Paper by Martha Finnemore: “This essay steps back from the more detailed regulatory discussions in other contributions to this roundtable on “Competing Visions for Cyberspace” and highlights three broad issues that raise ethical concerns about our activity online. First, the commodification of people—their identities, their data, their privacy—that lies at the heart of business models of many of the largest information and communication technologies companies risks instrumentalizing human beings. Second, concentrations of wealth and market power online may be contributing to economic inequalities and other forms of domination. Third, long-standing tensions between the security of states and the human security of people in those states have not been at all resolved online and deserve attention….(More)”.
Towards matching user mobility traces in large-scale datasets
Paper by Daniel Kondor, Behrooz Hashemian, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye and Carlo Ratti: “The problem of unicity and reidentifiability of records in large-scale databases has been studied in different contexts and approaches, with focus on preserving privacy or matching records from different data sources. With an increasing number of service providers nowadays routinely collecting location traces of their users on unprecedented scales, there is a pronounced interest in the possibility of matching records and datasets based on spatial trajectories. Extending previous work on reidentifiability of spatial data and trajectory matching, we present the first large-scale analysis of user matchability in real mobility datasets on realistic scales, i.e. among two datasets that consist of several million people’s mobility traces, coming from a mobile network operator and transportation smart card usage. We extract the relevant statistical properties which influence the matching process and analyze their impact on the matchability of users. We show that for individuals with typical activity in the transportation system (those making 3-4 trips per day on average), a matching algorithm based on the co-occurrence of their activities is expected to achieve a 16.8% success only after a one-week long observation of their mobility traces, and over 55% after four weeks. We show that the main determinant of matchability is the expected number of co-occurring records in the two datasets. Finally, we discuss different scenarios in terms of data collection frequency and give estimates of matchability over time. We show that with higher frequency data collection becoming more common, we can expect much higher success rates in even shorter intervals….(More)”.
Cybersecurity of the Person
Paper by Jeff Kosseff: “U.S. cybersecurity law is largely an outgrowth of the early-aughts concerns over identity theft and financial fraud. Cybersecurity laws focus on protecting identifiers such as driver’s licenses and social security numbers, and financial data such as credit card numbers. Federal and state laws require companies to protect this data and notify individuals when it is breached, and impose civil and criminal liability on hackers who steal or damage this data. In this paper, I argue that our current cybersecurity laws are too narrowly focused on financial harms. While such concerns remain valid, they are only one part of the cybersecurity challenge that our nation faces.
Too often overlooked by the cybersecurity profession are the harms to individuals, such as revenge pornography and online harassment. Our legal system typically addresses these harms through retrospective criminal prosecution and civil litigation, both of which face significant limits. Accounting for such harms in our conception of cybersecurity will help to better align our laws with these threats and reduce the likelihood of the harms occurring….(More)”,
Using insights from behavioral economics to nudge individuals towards healthier choices when eating out
Paper by Stéphane Bergeron, Maurice Doyon, Laure Saulais and JoAnne Labrecque: “Using a controlled experiment in a restaurant with naturally occurring clients, this study investigates how nudging can be used to design menus that guide consumers to make healthier choices. It examines the use of default options, focusing specifically on two types of defaults that can be found when ordering food in a restaurant: automatic and standard defaults. Both types of defaults significantly affected choices, but did not adversely impact the satisfaction of individual choices. The results suggest that menu design could effectively use non-informational strategies such as nudging to promote healthier individual choices without restricting the offer or reducing satisfaction….(More)”.
When a Nudge Backfires: Using Observation with Social and Economic Incentives to Promote Pro-Social Behavior
Our study questions the universality of these claims. We employ a novel four-party setup to disentangle the roles three observational mechanisms play in mediating behavior. We systematically vary the observability of one’s actions by others as well as the (non-)monetary relationship between observer and observee. Observability involving economic incentives
crowds-out anti-social behavior in favor of more pro-social behavior.
Surprisingly, social observation without economic incentives fails to achieve any aggregate pro-social effect, and if anything it backfires. Additional experiments confirm that observability without additional monetary incentives can indeed backfire. However, they also show that the effect of observability on pro-social behavior is increased when social norms are made salient….(More)”.
