The responsible use of data for and about children: treading carefully and ethically

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Q&A with Stefaan G. Verhulst and Andrew Young …” working in collaboration with UNICEF on an initiative called Responsible Data for Children initiative (RD4C) . Its focus is on data – the risks it poses to children, as well as the opportunities it offers.

You have been working with UNICEF on the Responsible Data for Children initiative (RD4C). What is this and why do we need to be talking more about ‘responsible data’?

To date, the relationship between the datafication of everyday life and child welfare has been under-explored, both by researchers in data ethics and those who work to advance the rights of children. This neglect is a lost opportunity, and also poses a risk to children.

Today’s children are the first generation to grow up amid the rapid datafication of virtually every aspect of social, cultural, political and economic life. This alone calls for greater scrutiny of the role played by data. An entire generation is being datafied, often starting 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. Ironically, humanitarian and development organizations working with children are themselves among the key actors contributing to the increased collection of data. These organizations rely on a wide range of technologies, including biometrics, digital identity systems, remote-sensing technologies, mobile and social media messaging apps, and administrative data systems. The data generated by these tools and platforms inevitably includes potentially sensitive PII data (personally identifiable information) and DII data (demographically identifiable information). All of this begs much closer scrutiny, and a more systematic framework to guide how child-related data is collected, stored, and used.

Towards this aim, we have also been working with the Data for Children Collaborative, based in Edinburgh in establishing innovative and ethical practices around the use of data to improve the lives of children worldwide….(More)”.

The web is full of junk health info. This startup wants to change that

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet at ZDNet: “A crowdsourcing platform aims to provide better insight into health issues than is currently available….In the age of social media, blogs, and online forums, the most common practice when feeling slightly under the weather has undeniably become to resort to a quick Google search. Unfortunately, when they are not unnecessarily worrying, the answers found on the web are typically inconclusive. That observation is what prompted Israeli entrepreneur Yael Elish to launch StuffThatWorks, an AI-based online platform that collects crowdsourced data about a host of chronic conditions.

The idea being that, unlike Facebook groups or Reddit threads, the information shared by patients is centralized and assessed for quality to readily provide informed data to other users who are enquiring about their own symptoms. Healthline cuts through the confusion with straightforward, expert-reviewed, person-first experiences — all designed to help you make the best decisions. Elish is a former member of the founding team for crowdsourced navigation app Waze, but this time instead of tapping user-generated content to come up with traffic predictions and accident warnings, StuffThatWorks is intended to give users better insights into illness…(More)”.

Macron’s green democracy experiment gets political

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Louise Guillot and Elisa Braun at Politico: “Emmanuel Macron asked 150 ordinary people to help figure out France’s green policies — and now this citizens’ convention is turning into a political problem for the French president.

The Citizens’ Convention on Climate was aimed at calming tensions in the wake of the Yellow Jackets protest movement — which was sparked by a climate tax on fuel — and showing that Macron wasn’t an out-of-touch elitist.

After nine months of deliberations, the convention came up with 149 proposals to slash greenhouse gas emissions this summer. The government has to put some of these measures before the parliament for them to become binding, and a bill is due to be presented in December.

But that’s too slow for many of the convention’s members, who feel the government is back-pedalling on some of the ideas and that Macron has poked fun at them.

Muriel Raulic, a member of the convention, accused Macron of using the body to greenwash his administration.

She supports a moratorium on 5G high-speed mobile technology, which has created some health and environmental fears. Macron has dismissed proponents of the ban as “Amish” — a Christian sect suspicious of technology.

The 150 members wrote an open letter to Macron in mid-October, complaining about a lack of “clear and defined support from the executive, whose positions sometimes appear contradictory,” and to “openly hostile communications” from “certain professional actors.”

Some gathered late last month before the National Assembly to complain they felt used and treated like “guinea pigs” by politicians. In June, they created an association to oversee what the government is doing with their proposals. 

…The government denied it is using the convention to greenwash itself….(More)”.

Platform Power to the People

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Sanjay Pinto & Beth Gutelius: “When stay-at-home orders swept across the United States in response to the coronavirus outbreak this past spring, workers’ rights advocates accustomed to in-person meetings had to adjust quickly—and many did. In April, thousands of supporters joined a digital workers’ town hall to learn about the issues facing Nashville’s low-wage workers amid COVID-19, compounded by a series of tornadoes that had recently hit the Tennessee capitol’s region. In May, Taco Bell workers in Michigan created an online petition with support from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a group formed in the early months of the pandemic. That effort won them hazard pay and increased paid sick leave, among other benefits.

