymakers are not following this course. Nurses, other frontline workers and most nursing home residents could not win a bidding battle with billionaires. And, to be clear, they should not have to!

Yet there is a small but useful role that prices might play in determining who gets priority in the second round of vaccines, after the first 20 million people have gotten their shots.

At that point, perhaps sometime early this winter, suppose a small proportion of doses are sold in what would amount to a charity auction.

Who might be the winning bidders? Very wealthy individuals and high-tech companies are likely to account for some of the demand, along with businesses that employ high-profile talent like professional athletes and entertainers.

Just imagine how much the National Basketball Association, whose season will start around Christmas, would be willing to pay to ensure that none of its players or staff would be infected! The same goes for Hollywood studios and television production companies that are eager to go back to work.

The prospect of selling off precious vaccine to celebrity athletes and entertainers, hedge fund magnates and high-tech billionaires may strike you as utterly immoral, exacerbating the inequality this disease has already inflicted. But before you dismiss this idea as outrageous, let me make three points.

First, the very purpose of the charity auction would be to redistribute money from the rich to the poor….(More)”.

What the World’s First Medical Records Tell Us About Ancient Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Robin Lane Fox: “The Hippocratic books now known as the Epidemics are entitled in Greek epidemiai. This title does not refer to epidemics as we now painfully recognize them, individual diseases which are spread widely through a population, whether by touch, inhaling, contact with wildlife, eating, drinking, kissing (which the elder Pliny, c. AD 70, recognized to be a means of transmitting diseases) or sex, while remaining one and the same disease. In the mid-fifth century BC, the amiable Ion, a poet and author from the island of Chios, composed Epidemiai which referred to his visits to the demos, or people, of individual city-states around the Greek world. His title has sometimes misled readers of the medical Epidemiai into thinking that their title, too, refers to traveling doctors’ visits to particular places. They refer to such visits, but their use of the verb epidemein shows that for them the word epidemia referred to the presence of a disease in a community. It was not necessarily a rampant disease in our sense of the word “epidemic,” and it was not contrasted with diseases which were endemic, a category the authors did not distinguish, but it was certainly a disease at large. This meaning was still correctly understood in later ancient commentaries on the Epidemic books.

By the mid-first century AD, seven books were grouped under this title: the grammarian Erotian referred then to “seven books of Epidemics” in the list of works which he considered, over-optimistically, to be by Hippocrates himself. The title went back to earlier editors, probably at least as early as the third century BC, but it may not have been used by any of the books’ original authors. All seven books share a distinctive feature. Whereas the other texts in the Hippocratic Corpus refer to patients in general, and only once, in passing, name an individual, the Epidemic books are quite different. They contain individual case histories, most of which specify the very place where the named patient lived, even the house or location. They are the very first observations and descriptions of real-life individuals during a number of days which survive anywhere in the world. In Babylonia written case histories of named individuals are unknown.

In China none survives until c. 170 BC, and even then they were presented for a different purpose, to defend their doctor-author’s reputation. In ancient Egypt, cases were discussed individually in the now-famous medical papyri whose contents date back into the second millennium BC, but they never name patients or describe observations of them day after day, let alone locate them at an exact address….(More)”.

People understand statistics better than politicians think

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah O’Connor at the Financial Times: “In 2015 I took my reporter’s notebook to Liverpool because statistics suggested it was enjoying a jobs boom. The unemployment gap between the northern English city and the national average had shrunk to the smallest in a decade. When I mentioned that fact to people I met, I might as well have said the grass was pink.

“It’s certainly not our experience, I would say I’ve never seen poverty at this level,” was the response from the director of the local Citizens Advice Bureau. A woman who ran a small cake business said: “My cynical side thinks straight away they’ve probably got zero-hours contracts somewhere — [they] are a great way of cooking the books.”

I thought of that trip when I read a newly published study that uses an in-depth survey and focus groups to delve into the British public’s understanding of economics. The headline findings are bleak. Large parts of the public have misperceptions about how economic concepts such as the unemployment rate are measured and they are “sceptical and cynical” about data.

One obvious response would be to blame inadequate education and worry that economic ignorance allows people to be duped by demagogues such as Nigel Farage in the UK and Donald Trump in the US.

Economic literacy classes in schools would certainly be a good idea, especially since most of those surveyed were “deeply interested” in the economy and regretted not understanding the details. But there’s more to this story. The public live and breathe the economy every day. If their first response to a statistic such as the unemployment rate is to say “that doesn’t feel right” (a common response in the focus groups) then perhaps it’s the economists who are missing something….(More)”.

Silicon Valley’s next goal is 3D maps of the world — made by us

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Bradshaw at the Financial Times: “When technology transformed the camera, the shift from film to digital sensors was just the beginning. As standalone cameras were absorbed into our phones, they gained software smarts, enabling them not only to capture light but also to understand the contents of a photo and even recognise people in it.

A similar transformation is now starting to happen to maps — and it too is powered by those advances in camera technology. In the next 20 years, our collective understanding of a “map” will be unrecognisable from the familiar grid of roads and places that has endured even as the A-Z street atlas has been supplanted by Google Maps.

Before long, countless objects and places will be captured and recreated in 3D digital models that we can view through our phones or even, at some stage, on headsets. This digital world might be populated by our avatars, turned into a playing field for new kinds of games or used to discover routes, buildings and services around us. 

Nobody seems sure yet what the killer app for this “digital twin” of Planet Earth might be, but that hasn’t stopped Silicon Valley from racing to build it anyway. Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft, as well as the developers of Snapchat and Pokémon Go, are all hoping to bring this “mirrorworld” to life, as a precursor to the augmented-reality (AR) glasses that many in tech see as the next big thing.

To place virtual objects in our world, our devices need to know the textures and contours of their surroundings, which GPS cannot see. But instead of sending out cars with protruding cameras to scan the world, as Google did to build Street View over the past decade and a half, these maps will be plotted by hundreds of millions of users like you and me. The question is whether we even realise that we have been dragooned into Silicon Valley’s army of cartographers. They cannot do it without us.

This month, Google said it would ask Maps users to upload photos to Street View using their smartphones for the first time. Only handsets running its AR software can contribute.  As Michael Abrash, chief scientist at Facebook’s Oculus headset unit, recently told Fast Company magazine: “Crowdsourcing has to be the primary way that this works. There is no other way to scale.”…(More)”.

Lawmakers are trying to create a database with free access to court records. Judges are fighting against it.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ann Marimow in the Washington Post: “Leaders of the federal judiciary are working to block bipartisan legislation designed to create a national database of court records that would provide free access to case documents.

Backers of the bill, who are pressing for a House vote in the coming days, envision a streamlined, user-friendly system that would allow citizens to search for court documents and dockets without having to pay. Under the current system, users pay 10 cents per page to view the public records through the service known as PACER, an acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

“Everyone wants to have a system that is technologically first class and free,” said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), a sponsor of the legislation with Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.).

A modern system, he said, “is more efficient and brings more transparency into the equation and is easier on the pocketbooks of regular people.”…(More)”.