Paper by Andrew Iliadis et al: “Several industry-specific metadata initiatives have historically facilitated structured data modeling for the web in domains such as commerce, publishing, social media, etc. The metadata vocabularies produced by these initiatives allow developers to ‘wrap’ information on the web to provide machine-readable signals for search engines, advertisers, and user-facing content on apps and websites, thus assisting with surfacing facts about people, places, and products. A universal iteration of such a project called Schema.org started in 2011, resulting from a partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex to collaborate on a single structured data model across domains. Yet, few studies have explored the metadata vocabulary terms in this significant web resource. What terms are included, upon what subject domains do they focus, and how does Schema.org represent knowledge in its conceptual model? This paper presents findings from our extraction and analysis of the documented release history and complete hierarchy on Schema.org’s developer pages. We provide a semantic network visualization of Schema.org, including an analysis of its modularity and domains, and discuss its global significance concerning fact-checking and COVID-19. We end by theorizing Schema.org as a gatekeeper of data on the web that authors vocabulary that everyday web users encounter in their searches..(More)”.
Orchestrating distributed data governance in open social innovation
Paper by Thomas Gegenhuber et al: “Open Social Innovation (OSI) involves the collaboration of multiple stakeholders to generate ideas, and develop and scale solutions to make progress on societal challenges. In an OSI project, stakeholders share data and information, utilize it to better understand a problem, and combine data with digital technologies to create digitally-enabled solutions. Consequently, data governance is essential for orchestrating an OSI project to facilitate the coordination of innovation. Because OSI brings multiple stakeholders together, and each stakeholder participates voluntarily, data governance in OSI has a distributed nature. In this essay we put forward a framework consisting of three dimensions allowing an inquiry into the effectiveness of such distributed data governance: (1) openness (i.e., freely sharing data and information), (2) accountability (i.e., willingness to be held responsible and provide justifications for one’s conduct) and (3) power (i.e., resourceful actors’ ability to impact other stakeholder’s actions). We apply this framework to reflect on the OSI project #WirVsVirus (“We versus virus” in English), to illustrate the challenges in organizing effective distributed data governance, and derive implications for research and practice….(More)”.
Americans Don’t Understand What Companies Can Do With Their Personal Data — and That’s a Problem
Press Release by the Annenberg School for Communications: “Have you ever had the experience of browsing for an item online, only to then see ads for it everywhere? Or watching a TV program, and suddenly your phone shows you an ad related to the topic? Marketers clearly know a lot about us, but the extent of what they know, how they know it, and what they’re legally allowed to know can feel awfully murky.
In a new report, “Americans Can’t Consent to Companies’ Use of Their Data,” researchers asked a nationally representative group of more than 2,000 Americans to answer a set of questions about digital marketing policies and how companies can and should use their personal data. Their aim was to determine if current “informed consent” practices are working online.
They found that the great majority of Americans don’t understand the fundamentals of internet marketing practices and policies, and that many feel incapable of consenting to how companies use their data. As a result, the researchers say, Americans can’t truly give informed consent to digital data collection.
The survey revealed that 56% of American adults don’t understand the term “privacy policy,” often believing it means that a company won’t share their data with third parties without permission. In actual fact, many of these policies state that a company can share or sell any data it gathers about site visitors with other websites or companies.
Perhaps because so many Americans feel that internet privacy feels impossible to comprehend — with “opting-out” or “opting-in,” biometrics, and VPNs — they don’t trust what is being done with their digital data. Eighty percent of Americans believe that what companies know about them can cause them harm.
“People don’t feel that they have the ability to protect their data online — even if they want to,” says lead researcher Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems & Industries at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania….(More)”
Digital Hermits
Paper by Jeanine Miklós-Thal, Avi Goldfarb, Avery M. Haviv & Catherine Tucker: “When a user shares multi-dimensional data about themselves with a firm, the firm learns about the correlations of different dimensions of user data. We incorporate this type of learning into a model of a data market in which a firm acquires data from users with privacy concerns. User data is multi-dimensional, and each user can share no data, only non-sensitive data, or their full data with the firm. As the firm collects more data and becomes better at drawing inferences about a user’s privacy-sensitive data from their non-sensitive data, the share of new users who share no data (“digital hermits”) grows. At the same time, the share of new users who share their full data also grows. The model therefore predicts a polarization of users’ data sharing choices away from non-sensitive data sharing to no sharing and full sharing….(More)”
Participatory budgeting and well-being: governance and sustainability in comparative perspective
Paper by Michael Touchton, Stephanie McNulty, and Brian Wampler: “Participatory budgeting’s (PB’s) proponents hope that bringing development projects to historically underserved communities will improve well-being by extending infrastructure and services. This article details the logic connecting PB to well-being, describes the evolution of PB programs as they spread around the world and consolidates global evidence from research that tests hypotheses on PB’s impact. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues…
The authors find evidence for PB’s impact on well-being in several important contexts, mostly not only in Brazil, but also in Peru and South Korea. They also find that very few rigorous, large-N, comparative studies have evaluated the relationship between PB and well-being and that the prospects for social accountability and PB’s sustainability for well-being are not equally strong in all contexts. They argue that PB has great potential to improve well-being, but program designs, operational rules and supporting local conditions must be favorable to realize that potential…(More)”.
Understanding how to build a social licence for using novel linked datasets for planning and research in Kent, Surrey and Sussex: results of deliberative focus groups.
