pii2014: “Every year, we invite a select group of startup CEOs to present their technologies on stage at Privacy Identity Innovation as part of the Innovator Spotlight program. This year’s conference (pii2014) is taking place November 12-14 in Silicon Valley, and we’re excited to announce that the following eight companies will be participating in the pii2014 Innovator Spotlight:
* BeehiveID – Led by CEO Mary Haskett, BeehiveID is a global identity validation service that enables trust by identifying bad actors online BEFORE they have a chance to commit fraud.
* Five – Led by CEO Nikita Bier, Five is a mobile chat app crafted around the experience of a house party. With Five, you can browse thousands of rooms and have conversations about any topic.
* Glimpse – Led by CEO Elissa Shevinsky, Glimpse is a private (disappearing) photo messaging app just for groups.
* Humin – Led by CEO Ankur Jain, Humin is a phone and contacts app designed to think about people the way you naturally do by remembering the context of your relationships and letting you search them the way you think.
* Kpass – Led by CEO Dan Nelson, Kpass is an identity platform that provides brands, apps and developers with an easy-to-implement technology solution to help manage the notice and consent requirements for the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) laws.
* Meeco – Led by CEO Katryna Dow, Meeco is a Life Management Platform that offers an all-in-one solution for you to transact online, collect your own personal data, and be more anonymous with greater control over your own privacy.
* TrustLayers – Led by CEO Adam Towvim, TrustLayers is privacy intelligence for big data. TrustLayers enables confident use of personal data, keeping companies secure in the knowledge that the organization team is following the rules.
* Virtru – Led by CEO John Ackerly, Virtru is the first company to make email privacy accessible to everyone. With a single plug-in, Virtru empowers individuals and businesses to control who receives, reviews, and retains their digital information — wherever it travels, throughout its lifespan.
Learn more about the startups on the Innovator Spotlight page…”
Welcome to The Open Standard
“Welcome to The Open Standard.
From the beginning, Mozilla has dedicated itself to advocating for an open Web in wholehearted belief that open systems create more opportunity for everyone.
From its advocacy work to web literacy programs, to the creation of the Firefox browser, Mozilla has exemplified the journalism adage, “show, don’t tell.” It’s in that tradition that we’re excited to bring you The Open Standard, an original news site dedicated to covering the ideas and opinions that support the open, transparent and collaborative systems at work in our daily lives.
We advocate that open systems create healthier communities and more successful societies overall. We will cover everything from open source to open government and the need for transparency; privacy and security, the “Internet of Things” vs. “pervasive computing”, to education and if it’s keeping up with the technological changes. The bottom line? Open is better.
This is just the beginning. Over the next few months, The Open Standard will open itself to collaboration with you, our readers; everything from contributing to the site, to drawing our attention to uncovered issues, to crowdsourcing the news…”
From its advocacy work to web literacy programs, to the creation of the Firefox browser, Mozilla has exemplified the journalism adage, “show, don’t tell.” It’s in that tradition that we’re excited to bring you The Open Standard, an original news site dedicated to covering the ideas and opinions that support the open, transparent and collaborative systems at work in our daily lives.
We advocate that open systems create healthier communities and more successful societies overall. We will cover everything from open source to open government and the need for transparency; privacy and security, the “Internet of Things” vs. “pervasive computing”, to education and if it’s keeping up with the technological changes. The bottom line? Open is better.
This is just the beginning. Over the next few months, The Open Standard will open itself to collaboration with you, our readers; everything from contributing to the site, to drawing our attention to uncovered issues, to crowdsourcing the news…”
We Want Privacy, but Can’t Stop Sharing
Kate Murphy in the New York Times: “Well, that’s essentially the state of affairs on the Internet. There is no privacy. If those creepy targeted ads on Google hadn’t tipped you off, then surely Edward J. Snowden’s revelations, or, more recently, Jennifer Lawrence’s nude selfies, made your vulnerability to cybersnooping abundantly clear.
You need only read George Orwell’s “1984” or watch the film “Minority Report” to understand how surveillance is incompatible with a free society. And increasingly, people are coming to understand how their online data might be used against them. You might not get a job, a loan or a date because of an indiscreet tweet or if your address on Google Street View shows your brother-in-law’s clunker in the driveway. But less obvious is the psychic toll of the current data free-for-all.
“With all the focus on the legal aspects of privacy and the impact on global trade there’s been little discussion of why you want privacy and why it’s intrinsically important to you as an individual,” said Adam Joinson, professor of behavior change at the University of the West of England in Bristol, who coined the term “digital crowding” to describe excessive social contact and loss of personal space online.
