This is how we lost control of our faces

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Karen Hao at MIT Technology Review: “In 1964, mathematician and computer scientist Woodrow Bledsoe first attempted the task of matching suspects’ faces to mugshots. He measured out the distances between different facial features in printed photographs and fed them into a computer program. His rudimentary successes would set off decades of research into teaching machines to recognize human faces.

Now a new study shows just how much this enterprise has eroded our privacy. It hasn’t just fueled an increasingly powerful tool of surveillance. The latest generation of deep-learning-based facial recognition has completely disrupted our norms of consent.

Deborah Raji, a fellow at nonprofit Mozilla, and Genevieve Fried, who advises members of the US Congress on algorithmic accountability, examined over 130 facial-recognition data sets compiled over 43 years. They found that researchers, driven by the exploding data requirements of deep learning, gradually abandoned asking for people’s consent. This has led more and more of people’s personal photos to be incorporated into systems of surveillance without their knowledge.

It has also led to far messier data sets: they may unintentionally include photos of minors, use racist and sexist labels, or have inconsistent quality and lighting. The trend could help explain the growing number of cases in which facial-recognition systems have failed with troubling consequences, such as the false arrests of two Black men in the Detroit area last year.

People were extremely cautious about collecting, documenting, and verifying face data in the early days, says Raji. “Now we don’t care anymore. All of that has been abandoned,” she says. “You just can’t keep track of a million faces. After a certain point, you can’t even pretend that you have control.”…(More)”.

Mechanisms of power inscription into IT governance: Lessons from two national digital identity systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rony Medaglia, Ben Eaton, Jonas Hedman, and Edgar A. Whitley: “Establishing IT governance arrangements is a deeply political process, where relationships of power play a crucial role. While the importance of power relationships is widely acknowledged in IS literature, specific mechanisms whereby the consequences of power relationships affect IT governance arrangements are still under‐researched. This study investigates the way power relationships are inscribed in the governance of digital identity systems in Denmark and the United Kingdom, where public and private actors are involved. Drawing on the theoretical lens of circuits of power, we contribute to research on the role of power in IT governance by identifying two distinct mechanisms of power inscription into IT governance: power cultivation and power limitation….(More)“.

Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Van Dijcke and Austin L. Wright: “We develop a novel approach for estimating spatially dispersed community-level participation in mass protest. This methodology is used to investigate factors associated with participation in the ‘March to Save America’ event in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. This study combines granular location data from more than 40 million mobile devices with novel measures of community-level voting patterns, the location of organized hate groups, and the entire georeferenced digital archive of the social media platform Parler. We find evidence that partisanship, socio-political isolation, proximity to chapters of the Proud Boys organization, and the local activity on Parler are robustly associated with protest participation. Our research fills a prominent gap in the study of collective action: identifying and studying communities involved in mass-scale events that escalate into violent insurrection….(More)”.

Monitoring the R-Citizen in the Time of Coronavirus

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John Flood and Monique Lewis: “The COVID pandemic has overwhelmed many countries in their attempts at tracking and tracing people infected with the disease. Our paper examines how tracking and tracing is done looking at manual and technological means. It raises the issues around efficiency and privacy, etc. The paper investigates more closely the approaches taken by two countries, namely Taiwan and the UK. It shows how tracking and tracing can be handled sensitively and openly compared to the bungled attempts of the UK that have led to the greatest number of dead in Europe. The key messages are that all communications around tracking and tracing need to open, clear, without confusion and delivered by those closest to the communities receiving the messages.This occurred in Taiwan but in the UK the central government chose to close out local government and other local resources. The highly centralised dirigiste approach of the government alienated much of the population who came to distrust government. As local government was later brought into the COVID fold the messaging improved. Taiwan always remained open in its communications, even allowing citizens to participate in improving the technology around COVID. Taiwan learnt from its earlier experiences with SARS, whereas the UK ignored its pandemic planning exercises from earlier years and even experimented with crude ideas of herd immunity by letting the disease rip through the population–an idea soon abandoned.

We also derive a new type of citizen from the pandemic, namely the R citizen. This unfortunate archetype is both a blessing and a curse. If the citizen scores over 1 the disease accelerates and the R citizen is chastised, whereas if the citizen declines to zero it disappears but receives no plaudits for their behaviour. The R citizen can neither exist or die, rather like Schrödinger’s cat. R citizens are of course datafied individuals who are assemblages of data and are treated as distinct from humans. We argue they cannot be so distinguished without rendering them inhuman. This is as much a moral category as it is a scientific one….(More)”.