In response to the pandemic, workers both employed and unemployed have used digital platforms and tools to magnify their voices and meet their needs. They have launched online petition campaigns to demand safer workplaces. Worker centers, unions, and other economic justice groups are broadcasting Facebook and Instagram live events to share information about programs that support workers, offering online training to navigate state unemployment insurance systems, and sending out text blasts asking workers to take direct action.

Digital platforms have also helped workers share information about the problems they’re confronting, mobilize different forms of support and mutual aid, and make demands of employers and policy makers. Such engagement occurs not only within the channels created by established worker justice organizations, including unions and worker centers, but also among informal networks of workers who have common concerns. In some cases, digital tools are mediating relationships between workers and employers to address needs that have intensified during the pandemic. Online platforms are connecting people to steadier work, for example, and enabling employers to pay in to benefits funds for workers who have been shut out of government-sponsored and regulated systems.

These uses of digital tools are not new. Mainstream social media platforms, despite serious drawbacks discussed below, have played an important role in a variety of social movements. For example, activists used Facebook and Twitter to coordinate protests during the Arab Spring uprisings in the early 2010s. In the worker justice arena, online engagement using social media platforms that mobilize and organize workers, like Facebook and customized platforms like Coworker, has contributed to impressive actions and campaigns, including teacher strikes in the United States, strikes of Ryanair workers in Europe, and successful efforts to challenge unfair workplace policies in nonunion settings around the world. In many ways, COVID-19 has amplified and accelerated the digital efforts that have already been in motion. In a time of social distancing, people have increasingly relied upon digital tools to support collective action across different sectors, just as they have for a broad spectrum of other social interactions.

However, digital engagement will never replace analog or in-person forms of connection, as we have seen in the recent protests drawing attention to the epidemic of police violence against Black Americans. Nor will tools designed to directly address specific challenges confronting low-wage workers single-handedly transform the broader set of conditions that have produced rising inequality; ongoing expansion of the low-wage economy; and entrenched marginalization based on identity markers like race, gender, and citizenship status. Just as we need to challenge the idea that technological change will inevitably lead to mass unemployment, we also need to resist seeing new technology as supplying a set of easy fixes that secure a just and equitable future of work.

In this article, we examine how worker-centered digital tools and approaches to digital engagement might fit within a larger set of strategies for shifting power in the economy and ensuring that all people have access to “decent work” that provides fair income, social protections, and the freedom to organize, among other measures. How can online organizing foster connection and collective action—even direct action—for workers separated by geography and working across different sectors? For those lacking information about their labor rights and the behavior of unscrupulous and abusive employers, how can digital channels offer a lifeline? How can digital tools help pave the way for “high-road” forms of employment that pay fairly and invest in workers, particularly in areas where prevailing policies and norms translate into chronic precarity?…(More)”.

The Human Experience Will Not Be Quantified

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Phil Klay at the New York Times: “…Stories are a quintessentially human method of responding to the chaos and uncertainty of the world. Science is a quintessentially human method of trying to control that chaos, and data is its raw material. Adrift in the world, uncertain of the future, hostage to fate, but possessed of increasingly powerful tools for carving up pieces of the world and putting them under the microscope, is it any wonder that we increasingly turn to science when looking for deliverance from our human predicaments?

Science, after all, will eventually bring us to the end of the pandemic, just as it has helped limit the damage through better treatments and proof of the benefits of wearing masks. “Science over fiction,” was one slogan of the Joe Biden campaign, a welcome message to those who’d like public policy tethered more to reality than political fantasy.

But because science supposedly gives clear answers about everything from how to open schools in a pandemic to who will be elected president, we tend to rush to embrace it as a panacea. Some, like the popular podcaster and author Sam Harris, even think science can answer moral questions. Rarely does it occur to us how often the invocation of “science” is used to mask value judgments, or political deliberation.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatricians released separate guidelines for reopening schools, the difference lay not in the underlying science but in their institutional priorities, one focused on disease spread and the other on the welfare of children. Likewise, the difference in how New York City handled the reopenings of day cares and schools reflected not simply science, but also what could be more easily demanded of workers who lacked the protection of a powerful union.

As much as we’d like to believe in “science over fiction,” decisions in the real world require negotiating between what we think the data means, what human value we’d like to assign to it and what stories about it we can get others to accept. Data alone is not knowledge, and it is certainly not wisdom. It rarely says as much as we think it does.