Perhaps that’s because there is no agreement over what constitutes private information. It varies among cultures, genders and individuals. Moreover, it’s hard to argue for the value of privacy when people eagerly share so much achingly personal information on social media.
But the history of privacy (loosely defined as freedom from being observed) is one of status. Those who are institutionalized for criminal behavior or ill health, children and the impoverished have less privacy than those who are upstanding, healthy, mature and wealthy. Think of crowded tenements versus mansions behind high hedges.
“The implication is that if you don’t have it, you haven’t earned the right or aren’t capable or trustworthy,” said Christena Nippert-Eng, professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and author of “Islands of Privacy.”
So it’s not surprising that privacy research in both online and offline environments has shown that just the perception, let alone the reality, of being watched results in feelings of low self-esteem, depression and anxiety. Whether observed by a supervisor at work or Facebook friends, people are inclined to conform and demonstrate less individuality and creativity. Their performance of tasks suffers and they have elevated pulse rates and levels of stress hormones.
An analogy in the psychological literature is that privacy is like sleep….”
Announcing New U.S. Open Government Commitments on the Third Anniversary of the Open Government Partnership
US White House Fact Sheet: “Three years ago, President Obama joined with the leaders of seven other nations to launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international partnership between governments and civil society to promote transparency, fight corruption, energize civic engagement, and leverage new technologies to open up governments worldwide. The United States and other founding countries pledged to transform the way that governments serve their citizens in the 21st century. Today, as heads of state of OGP participating countries gather at the UN General Assembly, this partnership has grown from 8 to 65 nations and hundreds of civil society organizations around the world. These countries are embracing the challenge by taking steps in partnership with civil society to increase the ability of citizens to engage their governments, access government data to fuel entrepreneurship and innovation, and promote accountability….
The United States is committed to continuing to lead by example in OGP. Since assuming office, President Obama has prioritized making government more open and accountable and has taken substantial steps to increase citizen participation, collaboration with civil society, and transparency in government. The United States will remain a global leader of international efforts to promote transparency, stem corruption and hold to account those who exploit the public’s trust for private gain. Yesterday, President Obama announced several steps the United States is taking to deepen our support for civil society globally.
Today, to mark the third anniversary of OGP, President Obama is announcing four new and expanded open government initiatives that will advance our efforts through the end of 2015.
1. Promote Open Education to Increase Awareness and Engagement
Open education is the open sharing of digital learning materials, tools, and practices that ensures free access to and legal adoption of learning resources. The United States is committed to open education and will:
- Raise open education awareness and identify new partnerships. The U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy will jointly host a workshop on challenges and opportunities in open education internationally with stakeholders from academia, industry, and government.
- Pilot new models for using open educational resources to support learning. The State Department will conduct three pilots overseas by December 2015 that use open educational resources to support learning in formal and informal learning contexts. The pilots’ results, including best practices, will be made publicly available for interested educators.
- Launch an online skills academy. The Department of Labor (DOL), with cooperation from the Department of Education, will award $25 million through competitive grants to launch an online skills academy in 2015 that will offer open online courses of study, using technology to create high-quality, free, or low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, and other employer-recognized credentials.
2. Deliver Government Services More Effectively Through Information Technology
The Administration is committed to serving the American people more effectively and efficiently through smarter IT delivery. The newly launched U.S. Digital Service will work to remove barriers to digital service delivery and remake the experience that people and businesses have with their government. To improve delivery of Federal services, information, and benefits, the Administration will:
- Expand digital service delivery expertise in government. Throughout 2015, the Administration will continue recruiting top digital talent from the private and public sectors to expand services across the government. These individuals —who have expertise in technology, procurement, human resources, and financing —will serve as digital professionals in a number of capacities in the Federal government, including the new U.S. Digital Service and 18F digital delivery team within the U.S. General Services Administration, as well as within Federal agencies. These teams will take best practices from the public and private sectors and scale them across agencies with a focus on the customer experience.
- Build digital services in the open. The Administration will expand its efforts to build digital services in the open. This includes using open and transparent processes intended to better understand user needs, testing pilot digital projects, and designing and developing digital services at scale. In addition, building on the recently published Digital Services Playbook, the Administration will continue to openly publish best practices on collaborative websites that enable the public to suggest improvements.
- Adopt an open source software policy. Using and contributing back to open source software can fuel innovation, lower costs, and benefit the public. No later than December 31, 2015, the Administration will work through the Federal agencies to develop an open source software policy that, together with the Digital Services Playbook, will support improved access to custom software code developed for the Federal government.
