Politwoops: “An archive of public tweets, deleted by politicians. Explore the tweets they would prefer you couldn’t see.”
Protecting One’s Own Privacy in a Big Data Economy
Anita L. Allen in the Harvard Law Review Forum: “Big Data is the vast quantities of information amenable to large-scale collection, storage, and analysis. Using such data, companies and researchers can deploy complex algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies to reveal otherwise unascertained patterns, links, behaviors, trends, identities, and practical knowledge. The information that comprises Big Data arises from government and business practices, consumer transactions, and the digital applications sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.” Individuals invisibly contribute to Big Data whenever they live digital lifestyles or otherwise participate in the digital economy, such as when they shop with a credit card, get treated at a hospital, apply for a job online, research a topic on Google, or post on Facebook.
Privacy advocates and civil libertarians say Big Data amounts to digital surveillance that potentially results in unwanted personal disclosures, identity theft, and discrimination in contexts such as employment, housing, and financial services. These advocates and activists say typical consumers and internet users do not understand the extent to which their activities generate data that is being collected, analyzed, and put to use for varied governmental and business purposes.
I have argued elsewhere that individuals have a moral obligation to respect not only other people’s privacy but also their own. Here, I wish to comment first on whether the notion that individuals have a moral obligation to protect their own information privacy is rendered utterly implausible by current and likely future Big Data practices; and on whether a conception of an ethical duty to self-help in the Big Data context may be more pragmatically framed as a duty to be part of collective actions encouraging business and government to adopt more robust privacy protections and data security measures….(More)”
The Emergence of a Post-Fact World
Francis Fukuyama in Project Syndicate: “One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a “post-fact” world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.
The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded.
The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilization that fueled various democratic “color revolutions” around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.
While there was some truth to this positive narrative, another, darker one was also taking shape. Those old authoritarian forces were responding in dialectical fashion, learning to control the Internet, as in China, with its tens of thousands of censors, or, as in Russia, by recruiting legions of trolls and unleashing bots to flood social media with bad information. These trends all came together in a hugely visible way during 2016, in ways that bridged foreign and domestic politics….
The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The Internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information….
The inability to agree on the most basic facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and around the world. And this is where the democracies are headed for trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay, whereby powerful interest groups have been able to protect themselves through a system of unlimited campaign finance. The primary locus of this decay is Congress, and the bad behavior is for the most part as legal as it is widespread. So ordinary people are right to be upset.
And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that everything has been rigged or politicized, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favored candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to perform better in a debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life….(More)”
The Power of Networks: Six Principles That Connect Our Lives
Book by Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang: “What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order search results? Why do Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube use fundamentally different rating and recommendation methods—and why does it matter? Is it really true that everyone on Facebook is connected in six steps or less? And how do cat videos—or anything else—go viral? The Power of Networks answers questions like these for the first time in a way that all of us can understand and use, whether at home, the office, or school. Using simple language, analogies, stories, hundreds of illustrations, and no more math than simple addition and multiplication, Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang provide a smart but accessible introduction to the handful of big ideas that drive the technical and social networks we use every day—from cellular phone networks and cloud computing to the Internet and social media platforms.
The Power of Networks unifies these ideas through six fundamental principles of networking, which explain the difficulties in sharing network resources efficiently, how crowds can be wise or not so wise depending on the nature of their connections, how there are many building-blocks of layers in a network, and more. Understanding these simple ideas unlocks the workings of everything from the connections we make on Facebook to the technology that runs such platforms. Along the way, the authors also talk with and share the special insights of renowned experts such as Google’s Eric Schmidt, former Verizon Wireless CEO Dennis Strigl, and “fathers of the Internet” Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn….(More)”
#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
Book by Cass Sunstein: “As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It’s no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other. It’s also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect.
Welcome to the age of #Republic.
In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today’s Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism—and what can be done about it.
Thoroughly rethinking the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet, Sunstein describes how the online world creates “cybercascades,” exploits “confirmation bias,” and assists “polarization entrepreneurs.” And he explains why online fragmentation endangers the shared conversations, experiences, and understandings that are the lifeblood of democracy.
In response, Sunstein proposes practical and legal changes to make the Internet friendlier to democratic deliberation. These changes would get us out of our information cocoons by increasing the frequency of unchosen, unplanned encounters and exposing us to people, places, things, and ideas that we would never have picked for our Twitter feed.