Yet its allure is undeniable, persistent. As I watched the election returns on Tuesday and Wednesday, I did so with the sinking feeling that I’d been fooled again by the lure of data. Even though it looked like Biden could still win, it was clear that those hard numbers I’d been absorbing for weeks, based on fine -tuned methodologies, correcting for past mistakes, aggregated to minimize chances of error, hadn’t come close to reflecting reality. “You are literally working on an essay about the problems with relying too much on data,” my wife told me the morning after the election, “and yet you were so confident in the polls.”…(More)”

Your phone already tracks your location. Now that data could fight voter suppression

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Seth Rosenblatt: “Smartphone location data is a dream for marketers who want to know where you go and how long you spend there—and a privacy nightmare. But this kind of geolocation data could also be used to protect people’s voting rights on Election Day.

The newly founded nonprofit Center for New Data is now tracking voters at the polls using smartphone location data to help researchers understand how easy—or difficult—it is for people to vote in different places. Called the Observing Democracy project, the nonpartisan effort is making data on how far people have to travel to vote and how long they have to wait in line available in a privacy-friendly way so it can be used to craft election policies that ensure voting is accessible for everyone.

Election data has already fueled changes in various municipalities and states. A 66-page lawsuit filed by Fair Fight Action against the state of Georgia in the wake of Stacey Abrams’s narrow loss to Brian Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial race relies heavily on data to back its assertions of unconstitutionally delayed and deferred voter registration, unfair challenges to absentee and provisional ballots, and unjustified purges of voter rolls—all hallmarks of voter suppression.

The promise of Observing Democracy is to make this type of impactful data available much more rapidly than ever before. Barely a month old, Observing Democracy isn’t wasting any time: Its all-volunteer staffers will be receiving data potentially as soon as Nov. 4 on voter wait times at polling locations, travel times to polling stations, and how frequently ballot drop-off boxes are visited, courtesy of location-data mining companies X-Mode Social and Veraset, which was spun off from SafeGraph….(More)”.

The necessity of judgment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jeff Malpas in AI and Society: “In 2016, the Australian Government launched an automated debt recovery system through Centrelink—its Department of Human Services. The system, which came to be known as ‘Robodebt’, matched the tax records of welfare recipients with their declared incomes as held by Ethe Department and then sent out debt notices to recipients demanding payment. The entire system was computerized, and many of those receiving debt notices complained that the demands for repayment they received were false or inaccurate as well as unreasonable—all the more so given that those being targeted were, almost by definition, those in already vulnerable circumstances. The system provoked enormous public outrage, was subjected to successful legal challenge, and after being declared unlawful, the Government paid back all of the payments that had been received, and eventually, after much prompting, issued an apology.

The Robodebt affair is characteristic of a more general tendency to shift to systems of automated decision-making across both the public and the private sector and to do so even when those systems are flawed and known to be so. On the face of it, this shift is driven by the belief that automated systems have the capacity to deliver greater efficiencies and economies—in the Robodebt case, to reduce costs by recouping and reducing social welfare payments. In fact, the shift is characteristic of a particular alliance between digital technology and a certain form of contemporary bureaucratised capitalism. In the case of the automated systems we see in governmental and corporate contexts—and in many large organisations—automation is a result both of the desire on the part of software, IT, and consultancy firms to increase their customer base as well as expand the scope of their products and sales, and of the desire on the part of governments and organisations to increase control at the same time as they reduce their reliance on human judgment and capacity. The fact is, such systems seldom deliver the efficiencies or economies they are assumed to bring, and they also give rise to significant additional costs in terms of their broader impact and consequences, but the imperatives of sales and seemingly increased control (as well as an irrational belief in the benefits of technological solutions) over-ride any other consideration. The turn towards automated systems like Robodebt is, as is now widely recognised, a common feature of contemporary society. To look to a completely different domain, new military technologies are being developed to provide drone weapon systems with the capacity to identify potential threats and defend themselves against them. The development is spawning a whole new field of military ethics-based entirely around the putative ‘right to self-defence’ of automated weapon systems.

In both cases, the drone weapon system and Robodebt, we have instances of the development of automated systems that seem to allow for a form of ‘judgment’ that appears to operate independently of human judgment—hence the emphasis on this systems as autonomous. One might argue—and typically it is so argued—that any flaws that such systems currently present can be overcome either through the provision of more accurate information or through the development of more complex forms of artificial intelligence….(More)”.

The Potential Role Of Open Data In Mitigating The COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges And Opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Sunyoung Pyo, Luigi Reggi and Erika G. Martin: “…There is one tool for the COVID-19 response that was not as robust in past pandemics: open data. For about 15 years, a “quiet open data revolution” has led to the widespread availability of governmental data that are publicly accessible, available in multiple formats, free of charge, and with unlimited use and distribution rights. The underlying logic of open data’s value is that diverse users including researchers, practitioners, journalists, application developers, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders will synthesize the data in novel ways to develop new insights and applications. Specific products have included providing the public with information about their providers and health care facilities, spotlighting issues such as high variation in the cost of medical procedures between facilities, and integrating food safety inspection reports into Yelp to help the public make informed decisions about where to dine. It is believed that these activities will in turn empower health care consumers and improve population health.

