What Data About You Can the Government Get From Big Tech?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Jack Nicas at the New York Times: “The Justice Department, starting in the early days of the Trump administration, secretly sought data from some of the biggest tech companies about journalists, Democratic lawmakers and White House officials as part of wide-ranging investigations into leaks and other matters, The New York Times reported last week.

The revelations, which put the companies in the middle of a clash over the Trump administration’s efforts to find the sources of news coverage, raised questions about what sorts of data tech companies collect on their users, and how much of it is accessible to law enforcement authorities.

Here’s a rundown:

All sorts. Beyond basic data like users’ names, addresses and contact information, tech companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook also often have access to the contents of their users’ emails, text messages, call logs, photos, videos, documents, contact lists and calendars.

Most of it is. But which data law enforcement can get depends on the sort of request they make.

Perhaps the most common and basic request is a subpoena. U.S. government agencies and prosecutors can often issue subpoenas without approval from a judge, and lawyers can issue them as part of open court cases. Subpoenas are often used to cast a wide net for basic information that can help build a case and provide evidence needed to issue more powerful requests….(More)”.

Digitalization as a common good. Contribution to an inclusive recovery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Julia Pomares, Andrés Ortega & María Belén Abdala: “…The pandemic has accelerated the urgency of a new social contract for this era at national, regional, and global levels, and such a pact clearly requires a digital dimension. The Spanish government, for example, proposes that by 2025, 100 megabits per second should be achieved for 100% of the population. A company like Telefónica, for its part, proposes a “Digital Deal to build back better our societies and economies” to achieve a “fair and inclusive digital transition,” both for Spain and Latin America.

The pandemic and the way of coping with and overcoming it has also emphasized and aggravated the significance of different types of digital and connectivity gaps and divides, between countries and regions of the world, between rural and urban areas, between social groups, including income and gender-related gaps, and between companies (large and small), which need to be addressed and bridged in these new social digital contracts. For the combination of digital divides and the pandemic amplify social disparities and inequalities in various spheres of life. Digitalization can contribute to enlarge those divides, but also to overcome them.

Common good

In 2016, the UN, through its Human Rights Council and General Assembly, qualified access to the internet as a basic fundamental human right, from which all human rights can also be defended. In 2021, the Italian Presidency of the G20 has set universal access to the internet as a goal of the group.

We use the concept of common good, in a non-legal but economic sense, following Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom 6 who refers to the nature of use and not of ownership. In line with Ostrom, digitalization and connectivity as a common good respond to three characteristics:

  • It is non-rivalrous: Its consumption by anyone does not reduce the amount available to others (which in digitalization and connectivity is true to a certain extent, since it also relies on huge but limited storage and processing centers, and also on network capacity, both in the access and backbone network. It is the definition of service, where a distinction has to be made between the content of what is transmitted, and the medium used.)
  • It is non-excludable: It is almost impossible to prevent anyone from consuming it.
  • It is available, more or less, all over the world….(More)”.

How Low and Middle-Income Countries Are Innovating to Combat Covid

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ben Ramalingam, Benjamin Kumpf, Rahul Malhotra and Merrick Schaefer: “Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, innovators around the world have developed thousands of novel solutions and practical approaches to this unprecedented global health challenge. About one-fifth of those innovations have come from low- and middle-income countries across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, according to our analysis of WHO data, and they work to address the needs of poor, marginalized, or excluded communities at the so-called bottom of the pyramid.

Over the past year we’ve been able to learn from and support some of those inspiring innovators. Their approaches are diverse in scope and scale and cover a vast range of pandemic response needs — from infection prevention and control to community engagement, contract tracing, social protection, business continuity, and more.

Here we share seven lessons from those innovators that offer promising insights not only for the ongoing Covid response but also for how we think about, manage, and enable innovation.

1. Ensure that your solutions are sensitive to social and cultural dynamics. 

Successful innovations are relevant to the lived realities of the people they’re intended to help. Socially and culturally sensitive design approaches see greater uptake and use. This is true in both resource-constrained and resource-rich environments.

Take contact tracing in Kenya. In a context where more than half of all residents use public transportation every day, the provider of a ticketing app for Nairobi’s bus fleets adapted its software to collect real-time passenger data. The app has been used across one of the world’s most mobile populations to trace Covid-19 cases, identify future clusters, trigger automated warnings to exposed passengers, and monitor the maximum number of people that could safely be allowed in each vehicle….(More)”.