3. Increase Transparency in Spending
The Administration has made an increasing amount of Federal spending data publicly available and searchable, allowing nationwide stakeholders to perform analysis of Federal spending. The Administration will build on these efforts by committing to:
- Improve USAspending.gov. In 2015, the Administration will launch a refreshed USAspending.gov website that will improve the site’s design and user experience, including better enabling users to explore the data using interactive maps and improving the search functionality and application programming interface.
- Improve accessibility and reusability of Federal financial data. In 2015, as part of implementation of the DATA Act,[2] the Administration will work to improve the accessibility and reusability of Federal financial data by issuing data element definition standards and standards for exchanging financial data. The Administration, through the Office of Management and Budget, will leverage industry data exchange standards to the extent practicable to maximize the sharing and utilization of Federal financial data.
- Explore options for visualization and publication of additional Federal financial data. The Administration, through the Treasury Department, will use small-scale pilots to help explore options for visualizing and publishing Federal financial data from across the government as required by the DATA Act.
- Continue to engage stakeholders. The Administration will continue to engage with a broad group of stakeholders to seek input on Federal financial transparency initiatives including DATA Act implementation, by hosting town hall meetings, conducting interactive workshops, and seeking input via open innovation collaboration tools.
4. Use Big Data to Support Greater Openness and Accountability
President Obama has recognized the growing importance of “big data” technologies for our economy and the advancement of public good in areas such as education, energy conservation, and healthcare. The Administration is taking action to ensure responsible uses of big data to promote greater openness and accountability across a range of areas and sectors. As part of the work it is doing in this area, the Administration has committed to:
- Enhance sharing of best practices on data privacy for state and local law enforcement. Federal agencies with expertise in law enforcement, privacy, and data practices will seek to enhance collaboration and information sharing about privacy best practices among state and local law enforcement agencies receiving Federal grants.
- Ensure privacy protection for big data analyses in health. Big data introduces new opportunities to advance medicine and science, improve health care, and support better public health. To ensure that individual privacy is protected while capitalizing on new technologies and data, the Administration, led by the Department of Health and Human Services, will: (1) consult with stakeholders to assess how Federal laws and regulations can best accommodate big data analyses that promise to advance medical science and reduce health care costs; and (2) develop recommendations for ways to promote and facilitate research through access to data while safeguarding patient privacy and autonomy.
- Expand technical expertise in government to stop discrimination. U.S. Government departments and agencies will work to expand their technical expertise to identify outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that may have a discriminatory impact on protected classes. …”
Ello
What is Ello?
“Ello is a simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small group of artists and designers.
We originally built Ello as a private social network. Over time, so many people wanted to join Ello that we built a public version of Ello for everyone to use.
Ad Free
Ello doesn’t sell ads. Nor do we sell data about you to third parties.
Virtually every other social network is run by advertisers. Behind the scenes they employ armies of ad salesmen and data miners to record every move you make. Data about you is then auctioned off to advertisers and data brokers. You’re the product that’s being bought and sold.
Collecting and selling your personal data, reading your posts to your friends, and mapping your social connections for profit is both creepy and unethical. Under the guise of offering a “free” service, users pay a high price in intrusive advertising and lack of privacy.
We also think ads are tacky, that they insult our intelligence and that we’re better without them.
Read more about our no-ad policy here.
Support Ello
Ello is completely free to use.
We occasionally offer special features to our users. If we create a special feature that you really like, you may choose to support Ello by paying a very small amount of money to add that feature to your Ello account.
You never have to pay anything, and you can keep using Ello forever, for free. By choosing to buy a feature now and then for a very small amount of money you support our work and help us make Ello better and better….
Read the manifesto“
Mapping the Next Frontier of Open Data: Corporate Data Sharing
Stefaan Verhulst at the GovLab (cross-posted at the UN Global Pulse Blog): “When it comes to data, we are living in the Cambrian Age. About ninety percent of the data that exists today has been generated within the last two years. We create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data on a daily basis—equivalent to a “new Google every four days.”
All of this means that we are certain to witness a rapid intensification in the process of “datafication”– already well underway. Use of data will grow increasingly critical. Data will confer strategic advantages; it will become essential to addressing many of our most important social, economic and political challenges.
This explains–at least in large part–why the Open Data movement has grown so rapidly in recent years. More and more, it has become evident that questions surrounding data access and use are emerging as one of the transformational opportunities of our time.
Today, it is estimated that over one million datasets have been made open or public. The vast majority of this open data is government data—information collected by agencies and departments in countries as varied as India, Uganda and the United States. But what of the terabyte after terabyte of data that is collected and stored by corporations? This data is also quite valuable, but it has been harder to access.