#Republic need not be an ironic term. As Sunstein shows, it can be a rallying cry for the kind of democracy that citizens of diverse societies most need….(More)”
Beyond IRBs: Designing Ethical Review Processes for Big Data Research
Conference Proceedings by Future of Privacy Forum: “The ethical framework applying to human subject research in the biomedical and behavioral research fields dates back to the Belmont Report.Drafted in 1976 and adopted by the United States government in 1991 as the Common Rule, the Belmont principles were geared towards a paradigmatic controlled scientific experiment with a limited population of human subjects interacting directly with researchers and manifesting their informed consent. These days, researchers in academic institutions as well as private sector businesses not subject to the Common Rule, conduct analysis of a wide array of data sources, from massive commercial or government databases to individual tweets or Facebook postings publicly available online, with little or no opportunity to directly engage human subjects to obtain their consent or even inform them of research activities.
Data analysis is now used in multiple contexts, such as combatting fraud in the payment card industry, reducing the time commuters spend on the road, detecting harmful drug interactions, improving marketing mechanisms, personalizing the delivery of education in K-12 schools, encouraging exercise and weight loss, and much more. And companies deploy data research not only to maximize economic gain but also to test new products and services to ensure they are safe and effective. These data uses promise tremendous societal benefits but at the same time create new risks to privacy, fairness, due process and other civil liberties.
Increasingly, corporate officers find themselves struggling to navigate unsettled social norms and make ethical choices that are more befitting of philosophers than business managers or even lawyers. The ethical dilemmas arising from data analysis transcend privacy and trigger concerns about stigmatization, discrimination, human subject research, algorithmic decision making and filter bubbles.
The challenge of fitting the round peg of data-focused research into the square hole of existing ethical and legal frameworks will determine whether society can reap the tremendous opportunities hidden in the data exhaust of governments and cities, health care institutions and schools, social networks and search engines, while at the same time protecting privacy, fairness, equality and the integrity of the scientific process. One commentator called this “the biggest civil rights issue of our time.”…(More)”
Iran’s Civic Tech Sector
Leah Hunter at Forbes: “This is the story of Firuzeh Mahmoudi, founder of United4Iran and Irancubator, the first civic tech-focused startup incubator in Iran. She is also a creator of civil justice apps and a businessperson. Her business? Creating social good in a country she loves.
“Our mission is to improve civil liberties in Iran, and we do that in three ways,” says Mahmoudi, 45, who spent four years working for the United Nations in countries across the world as an international project coordinator before becoming a founder….
Mahmoudi realized that there wasn’t anyone focused on apps made for civic engagement inside Iran, so she built a team to create Irancubator. She works with 30 consultants and partners in the Iranian-American community. She also has a staff of 10 in her San Francisco Bay Area office—most of whom are Iranian, and were still in the country until 2009. “I really worked hard in bringing in resilient people…people who are smart, creative, kind. It’s so important to be kind. How you do the work, and how you show up, is that critical. If you try to make the world a better place, you’d better be nice. If you want to make the government be nicer, you’d better be nice, too.”
She and her team, based in the San Francisco Bay Area are creating apps like the Iran Prison Atlas – a database of all the country’s political prisoners, the judges who sentenced them and the prisons where they’re held. “We believe how these people are treated is a litmus test for our country,” Mahmoudi explains.
They are building an app women can use to track their ovulation cycles and periods. It also acts as a Trojan horse; as you dig deeper, it includes all sorts of information on women’s rights, including how to have equal rights in a marriage. (In Iran, divorce rights for women—as well as the right to equal custody of their children afterward—require a document signed before the wedding ceremony.) “This one’s not specifically targeting the richer women who are living in Northern Tehran. It’s an app that aims to engage people who live in rural areas, or not be as well-off or educated or perhaps more conservative or religious,” Mahmoudi explains. “Once you get in the app, you realize there are other parts. They include information on one’s rights as a woman in a marriage. Or basic concepts that may be completely foreign to them. Like maybe say, “Hey, do you know there’s a concept called ‘marital rape’? Even if someone’s your husband, they can’t treat you this way.”…
Right now, Irancubator is building a dozen apps. The first is launching in late January. Named RadiTo, this app works similarly to YouTube, but for radio instead of TV, allowing people in Iran to broadcast channels about the topics they care about. Someone can create a channel about LGBT rights or about children and education in their language. “Whatever they want—they can have a secure, safe platform to broadcast their message,” Mahmoudi explains.
From an operational perspective, this isn’t easy. Mahmoudi and her staff aren’t just building a startup. They’re operating from the other side of the world, working for users with whom they cannot directly communicate. “Any startup is challenging and has so many hurdles. For us, it’s another level, working with so many security challenges,” says Mahmoudi….
The biggest challenge of all: they cannot go back to Iran. “The Islamic Republic coined me as an anti-revolutionary fugitive in one of their articles,” Mahmoudi says. “Half of my staff are refugees who got out.”…(More).
Could Technology Remove the Politicians From Politics?
Sue Brideshead at Motherboard: “The tech industry has talked long and hard about democratizing industries. Democratizing content, democratizing taxi-cabs, and democratizing bed and breakfasts. But what about democratizing democracy?