Paper by Elizabeth Ford et al: “Digital programmes in the newly created NHS integrated care boards (ICBs) in the United Kingdom mean that curation and linkage of anonymised patient data is underway in many areas for the first time. In Kent, Surrey and Sussex (KSS), in Southeast England, public health teams want to use these datasets to answer strategic population health questions, but public expectations around use of patient data are unknown….We aimed to engage with citizens of KSS to gather their views and expectations of data linkage and re-use, through deliberative discussions…
We held five 3-hour deliberative focus groups with 79 citizens of KSS, presenting information about potential uses of data, safeguards, and mechanisms for public involvement in governance and decision making about datasets. After each presentation, participants discussed their views in facilitated small groups which were recorded, transcribed and analysed thematically…
The focus groups generated 15 themes representing participants’ views on the benefits, risks and values for safeguarding linked data. Participants largely supported use of patient data to improve health service efficiency and resource management, preventative services and out of hospital care, joined-up services and information flows. Most participants expressed concerns about data accuracy, breaches and hacking, and worried about commercial use of data. They suggested that transparency of data usage through audit trails and clear information about accountability, ensuring data re-use does not perpetuate stigma and discrimination, ongoing, inclusive and valued involvement of the public in dataset decision-making, and a commitment to building trust, would meet their expectations for responsible data use…
Participants were largely favourable about the proposed uses of patient linked datasets but expected a commitment to transparency and public involvement. Findings were mapped to previous tenets of social license and can be used to inform ICB digital programme teams on how to proceed with use of linked datasets in a trustworthy and socially acceptable way…(More)”.
Citizen Participation and Knowledge Support in Urban Public Energy Transition—A Quadruple Helix Perspective
Paper by Peter Nijkamp et al: “Climate change, energy transition needs and the current energy crisis have prompted cities to implement far-reaching changes in public energy supply. The present paper seeks to map out the conditions for sustainable energy provision and use, with a particular view to the role of citizens in a quadruple helix context. Citizen participation is often seen as a sine qua non for a successful local or district energy policy in an urban area but needs due scientific and digital support based on evidence-based knowledge (using proper user-oriented techniques such as Q-analysis). The paper sets out to explore the citizen engagement and knowledge base for drastic energy transitions in the city based on the newly developed “diabolo” model, in which in particular digital tools (e.g., dashboards, digital twins) are proposed as useful tools for the interface between citizens and municipal policy. The approach adopted in this paper is empirically illustrated for local energy policy in the city of Rotterdam…(More)”.
Secondary data for global health digitalisation
Paper by Anatol-Fiete Näher, et al: “Substantial opportunities for global health intelligence and research arise from the combined and optimised use of secondary data within data ecosystems. Secondary data are information being used for purposes other than those intended when they were collected. These data can be gathered from sources on the verge of widespread use such as the internet, wearables, mobile phone apps, electronic health records, or genome sequencing. To utilise their full potential, we offer guidance by outlining available sources and approaches for the processing of secondary data. Furthermore, in addition to indicators for the regulatory and ethical evaluation of strategies for the best use of secondary data, we also propose criteria for assessing reusability. This overview supports more precise and effective policy decision making leading to earlier detection and better prevention of emerging health threats than is currently the case…(More)”.
Measuring Partial Democracies: Rules and their Implementation
Paper by Debarati Basu, Shabana Mitra & Archana Purohit: “This paper proposes a new index that focuses on capturing the extent of democracy in a country using not only the existence of rules but also the extent of their implementation. The measure, based on the axiomatically robust framework of (Alkire and Foster, J Public Econ 95:476–487, 2011), is able to moderate the existence of democratic rules by their actual implementation. By doing this we have a meaningful way of capturing the notion of a partial democracy within a continuum between non-democratic and democratic, separating out situations when the rules exist but are not implemented well. We construct our index using V-Dem data from 1900 to 2010 for over 100 countries to measure the process of democratization across the world. Our results show that we can track the progress in democratization, even when the regime remains either a democracy or an autarchy. This is the notion of partial democracy that our implementation-based index measures through a wide-based index that is consistent, replicable, extendable, easy to interpret, and more nuanced in its ability to capture the essence of democracy…(More)”.
Federated machine learning in data-protection-compliant research
Paper by Alissa Brauneck et al : “In recent years, interest in machine learning (ML) as well as in multi-institutional collaborations has grown, especially in the medical field. However, strict application of data-protection laws reduces the size of training datasets, hurts the performance of ML systems and, in the worst case, can prevent the implementation of research insights in clinical practice. Federated learning can help overcome this bottleneck through decentralised training of ML models within the local data environment, while maintaining the predictive performance of ‘classical’ ML. Thus, federated learning provides immense benefits for cross-institutional collaboration by avoiding the sharing of sensitive personal data(Fig. 1; refs.). Because existing regulations (especially the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 of the European Union, or GDPR) set stringent requirements for medical data and rather vague rules for ML systems, researchers are faced with uncertainty. In this comment, we provide recommendations for researchers who intend to use federated learning, a privacy-preserving ML technique, in their research. We also point to areas where regulations are lacking, discussing some fundamental conceptual problems with ML regulation through the GDPR, related especially to notions of transparency, fairness and error-free data. We then provide an outlook on how implications from data-protection laws can be directly incorporated into federated learning tools…(More)”.