The topic of private sector data sharing was the focus of a recent conference organized by the Responsible Data Forum, Data and Society Research Institute and Global Pulse (see event summary). Participants at the conference, which was hosted by The Rockefeller Foundation in New York City, included representatives from a variety of sectors who converged to discuss ways to improve access to private data; the data held by private entities and corporations. The purpose for that access was rooted in a broad recognition that private data has the potential to foster much public good. At the same time, a variety of constraints—notably privacy and security, but also proprietary interests and data protectionism on the part of some companies—hold back this potential.
The framing for issues surrounding sharing private data has been broadly referred to under the rubric of “corporate data philanthropy.” The term refers to an emerging trend whereby companies have started sharing anonymized and aggregated data with third-party users who can then look for patterns or otherwise analyze the data in ways that lead to policy insights and other public good. The term was coined at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, in 2011, and has gained wider currency through Global Pulse, a United Nations data project that has popularized the notion of a global “data commons.”
Although still far from prevalent, some examples of corporate data sharing exist….
Help us map the field
A more comprehensive mapping of the field of corporate data sharing would draw on a wide range of case studies and examples to identify opportunities and gaps, and to inspire more corporations to allow access to their data (consider, for instance, the GovLab Open Data 500 mapping for open government data) . From a research point of view, the following questions would be important to ask:
- What types of data sharing have proven most successful, and which ones least?
- Who are the users of corporate shared data, and for what purposes?
- What conditions encourage companies to share, and what are the concerns that prevent sharing?
- What incentives can be created (economic, regulatory, etc.) to encourage corporate data philanthropy?
- What differences (if any) exist between shared government data and shared private sector data?
- What steps need to be taken to minimize potential harms (e.g., to privacy and security) when sharing data?
- What’s the value created from using shared private data?
We (the GovLab; Global Pulse; and Data & Society) welcome your input to add to this list of questions, or to help us answer them by providing case studies and examples of corporate data philanthropy. Please add your examples below, use our Google Form or email them to us at corporatedata@thegovlab.org”
The Stasi, casinos and the Big Data rush
Book Review by Hannah Kuchler of “What Stays in Vegas” (by Adam Tanner) in the Financial Times: “Books with sexy titles and decidedly unsexy topics – like, say, data – have a tendency to disappoint. But What Stays in Vegas is an engrossing, story-packed takedown of the data industry.
It begins, far from America’s gambling capital, in communist East Germany. The author, Adam Tanner, now a fellow at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, was in the late 1980s a travel writer taking notes on Dresden. What he did not realise was that the Stasi was busy taking notes on him – 50 pages in all – which he found when the files were opened after reunification. The secret police knew where he had stopped to consult a map, to whom he asked questions and when he looked in on a hotel.
Today, Tanner explains: “Thanks to meticulous data gathering from both public documents and commercial records, companies . . . know far more about typical consumers than the feared East German secret police recorded about me.”
Shining a light on how businesses outside the tech sector have become data addicts, Tanner focuses on Las Vegas casinos, which spotted the value in data decades ago. He was given access to Caesar’s Entertainment, one of the world’s largest casino operators. When chief executive Gary Loveman joined in the late 1990s, the former Harvard Business School professor bet the company’s future on harvesting personal data from its loyalty scheme. Rather than wooing the “whales” who spent the most, the company would use the data to decide which freebies were worth giving away to lure in mid-spenders who came back often – a strategy credited with helping the business grow.
The real revelations come when Tanner examines the data brokers’ “Cheez Whiz”. Like the maker of a popular processed dairy spread, he argues, data brokers blend ingredients from a range of sources, such as public records, marketing lists and commercial records, to create a detailed picture of your identity – and you will never quite be able to pin down the origin of any component…
The Big Data rush has gone into overdrive since the global economic crisis as marketers from different industries have sought new methods to grab the limited consumer spending available. Tanner argues that while users have in theory given permission for much of this information to be made public in bits and pieces, increasingly industrial-scale aggregation often feels like an invasion of privacy.
Privacy policies are so long and obtuse (one study Tanner quotes found that it would take a person more than a month, working full-time, to read all the privacy statements they come across in a year), people are unwittingly littering their data all over the internet. Anyway, marketers can intuit what we are like from the people we are connected to online. And as the data brokers’ lists are usually private, there is no way to check the compilers have got their facts right…”
Citizen Science: The Law and Ethics of Public Access to Medical Big Data
New Paper by Sharona Hoffman: “Patient-related medical information is becoming increasingly available on the Internet, spurred by government open data policies and private sector data sharing initiatives. Websites such as HealthData.gov, GenBank, and PatientsLikeMe allow members of the public to access a wealth of health information. As the medical information terrain quickly changes, the legal system must not lag behind. This Article provides a base on which to build a coherent data policy. It canvasses emergent data troves and wrestles with their legal and ethical ramifications.