The replication crisis won’t be solved with broad brushstrokes

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David Peterson at Nature: “Alarm about a ‘replication crisis’ launched a wave of projects that aimed to quantitatively evaluate scientific reproducibility: statistical analyses, mass replications and surveys. Such efforts, collectively called metascience, have grown into a social movement advocating broad reforms: open-science mandates, preregistration of experiments and new incentives for careful research. It has drawn attention to the need for improvements, and caused rancour.

Philosophers, historians and sociologists no longer accept a single, unified definition of science. Instead, they document how scientists in different fields have developed unique practices of producing, communicating and evaluating evidence, guided loosely by a set of shared values. However, this diversity and underlying scholarship are often overlooked by metascience activists.

Over the past three years, Aaron Panofsky, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and I have interviewed 60 senior biologists, chemists, geologists and physicists who are reviewing editors at Science, plus another 83 scientists seeking science-wide reforms. These highly recognized researchers saw growing interest in making science more open and robust — but also expressed scepticism.

Senior researchers bristled at the idea that their fields were in ‘crisis’, and suspected that activists were seeking recognition for themselves. A frustrated biologist argued that people running mass replication studies “were not motivated to find reproducibility” and benefited from finding it lacking. Others said metascientists dismissed replication work done to further a line of research rather than assess the state of the literature. Another saw data deposition as a frustrating, externally imposed mandate: “We’re already drowning in all the bureaucratic crap.”

Even those who acknowledged the potential value of reforms, such as those for data sharing, felt that there was no discussion about the costs. “If you add up all of the things that only take ten minutes, it’s a huge chunk of your day.”…(More)”.

Dutch cities to develop European mobility data standard

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cities Today: “Five Dutch cities – Amsterdam, Utrecht, Eindhoven, Rotterdam and The Hague – are collaborating to establish a new standard for the exchange of data between cities and shared mobility operators.

In partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water, the five cities, known as the G-5, will develop the City Data Standard – Mobility (CDS-M). The platform will allow information on mobility patterns, including the use of shared vehicles, traffic flows and parking, to be shared in compliance with Europe’s strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

So far, the working group has been focused on internal capacity-building, and members are set to delve into key thematic  areas from early June.

Speaking to Cities Today, Ross Curzon-Butler, Chairperson of the City of Amsterdam’s Data Specification for Mobility Working Group and Chief Technology Officer at Dutch start-up Cargoroo, said:“The key thing is about making sure the data is accessible to cities in a way that is proportional and compliant with GDPR.

“What we have to recognise is that cities are going to ask transport firms for data. This is coming, whether we like it or not. We therefore have the impetus to make sure that the data requested is in a standardised way, and that there’s a standardised understanding of why they’re being asked for that data.”…

Curzon-Butler sees the new standard as complementing, rather than competing with, the Open Mobility Foundation’s Mobility Data Specification (MDS), which is already used in several European cities, including Lisbon….

The CDS-M consists of the “standard”, the technical design, and the “agreement”, that details which organisations are involved in data processing. The agreement framework is now under development and will be established by a working group comprising mobility operators, urban planners, data scientists, code developers, data protection officers, and security experts.

“If you’re a city, or a data processor or a transport operator and you start asking people for different data points and asking for it in different formats, and across different standards, it becomes unmanageable,” Curzon-Butler said.

“And the development time in all of these things is already high enough, so what we’re trying to do is normalise the data flow as much as possible, so that everyone in that data chain doesn’t have these huge overheads that just grow and grow, where you’re then having to manage multiple dialects and standards and trying to understand ‘who’s got what data and what are they really doing with it?’.

“And in Europe we have GDPR, which is a very serious regulation that we have to be very mindful and aware of.”

He referenced a recent case where the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) fined the City of Enschede €600,000 (US$730,000) for its use of Wi-Fi sensors to measure the number of people in the city centre.

It is understood to be the first time the regulator has imposed a fine on a government body under the GDPR but the case could have implications for cities well beyond the Netherlands. Enschede is appealing the decision…(More)”

Building an Inclusive Digital Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Lee Jong-Wha: “…Addressing such questions is essential to preparing for the post-pandemic era, when all countries will need to embrace new ways of working, producing, and consuming. Digitalization can make a huge contribution to public health, the environment, consumer welfare, and wealth creation across society, but only if the public and private sectors work together to ensure inclusiveness.

Most countries will need policies to narrow the gaps in digital skills and access, because a growing share of jobs will require more technological know-how. Education systems must do more to equip students with the knowledge and skills they will need in a digital future. And job training must keep all workers up to date on the latest digital technologies.