Here, we describe several use cases whereby open data have already been used globally in the COVID-19 response. We highlight major challenges to using these data and provide recommendations on how to foster a robust open data ecosystem to ensure that open data can be leveraged in both this pandemic and future public health emergencies…(More)” See also Repository of Open Data for Covid19 (OECD/TheGovLab)

Learning like a State: Statecraft in the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Marion Fourcade and Jeff Gordon: “…Recent books have argued that we live in an age of “informational” or “surveillance” capitalism, a new form of market governance marked by the accumulation and assetization of information, and by the dominance of platforms as sites of value extraction. Over the last decade-plus, both actual and idealized governance have been transformed by a combination of neoliberal ideology, new technologies for tracking and ranking populations, and the normative model of the platform behemoths, which carry the banner of technological modernity. In concluding a review of Julie Cohen’s and Shoshana Zuboff’s books, Amy Kapcyznski asks how we might build public power sufficient to govern the new private power. Answering that question, we believe, requires an honest reckoning with how public power has been warped by the same ideological, technological, and legal forces that brought about informational capitalism.

In our contribution to the inaugural JLPE issue, we argue that governments and their agents are starting to conceive of their role differently than in previous techno-social moments. Our jumping-off point is the observation that what may first appear as mere shifts in the state’s use of technology—from the “open data” movement to the NSA’s massive surveillance operation—actually herald a deeper transformation in the nature of statecraft itself. By “statecraft,” we mean the state’s mode of learning about society and intervening in it. We contrast what we call the “dataist” state with its high modernist predecessor, as portrayed memorably by the anthropologist James C. Scott, and with neoliberal governmentality, described by, among others, Michel Foucault and Wendy Brown.

The high modernist state expanded the scope of sovereignty by imposing borders, taking censuses, and coercing those on the outskirts of society into legibility through broad categorical lenses. It deployed its power to support large public projects, such as the reorganization of urban infrastructure. As the ideological zeitgeist evolved toward neoliberalism in the 1970s, however, the priority shifted to shoring up markets, and the imperative of legibility trickled down to the individual level. The poor and working class were left to fend for their rights and benefits in the name of market fitness and responsibility, while large corporations and the wealthy benefited handsomely.

As a political rationality, dataism builds on both of these threads by pursuing a project of total measurement in a neoliberal fashion—that is, by allocating rights and benefits to citizens and organizations according to (questionable) estimates of moral desert, and by re-assembling a legible society from the bottom up. Weakened by decades of anti-government ideology and concomitantly eroded capacity, privatization, and symbolic degradation, Western states have determined to manage social problems as they bubble up into crises rather than affirmatively seeking to intervene in their causes. The dataist state sets its sights on an expanse of emergent opportunities and threats. Its focus is not on control or competition, but on “readiness.” Its object is neither the population nor a putative homo economicus, but (as Gilles Deleuze put it) “dividuals,” that is, discrete slices of people and things (e.g. hospital visits, police stops, commuting trips). Under dataism, a well-governed society is one where events (not persons) are aligned to the state’s models and predictions, no matter how disorderly in high modernist terms or how irrational in neoliberal terms….(More)”.

Covid-19 is reshaping collective intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Zollinger at Diplomatic Courier: “What a difference a year makes. A survey in April showed that almost 40% of people in the EU had switched to remote work, while estimates in the U.S. range from 30-50%. The video conference has become a staple of our daily working lives in a way that would have been inconceivable 12 months ago, while virtual collaboration tools have become ubiquitous.  

Given the straightened economic climate, it is unsurprising that many businesses see the situation as an opportunity to permanently reduce their cost base. Facebook, for example, has announced that it expects half of its global workforce to work remotely within the next five to ten years, with Twitter, Barclays and Mondelez International making similar moves. On a purely financial level, this seems like a win-win for everyone concerned: employers can save on the capital and operational costs of providing office space, while employees can save the time and money that it would have cost to commute.

However, if we want to move beyond mere economic survival towards recovery and growth, we need to be more ambitious in our thinking. Rather than merely cutting costs, we now have the chance to drive greater innovation and productivity by building more flexible, remote teams. In addition to the cost and time savings associated with remote work, companies now have an opportunity to shift the focus of their recruitment to new geographic areas and hire talented new employees without the need for them to physically relocate. In this way, they can form purpose-built teams to solve specific tasks over a defined time period….(More)”.