Publicly accessible medical data have the potential to yield numerous benefits, including scientific discoveries, cost savings, the development of patient support tools, healthcare quality improvement, greater government transparency, public education, and positive changes in healthcare policy. At the same time, the availability of electronic personal health information that can be mined by any Internet user raises concerns related to privacy, discrimination, erroneous research findings, and litigation. This Article analyzes the benefits and risks of health data sharing and proposes balanced legislative, regulatory, and policy modifications to guide data disclosure and use.”
The Crypto-democracy and the Trustworthy
New Paper by Sebastien Gambs, Samuel Ranellucci, and Alain Tapp: “In the current architecture of the Internet, there is a strong asymmetry in terms of power between the entities that gather and process personal data (e.g., major Internet companies, telecom operators, cloud providers, …) and the individuals from which this personal data is issued. In particular, individuals have no choice but to blindly trust that these entities will respect their privacy and protect their personal data. In this position paper, we address this issue by proposing an utopian crypto-democracy model based on existing scientific achievements from the field of cryptography. More precisely, our main objective is to show that cryptographic primitives, including in particular secure multiparty computation, offer a practical solution to protect privacy while minimizing the trust assumptions. In the crypto-democracy envisioned, individuals do not have to trust a single physical entity with their personal data but rather their data is distributed among several institutions. Together these institutions form a virtual entity called the Trustworthy that is responsible for the storage of this data but which can also compute on it (provided first that all the institutions agree on this). Finally, we also propose a realistic proof-of-concept of the Trustworthy, in which the roles of institutions are played by universities. This proof-of-concept would have an important impact in demonstrating the possibilities offered by the crypto-democracy paradigm.”
From “Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond”
IDCubed: “From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Autonomy and Identity in a Digital Society explores a new generation of digital technologies that are re-imagining the very foundations of identity, governance, trust and social organization.
The fifteen essays of this book stake out the foundations of a new future – a future of open Web standards and data commons, a society of decentralized autonomous organizations, a world of trustworthy digital currencies and self-organized and expressive communities like Burning Man.
Among the contributors are Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the M.I.T. Human Dynamics Laboratory, former FCC Chairman Reed E. Hundt, long-time IBM strategist Irving Wladawksy-Berger, monetary system expert Bernard Lietaer, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, journalist Jonathan Ledgard and H-Farm cofounder Maurizio Rossi.
From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond was edited by Dr. John H. Clippinger, cofounder and executive director of ID3, and David Bollier, an Editor at ID3 who is also an author, blogger and scholar who studies the commons. The book, published by ID3 in association with Off the Common Books, reflects ID3’s vision of the huge, untapped potential for self-organized, distributed governance on open platforms.
The book is available in print and ebook formats (Kindle and epub) from Amazon.com and Off the Common Books. The book, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA), may also be downloaded for free as a pdf file from ID3.
One chapter that inspires the book’s title traces the 28-year history of Burning Man, the week-long encampment in the Nevada desert that have hosted remarkable experimentation in new forms of self-governance by large communities. Other chapters explore such cutting-edge concepts as
- evolvable digital contracts that could supplant conventional legal agreements;
- smartphone currencies that could help Africans meet their economic needs more effective;
- the growth of the commodity-backed Ven currency; and
- new types of “solar currencies” that borrow techniques from Bitcoin to enable more efficient, cost-effective solar generation and sharing by homeowners.
From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond also introduces the path-breaking software platform that ID3 has developed called “Open Mustard Seed,” or OMS. The just-released open source program enables the rise of new types of trusted, self-healing digital institutions on open networks, which in turn will make possible new sorts of privacy-friendly social ecosystems.
“OMS is an integrated, open source package of programs that lets people collect and share personal information in secure, and transparent and accountable ways, enabling authentic, trusted social and economic relationships to flourish,” said Dr. John H. Clippinger, executive director of ID3, an acronym for the Institute for Institutional Innovation and Data-Driven Design.
“The software builds individual privacy, security and trusted exchange into the very design of the system. In effect, OMS represents a new authentication, privacy and sharing layer for the Internet,” said Clippinger “– a new way to share personal information selectively and securely, without access by unauthorized third parties.”
A two-minute video introducing the capabilities of OMS can be viewed here.”