Governments have a critical role to play on all of these fronts. It was state support and commitments that brought us revolutionary innovations like the internet, antibiotics, renewable energy, and the mRNA technology behind the development of the most effective COVID-19 vaccines. To fulfill their role as market makers, governments need to increase investments in physical infrastructure and human capital, and provide financial and tax incentives to ensure equitable access to critical technologies. They should also be exploring ways to provide more grants, subsidies, and technical support for small and medium enterprises and start-ups, so that the benefits of digital revolution do not remain limited to a few large companies….(More)”.

Wanted: rules for pandemic data access that everyone can trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial at Nature: “The need for better pandemic preparedness before the world faces another outbreak is rising up the global agenda. Last week, the World Health Organization’s member states met virtually for the World Health Assembly and decided to reconvene for a special three-day session in November to discuss a pandemic treaty. If agreed, the treaty would be an international law that would bind its signatories to take swift, collective and evidence-based action in the event of an outbreak of an infectious disease with pandemic potential.

As Nature has previously reported, the jury is out on whether such a treaty is necessary. It is still not clear whether the idea has the support of a majority of nations, and it is being debated whether now is the time to be discussing a future pandemic, when so much remains to be done to end the current one. However, if there is to be such a treaty, it must include internationally agreed rules on accessing data in a pandemic — or any global emergency that has the potential to cause large-scale loss of life.

Discussions on pandemic data access are already taking place, and at some pace. The science academies of the G7 group of the world’s seven biggest economies — known as the S7 — have published a statement emphasizing the need for emergency data-access rules, including questions of governance (go.nature.com/2sjqj2v).

These will be discussed at this month’s G7 meeting in Cornwall, UK. Discussions have also been taking place among the G20 science academies and at the World Health Organization. These separate conversations need to converge. A pandemic treaty involving researchers and policymakers from every country could be where this happens. Once the rules are set — and a treaty will make them legally binding — countries can then enact them into national laws.

Researchers and policymakers have needed a range of types of data during the pandemic. These data, often reported daily, include updates on: COVID-19 test results and assessments of their accuracy; the number of people who have died; and how many people have been vaccinated. Some countries are tracking data on viral genome sequences, in part to unlock the identity of variants.

Mobile-phone data offer considerable power to understand in real time how a disease is spreading, as do data from Internet search results, and data from mapping applications, which allow researchers to see the movement of people. Payment data held by banks and credit-card companies can help to provide an accurate understanding of the impact of lockdowns on economies.

But access to such data are spotty, to say the least. Researchers in some countries have used these data to good effect, according to a November report on data readiness from an initiative called DELVE: Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics, convened by the Royal Society in London (go.nature.com/3fymrcd). But there is no agreed, trusted mechanism for access….(More)”

AI helps scour video archives for evidence of human-rights abuses

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Thanks especially to ubiquitous camera-phones, today’s wars have been filmed more than any in history. Consider the growing archives of Mnemonic, a Berlin charity that preserves video that purports to document war crimes and other violations of human rights. If played nonstop, Mnemonic’s collection of video from Syria’s decade-long war would run until 2061. Mnemonic also holds seemingly bottomless archives of video from conflicts in Sudan and Yemen. Even greater amounts of potentially relevant additional footage await review online.

Outfits that, like Mnemonic, scan video for evidence of rights abuses note that the task is a slog. Some trim costs by recruiting volunteer reviewers. Not everyone, however, is cut out for the tedium and, especially, periodic dreadfulness involved. That is true even for paid staff. Karim Khan, who leads a United Nations team in Baghdad investigating Islamic State (IS) atrocities, says viewing the graphic cruelty causes enough “secondary trauma” for turnover to be high. The UN project, called UNITAD, is sifting through documentation that includes more than a year’s worth of video, most of it found online or on the phones and computers of captured or killed IS members.

Now, however, reviewing such video is becoming much easier. Technologists are developing a type of artificial-intelligence (AI) software that uses “machine vision” to rapidly scour video for imagery that suggests an abuse of human rights has been recorded. It’s early days, but the software is promising. A number of organisations, including Mnemonic and UNITAD, have begun to operate such programs.

This year UNITAD began to run one dubbed Zeteo. It performs well, says David Hasman, one of its operators. Zeteo can be instructed to find—and, if the image resolution is decent, typically does find—bits of video showing things like explosions, beheadings, firing into a crowd and grave-digging. Zeteo can also spot footage of a known person’s face, as well as scenes as precise as a woman walking in uniform, a boy holding a gun in twilight, and people sitting on a rug with an IS flag in view. Searches can encompass metadata that reveals when, where and on what devices clips were filmed….(More)”.

