A South African City Says It’s Putting QR Codes On Informal Settlement Cabins To Help Services. But Residents And Privacy Experts Are Uncertain.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ray Mwareya: “Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system.

Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system…(More)”.

The Adoption of Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Benjamin Kumpf & Emma Proud: “The adoption of innovation means an innovation has ceased to be “innovative.” It means that a method, technology, or approach to a problem has moved from the experimental edges of an organization to the core of its work: no longer a novelty, but something normal and institutionalized.

However, the concept of adoption is rarely discussed, and the experience and know-how to bring it about is even less common. While an increasing evidence base has been developed on adopting digital systems in development and public sector organizations, as well as literature on organizational reform, little has been published on strategically moving approaches and technologies out of the innovation space to the mainstream of how organizations work. The most relevant insights come from institutionalizing behavioral insights in governments, mainly in public sector entities in the global north. This gap makes it all the more important to surface the challenges, opportunities, and factors that enable adoption, as well as the barriers and roadblocks that impede it….

Adoption is not the same as scaling. Broadly speaking, scaling means “taking successful projects, programs, or policies and expanding, adapting, and sustaining them in different ways over time for greater development impact,” as the authors of the 2020 Focus Brief on Scaling-Up put it. But scaling tends to involve different players and focuses on a specific service, product, or delivery model. For example, SASA! Raising Voices is a community mobilization approach to address and reduce gender-based violence which was first pioneered in Tanzania, but after being rigorously evaluated, has since then adapted in at least 30 countries by more than 75 organizations around the world…(More)”.

Architectures of Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jay Lloyd and Annalee Saxenian: “Silicon Valley’s dynamism during the final three decades of the twentieth century highlighted the singular importance of social and professional networks to innovation. Since that time, contemporary and historical case studies have corroborated the link between networks and the pace of technological change. These studies have shown that networks of networks, or ecosystems, that are characterized by a mix of collaboration and competition, can accelerate learning and problem-solving.

However, these insights about networks, collaboration, and ecosystems remain surprisingly absent from public debates about science and technology policy. Since the end of World War II, innovation policy has targeted economic inputs such as funding for basic scientific research and a highly skilled workforce (via education, training, and/or immigration), as well as support for commercialization of technology, investments in information technology, and free trade. Work on national systems of innovation, by contrast, seeks to define the optimal ensembles of institutions and policies. Alternatively, policy attention is focused on achieving efficiencies and scale by gaining control over value chains, especially in critical industries such as semiconductors. Antitrust advocates have attributed stalled technological innovation to monopolistic concentration among large firms, arguing that divestiture or regulation is necessary to reinvigorate competition and speed gains for society. These approaches ignore the lessons of network research, potentially threatening the very ecosystems that could unlock competitive advantages. For example, attempts to strengthen value chains risk cutting producers off from global networks, leaving them vulnerable to shifting markets and technology and weakening the wider ecosystem. Breaking up large platform firms may likewise undermine less visible internal interdependencies that support innovation, while doing nothing to encourage external collaboration. 

Networks of networks, or ecosystems, that are characterized by a mix of collaboration and competition, can accelerate learning and problem-solving.

How might the public sector promote and strengthen important network connections in a world of continuous flux? This essay reexamines innovation policy through the lens of the current era of cloud computing, arguing that the public sector has a regulatory role as well as a nurturing one to play in fostering innovation ecosystems…(More)”.

Culver City, Calif., Uses AR to Showcase Stormwater Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Julia Edinger: “Culver City, Calif., and Trigger XR have teamed up to enhance a stormwater project by adding an interactive augmented reality experience.

Government agencies have been seeing the value of augmented and virtual reality for improved training and accessibility in recent years. Now, governments are launching innovative projects to help educate and engage residents — from a project in Charlotte, N.C., that revives razed Black neighborhoods to efforts to animate parks in Buffalo, N.Y., and Fairfax, Va.

For Culver City, an infrastructure project’s signage will bring the project to life with an augmented reality experience that educates the public on both the project itself and the city’s history…

…as is the case with many infrastructure projects, a big portion of the action would happen out of sight, motivating the project team to include “interpretive signage” that explains the purpose of the project through an interactive, virtual experience, Sean Singletary, the city’s senior civil engineer, explained in a written response…

The AR experience will soon be available for visitors, who will be able to learn about the project by reading the information on the signs — printed in both Spanish and English — or by scanning the QR code to get deeper.

There are six different “experiences” in augmented reality that users can participate in. In one experience, users can visualize the stormwater project that exists beneath their feet or watch images of the city’s history float past them as if they were walking through a museum. Another features a turtle that is native to Ballona Creek, which will swim around users as informational text boxes about the turtle’s history and keeping the creek clean pop up to enhance the experience…(More)”.