Governance of Data Sharing: a Law & Economics Proposal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jens Prufer and Inge Graef: “To prevent market tipping, which inhibits innovation, there is an urgent need to mandate sharing of user information in data-driven markets. Existing legal mechanisms to impose data sharing under EU competition law and data portability under the GDPR are not sufficient to tackle this problem. Mandated data sharing requires the design of a governance structure that combines elements of economically efficient centralization with legally necessary decentralization. We identify three feasible options. One is to centralize investigations and enforcement in a European Data Sharing Agency (EDSA), while decision-making power lies with National Competition Authorities in a Board of Supervisors. The second option is to set up a Data Sharing Cooperation Network coordinated through a European Data Sharing Board, with the National Competition Authority best placed to run the investigation adjudicating and enforcing the mandatory data-sharing decision across the EU. A third option is to mix both governance structures and to task national authorities to investigate and adjudicate and the EU-level EDSA with enforcement of data sharing….(More)”

A Worldwide Assessment of COVID-19 Pandemic-Policy Fatigue

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anna Petherick et al: “As the COVID-19 pandemic lingers, signs of “pandemic-policy fatigue” have raised worldwide concerns. But the phenomenon itself is yet to be thoroughly defined, documented, and delved into. Based on self-reported behaviours from samples of 238,797 respondents, representative of the populations of 14 countries, as well as global mobility and policy data, we systematically examine the prevalence and shape of people’s alleged gradual reduction in adherence to governments’ protective-behaviour policies against COVID-19. Our results show that from March through December 2020, pandemic-policy fatigue was empirically meaningful and geographically widespread. It emerged for high-cost and sensitising behaviours (physical distancing) but not for low-cost and habituating ones (mask wearing), and was less intense among retired people, people with chronic diseases, and in countries with high interpersonal trust. Particularly due to fatigue reversal patterns in high- and upper-middle-income countries, we observe an arch rather than a monotonic decline in global pandemic-policy fatigue….(More)”.

Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mirco Nanni et al: “The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively (e.g., with a backend system, but possibly also with other citizens), voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates—if and when they want and for specific aims—with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society….(More)”.

Spatial information and the legibility of urban form: Big data in urban morphology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Geoff Boeing: “Urban planning and morphology have relied on analytical cartography and visual communication tools for centuries to illustrate spatial patterns, conceptualize proposed designs, compare alternatives, and engage the public. Classic urban form visualizations – from Giambattista Nolli’s ichnographic maps of Rome to Allan Jacobs’s figure-ground diagrams of city streets – have compressed physical urban complexity into easily comprehensible information artifacts. Today we can enhance these traditional workflows through the Smart Cities paradigm of understanding cities via user-generated content and harvested data in an information management context. New spatial technology platforms and big data offer new lenses to understand, evaluate, monitor, and manage urban form and evolution. This paper builds on the theoretical framework of visual cultures in urban planning and morphology to introduce and situate computational data science processes for exploring urban fabric patterns and spatial order. It demonstrates these workflows with OSMnx and data from OpenStreetMap, a collaborative spatial information system and mapping platform, to examine street network patterns, orientations, and configurations in different study sites around the world, considering what these reveal about the urban fabric. The age of ubiquitous urban data and computational toolkits opens up a new era of worldwide urban form analysis from integrated quantitative and qualitative perspectives….(More)”.

From satisficing to artificing: The evolution of administrative decision-making in the age of the algorithm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Thea Snow at Data & Policy: “Algorithmic decision tools (ADTs) are being introduced into public sector organizations to support more accurate and consistent decision-making. Whether they succeed turns, in large part, on how administrators use these tools. This is one of the first empirical studies to explore how ADTs are being used by Street Level Bureaucrats (SLBs). The author develops an original conceptual framework and uses in-depth interviews to explore whether SLBs are ignoring ADTs (algorithm aversion); deferring to ADTs (automation bias); or using ADTs together with their own judgment (an approach the author calls “artificing”). Interviews reveal that artificing is the most common use-type, followed by aversion, while deference is rare. Five conditions appear to influence how practitioners use ADTs: (a) understanding of the tool (b) perception of human judgment (c) seeing value in the tool (d) being offered opportunities to modify the tool (e) alignment of tool with expectations….(More)”.

Digital Age Samaritans

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Zachary D. Kaufman: “Modern technology enables people to view, document, and share evidence of crimes contemporaneously or soon after commission. Electronic transmission of this material — including through social media and mobile devices — raises legal, moral, and practical questions about spectators’ responsibilities. In the digital age, will these actors be bystanders or upstanders? What role can and should the law play in shaping their behavior?

This Article argues that certain witnesses who are not physically present at the scene of a crime should be held criminally accountable for failing to report specified violent offenses. Focusing on rape, police brutality, and other misconduct, this Article demonstrates that recent technological innovations create new opportunities and challenges to pursue justice and accountability. Such culpability centers on “Bad Samaritan laws”: statutes that impose a legal duty to assist others in peril through intervening directly (also known as “the duty to rescue”) or notifying authorities (also known as “the duty to report”). However, many of these antiquated laws arguably apply only to witnesses who are physically present, which limits their potential effectiveness today.

Not all virtual witnesses should be subject to liability. To consider which categories of actors may warrant criminal punishment, this Article introduces a novel typology of bystanders and upstanders in the digital age. This typology draws on an original case study of the first known sexual crime livestreamed in the United States by a third party, which more than 700 people viewed. Harnessing insights from that case study and other episodes, the Article recommends that legislators should modernize, refine, and proliferate Bad Samaritan laws and that law enforcement should enforce these statutes or leverage them to obtain witness testimony. To that end, the Article proposes a model duty-to-report statute that includes features such as applicability to virtual presence and reasoned exemptions for noncompliance….(More)”.