Social-Tech Entrepreneurs: Building Blocks of a New Social Economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Mario Calderini, Veronica Chiodo, Francesco Gerli & Giulio Pasi: “Is it possible to create a sustainable, human-centric, resilient economy that achieves diverse objectives—including growth, inclusion, and equity? Could industry provide prosperity beyond jobs and economic growth, by adopting societal well-being as a compass to inform the production of goods and services?

The policy brief “Industry 5.0,” recently released by the European Commission, seems to reply positively. It makes the case for conceiving economic growth as a means to inclusive prosperity. It is also an invitation to rethink the role of industry in society, and reprioritize policy targets and tools

The following reflection, based on insights gathered from empirical research, is a first attempt to elaborate on how we might achieve this rethinking, and aims to contribute to the social economy debate in Europe and beyond.

A New Entrepreneurial Genre

A new entrepreneurial genre forged by the values of social entrepreneurship and fueled by technological opportunities is emerging, and it is well-poised to mend the economic and social wounds inflicted by both COVID-19 and the unexpected consequences of the early knowledge economy—an economy built around ideas and intellectual capital, and driven by diffused creativity, technology, and innovation.

We believe this genre, which we call social-tech entrepreneurship, is important to inaugurating a new generation of place-based, innovation-driven development policies inspired by a more inclusive idea of growth—though under the condition that industrial and innovation policies include it in their frame of reference.

This is partly because social innovation has undergone a complex transformation in recent years. It has seen a hybridization of social and commercial objectives and, as a direct consequence, new forms of management that support organizational missions that blend the two. Today, a more recent trend, reinforced by the pandemic, might push this transformation further: the idea that technologies—particularly those commoditized in the digital and software domains—offer a unique opportunity to solve societal challenges at scale.

Social-tech entrepreneurship differs from the work of high-tech companies in that, as researchers Geoffrey Desa and Suresh Kotha explain, it specifically aims to “develop and deploy technology-driven solutions to address social needs.” A social-tech entrepreneur also leverages technology not just to make parts of their operations more efficient, but to prompt a disruptive change in the way a specific social problem is addressed—and in a way that safeguards economic sustainability. In other words, they attempt to satisfy a social need through technological innovation in a financially sustainable manner. …(More)”.

The pandemic showed that big tech isn’t a public health savior

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicole Wetsman at Verge: “…It seemed like Big Tech, with its analytic firepower and new focus on health, could help with these very real problems. “We saw all over the papers: Facebook is gonna save the world, and Google’s going to save the world,” says Katerini Storeng, a medical anthropologist who studies public-private partnerships in global public health at the University of Oslo. Politicians were eager to welcome Silicon Valley to the table and to discuss the best ways to manage the pandemic. “It was remarkable, and indicative of a blurring of the boundaries between the public domain and the private domain,” Storeng says.

Over a year later, many of the promised tech innovations never materialized. There are areas where tech companies have made significant contributions — like collecting mobility data that helped officials understand the effects of social distancing policies. But Google wasn’t actually building a nationwide testing website. The program that eventually appeared, a testing program for California run by Google’s sibling company Verily, was quietly phased out after it created more problems than it solved.

Now, after a year, we’re starting to get a clear picture of what worked, what didn’t, and what the relationship between Big Tech and public health might look like in the future.

Tech companies were interested in health before the pandemic, and COVID-19 accelerated those initiatives. There may be things that tech companies are better equipped to handle than traditional public health agencies and other public institutions, and the past year showed some of those strengths. But it also showed their weaknesses and underscored the risks to putting health responsibilities in the hands of private companies — which have goals outside of the public good.

When the pandemic started, Storeng was already studying how private companies participated in public health preparedness efforts. Over the past two decades, consumers and health officials have become more and more confident that tech hacks can be shortcuts to healthy communities. These digital hacks can take many forms and include everything from a smartphone app nudging people toward exercise to a data model analyzing how an illness spreads, she says.

“What they have in common, I think, is this hope and optimism that it’ll help bypass some more systemic, intrinsic problems,” Storeng says.

But healthcare and public health present hard problems. Parachuting in with a new approach that isn’t based on a detailed understanding of the existing system doesn’t always work. “I think we tend to believe in our culture that higher tech, private sector is necessarily better,” says Melissa McPheeters, co-director of the Center for Improving the Public’s Health through Informatics at Vanderbilt University. “Sometimes that’s true. And sometimes it’s not.”

McPheeters spent three years as the director of the Office of Informatics and Analytics at the Tennessee Department of Health. While in that role, she got calls from technology companies all the time, promising quick fixes to any data issues the department was facing. But they were more interested in delivering a product than a collaboration, she says. “It never began with, ‘Help me understand your problem.’”…(More)”