The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram in The New York Times: “Across industries and incomes, more employees are being tracked, recorded and ranked. What is gained, companies say, is efficiency and accountability. What is lost?…

In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others. Eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real time, according to an examination by The New York Times.

Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.

Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like “Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,” after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.

Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as “demoralizing,” “humiliating” and “toxic.” Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said.

But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world’s new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself…(More)”.

AI-powered cameras to enforce bus lanes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Chris Teale: “New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority will use an automated camera system to ensure bus lanes in New York City are free from illegally parked vehicles.

The MTA is partnering with Hayden AI to deploy Automated Bus Lane Enforcement camera systems to 300 buses, which will be mounted on the interior of the windshield and powered by artificial intelligence. The agency has the option to add the cameras to 200 more buses if it chooses.

Chris Carson, Hayden AI’s CEO and co-founder, said when the cameras detect an encroachment on a bus lane, they use real-time automated license plate recognition and edge computing to compile a packet of evidence that includes the time, date and location of the offense, as well as a brief video that shows the violator’s license plate. 

That information is encrypted and sent securely to the cloud, where MTA officials can access and analyze it for violations. If there is no encroachment on a bus lane, the cameras do not record anything…

An MTA spokesperson said the agency will also use data from the system to identify locations that have the highest instances of vehicles blocking bus lanes. New York City has 140 miles of bus lanes and has plans to build 150 more miles in the next four years, but congestion and lane violations from other road users slows the speed of the buses. The city already uses cameras and police patrols to attempt to enforce proper bus lane use…(More)”.

How social media has undermined our constitutional architecture

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Danielle Allen: “Our politics are awful. On this we all agree. Often we feel there is nothing we can do. Yet there are steps to take. Before we can decide what to do, though, we have to face squarely the nature of the problem we are solving.

We face a crisis of representation. And — put bluntly — Facebook is the cause.

By crisis of representation, I do not mean that the other side’s representatives drive us all crazy. Of course, they do. I do not even mean that the incredibly negative nature of our political discourse is ruining the mental health of all of us. Of course, it is. What I mean is that the fundamental structural mechanism of our constitutional democracy is representation, and one of the pillars of the original design for that system has been knocked out from under us. As a result, the whole system no longer functions effectively.

Imagine that a truck has crashed into a supporting wall for your building. Your building is now structurally unsound and shifting dangerously in the wind. That’s the kind of situation I’m talking about.

In that abstract metaphor the building is our constitutional system, and social media is the truck. But explaining what I mean requires going back to the early design of our Constitution.

Ours is not the first era brought to its knees by polarization. After the Revolution, the nation was grinding to a halt under the Articles of Confederation. Congress couldn’t get a quorum. It couldn’t secure the revenue needed to pay war debts. Polarization — or as they called it — “faction” brought paralysis.

The whole point of writing the Constitution was to fix this aspect. James Madison made the case that the design of the Constitution would dampen factionalism. He argued this in the Federalist Papers,the famous op-eds that he, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton wrote advocating for the Constitution…

Madison couldn’t anticipate Facebook, and Facebook — with its historically unprecedented power to bind factions over great distances — knocked this pillar out from under us. In this sense, Facebook and the equally powerful social media platforms that followed it broke our democracy. They didn’t mean to. It’s like when your kid plays with a beach ball in the house and breaks your favorite lamp. But break it they did.

Now, the rest of us have to fix it.

Representation as designed cannot work under current conditions. We have no choice but to undertake a significant project of democracy renovation. We need an alternative to that original supporting wall to restore structural soundness to our institutions.

In coming columns, I will make the case for the recommendations that I consider most fundamental for a 21st-century system of representation that can address our needs. The goal should be responsive representation, which means representation that is inclusive of our extraordinary diversity and, of course, simultaneously effective. Our representatives get stuff done.

Increasing the size of the House of Representatives is one recommendation from a bipartisan commission on democracy renovation that I recently co-chaired. The report we produced is called Our Common Purpose. …(More)”

EU Court Expands Definition of Sensitive Data, Prompting Legal Concerns for Companies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Catherine Stupp: “Companies will be under increased pressure after Europe’s top court ruled they must apply special protections to data that firms previously didn’t consider sensitive.

Under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, information about health, religion, political views and sexual orientation are considered sensitive. Companies generally aren’t allowed to process it unless they apply special safeguards.

The European Court of Justice on Aug. 1 determined that public officials in Lithuania had their sensitive data revealed because their spouses’ names were published online, which could indicate their sexual orientation. Experts say the implications will extend to other types of potentially sensitive information.