Motivating Participation in Crowdsourced Policymaking: The Interplay of Epistemic and Interactive Aspects
Paper by Tanja Aitamurto and Jorge Saldivar in Proceedings of ACM Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW ’18): “…we examine the changes in motivation factors in crowdsourced policymaking. By drawing on longitudinal data from a crowdsourced law reform, we show that people participated because they wanted to improve the law, learn, and solve problems. When crowdsourcing reached a saturation point, the motivation factors weakened and the crowd disengaged. Learning was the only factor that did not weaken. The participants learned while interacting with others, and the more actively the participants commented, the more likely they stayed engaged. Crowdsourced policymaking should thus be designed to support both epistemic and interactive aspects. While the crowd’s motives were rooted in self-interest, their knowledge perspective showed common-good orientation, implying that rather than being dichotomous, motivation factors move on a continuum. The design of crowdsourced policymaking should support the dynamic nature of the process and the motivation factors driving it….(More)”.
Fostering innovation in public procurement through public private partnerships
Paper by Nunzia Carbonara in the Journal of Public Procurement: “The prevailing view in the studies on
With this aim, drawing upon the main streams of studies on innovation, the authors develop a conceptual framework that identifies the PPP features that can influence the innovativeness. Second, they define how these PPP features have to be structured to foster innovation.
The authors find that a wider involvement of the private sector will increase the level of innovation. The industry structure exerts opposite forces on innovation: the dominance of large-sized firms is positively related to innovative output, whereas the market concentration negatively affects innovation. Performance-based contracts should be used in the context of PPP instead of traditional contracts. Finally, the authors find that, to fully exploit the networking effects on innovation, cooperation and
Open Government Data for Inclusive Development
Chapter by F. van Schalkwyk and M, Cañares in “Making Open Development Inclusive”, MIT Press by Matthew L. Smith and Ruhiya Kris Seward (Eds): “This chapter examines the relationship between open government data and social inclusion. Twenty-eight open data initiatives from the Global South are analyzed to find out how and in what contexts the publication of open government data tend to result in the inclusion of habitually marginalized communities in governance processes such that they may lead better lives.
The relationship between open government data and social inclusion is examined by presenting an analysis of the outcomes of open data projects. This analysis is based on a constellation of factors that were identified as having a bearing on open data initiatives with respect to inclusion. The findings indicate that open data can contribute to an increase in access and participation— both components of inclusion. In these cases, this particular finding indicates that a more open, participatory approach to governance practice is taking root. However, the findings also show that access and participation approaches to open government data have, in the cases studied here, not successfully disrupted the concentration of power in political and other networks, and this has placed limits on open data’s contribution to a more inclusive society.
The chapter starts by presenting a theoretical framework for the analysis of the relationship between open data and inclusion. The framework sets out the complex relationship between social actors, information and power in the network society. This is critical, we suggest, in developing a realistic analysis of the contexts in which open data activates its potential for
transformation. The chapter then articulates the research question and presents the methodology used to operationalize those questions. The findings and discussion section that follows examines the factors affecting the relationship between open data and inclusion, and how these factors
are observed to play out across several open data initiatives in different contexts. The chapter ends with concluding remarks and an attempt to synthesize the insights that emerged in the preceding sections….(More)”.
Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy
Paper by Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier: “Existing approaches to cybersecurity emphasize either international state-to-state logics (such as deterrence theory) or the integrity of individual information systems. Neither provides a good understanding of new “soft cyber” attacks that involve the manipulation of expectations and common understandings. We argue that scaling up computer security arguments to the level of the state, so that the entire polity is treated as an information system with associated attack surfaces and threat models, provides the best immediate way to understand these attacks and how to mitigate them.
We demonstrate systematic differences between how autocracies and democracies work as information
Data Collaboration, Pooling and Hoarding under Competition Law
Paper by Bjorn Lundqvist: “In the Internet of Things era devices will monitor and collect data, whilst device producing firms will store, distribute,
If firms would like to combine data, they need to give each other access either by sharing, trading, or pooling the data. On the one hand, industry-wide pooling of data could increase