Data that might be used to infer a sensitive piece of information about a person is also sensitive, the court said. That could include unstructured data—which isn’t organized in databases and is therefore more difficult to search through and analyze—such as surveillance camera footage in a hospital that indicates a person was treated there, legal experts say. Records of a special airplane meal might reveal religious views.

The court ruling “raises a lot of practical complexities and a lot of difficulty in understanding if the data [organizations] have is sensitive or not,” said Dr. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, vice president for global privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Many companies with large data sets may not know they hold details that indirectly relate to sensitive information, privacy experts say. Identifying where that data is and deciding whether it could reveal personal details about an individual would be a huge undertaking, said Tobias Judin, head of the international section at the Norwegian data protection regulator.

“You can’t really comply with the law if your data set becomes so big that you don’t really know what’s in it,” Mr. Judin said.

The GDPR says companies can only process sensitive data in a few circumstances, such as if a person gives explicit consent for it to be used for a specified purpose.

Regulators have been grappling with the question of how to determine what is sensitive data. The Norwegian regulator last year fined gay-dating app Grindr LLC 65 million kroner, equivalent to roughly $6.7 million The regulator said the user data was sensitive because use of the app indicated their sexual orientation.

Grindr said it doesn’t require users to share that data. The company appealed in February. Mr. Judin said his office is reviewing material submitted by the company as part of its appeal. Spain’s regulator came to a different conclusion in January, and found that data Grindr shared for advertising purposes wasn’t sensitive….(More)”.

Phones Know Who Went to an Abortion Clinic. Whom Will They Tell?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Patience Haggin at Wall Street Journal: “Concerns over collection and storage of reproductive health data is the latest challenge for the location-data industry, which over the past few years has faced scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators. Data-privacy laws in California and other states in recent years have placed new restrictions on the companies, such as requiring companies to give consumers the right to opt out of having their data sold.

The Federal Trade Commission last month said it would strictly enforce laws governing the collection, use and sharing of sensitive consumer data. “The misuse of mobile location and health information— including reproductive health data—exposes consumers to significant harm,” wrote Kristin Cohen, acting associate director for the commission’s division of privacy and identity protection.

Without clear regulations for the location-data industry’s data on abortion clinics, individual companies are determining how to respond to the implications of the Supreme Court ruling.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google recently said it would automatically delete visits to abortion clinics from its users’ location history.

Apple Inc. says it minimizes collection of personal data and that most location data is stored in ways the company can’t access. It has no way to access Health and Maps app data for people using updated operating systems, and can’t provide such data in response to government requests, the company says.

The vast location-data ecosystem includes many other lesser-known companies that are taking a different approach. A trade group for some of those firms, Network Advertising Initiative, announced a new set of voluntary standards for member companies in June, two days before the Dobbs ruling came out.

Participating companies, including Foursquare Labs Inc., Cuebiq Inc. and Precisely Inc.’s PlaceIQ, agreed not to use, sell or share precise location data about visits to sensitive locations—including abortion clinics—except to comply with a legal obligation…(More)”

Meet the new GDP prototype that tracks inequality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Greg Rosalsky: “…Nearly a century after Kuznets pioneered the use of GDP, economists Thomas Blanchet, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman are trying to revolutionize it. In a new paper titled “Real-Time Inequality,” the economists imagine a new kind of GDP, one that isn’t merely a single number telling us about total economic growth, but a collection of numbers telling us where the gains from this growth are flowing. They already have a working prototype that they’ve published online, and it can provide some important insights about our economy right now…

Gabriel Zucman is an economist at UC Berkeley and the director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality. He has been working to transform government economic statistics — also called “national accounts” — for almost a decade. He says the national accounts offer the public valuable insights about economic growth. However, Zucman says, “The big problem is these data do not tell you who is benefiting from economic growth.”

America, of course, already has tons of data on inequality. The problem, Zucman says, is it usually takes a year or two for this data to be updated. “It’s not enough to come in two years after the policy battle, and say, ‘Look, this is what happened to inequality,'” Zucman says. “That’s too late.”

Their new project is an effort to fix this. Cobbling together data from a variety of official sources, Zucman and his colleagues have pioneered a method to compute in a more timely fashion how different income groups — like the working class and the middle class — are doing economically. They hope this prototype will inspire the federal government to follow suit and soon “produce numbers about how income is growing for each social group at the exact time when the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases its official GDP growth numbers.”

Zucman envisions a future where this data could inform and shape policy decisions. When considering policies like sending stimulus checks or providing tax relief, Zucman says, policymakers and voters need to know things like “which groups need more support, or whether the government may be actually overshooting, which might lead to inflation.”…(More)”.