Disruption is the word of the moment in Washington, thanks to an incoming president who counts his inexperience in government as an asset. It remains to be seen what kind of disruption Trump will bestow upon the White House, but efforts at disruption from the technology world have refined and chipped at only the topmost layer of inefficiencies. Mark Zuckerberg has poured cash into a broken school district; programmers have toyed with ways to secure digital ballots; and analysts have sought (and failed) to hone the political poll. The team of engineers Barack Obama lured to Washington has been tasked with fixing podunk websites and backend systems. But what they have failed to identify as a problem is the very system that elected their boss. Because beyond the topmost layer of government gunk lies a broad and broken structure: the idea of representation itself. In the era of the internet, the very premise of sending a man to Washington or a woman to city council is badly in need of an upgrade.
The idea of a political representative evolved out of necessity. Townspeople couldn’t afford to take a day off and ride a horse to the capital. They needed to agree upon one guy who would more or less say what they were thinking, and they voted to pick the right guy for the job.
Horses became model T’s became jets flying politicians from their constituencies to the District of Columbia, ostensibly to have an ear to the ground in their home state and a hand to the buzzers on the Senate floor. But travel—and voter awareness—requires cash that drives up the price of running for office.
The Republican President-elect scored votes by calling Washington “corrupt” and “criminal,” “rigged” and “stagnant,” but “quaint” is the first adjective I think of. In the era of the iPhone, sending a man or woman to Washington to “represent” a district back home can feel about as forward-thinking as sending an intern to Amazon headquarters to pick up the new DeLillo. Why do congressional offices read bills in hard-copy, in private, while their constituents draft their work in Google Docs? Why does a senator have to stand on the Senate floor to hear arguments or to vote, when her constituents watch proceedings on C-Span and vote for which Game of Thrones heroine her hair most resembles on BuzzFeed?..
….The price of running for office is now astronomical, literally; a New Hampshire senate race tops the cost of sending your satellite to low earth orbit with SpaceX’s rocket…But the most disturbing fact of our Republic is an upsurge of anti-intellectual rhetoric. An ongoing protest of California’s default direct democracy—its barrage of referendums—is fueled by the disturbing fact that voters are likely to base their decision on a television advertisement. Referendum protesters rightly note that a system reliant on advertising hardly cuts money out of politics or ensures an informed electorate. But the premise of this protest rests on the assumption that a Representative is more informed than a television advertisement; that a Representative makes decisions by speaking with experts, using paid time and expertise…
…Fixing an existing problem with new technology often fuels new and terrifying questions. Displacing power simply raises the same questions of control and ownership in new places. For example, even without the risk of politicians becoming susceptible to lobbyists, voters could still be influenced by special interest groups that can afford to bombard voters with their message. But by distributing the power for change among the electorate, a direct democracy model would effectively make lobbying efforts much more expensive and inefficient….
…What I do know: our system is broken. Voters crave transparency, an end to political photo-ops, an end to the influence of television, of Facebook, a way to flush the lobbyists out of Washington and drag the cash out of politicians’ pockets. As a citizenry, we hold relatively little power to destroy lobbying; to reform pay-to-play; to transform the media industries; re-engineer Facebook, or temper the bad behavior of the wealthy and powerful. But our new technologies also mean that there’s one central component we might have the power to remove from government completely: the politicians. (More)”
Open innovation in the public sector: A research agenda
Atreyi Kankanhalli et al in Government Information Quarterly: “New models of innovation are emerging in the marketplace and these are rapidly replacing traditional corporate research labs as the sole source of new ideas, new technologies, and new practices. This trend is being fueled by the ready availability of venture capital, and more importantly, by the ubiquitous presence of information technologies (IT) that are enabling firms to identify and foster new ideas from a myriad of knowledge sources, which could be geographically dispersed. This de-centralized and un-directed form of innovation, referred to as “open innovation”, is gaining traction both in the private and public sectors. In this guest editorial for the Special Issue on Open Innovation in the Public Sector, we first explore the diverse issues that are engendered when implementing open innovation in the public sector, and the IT that can facilitate such initiatives. Next, we highlight the fundamental differences in terms of focus, aim, value, and external stakeholders of open innovation in the private vs. public sectors. Last, we describe an agenda for research on open innovation in the public sector based on trends and gaps in the literature as seen from papers that were submitted to this special issue. Specifically, we suggest several useful directions for future research including conducting domain-specific studies, examining the use of tools beyond social media, and expanding the existing set of research methods and theoretical foundations….(More)”
Using Geodata and Geolocation in the Social Sciences: Mapping our Connected World
Book by David Abernathy: “Big data is upon us. With the ‘internet of things’ now a reality, social scientists must get to grips with the complex network of location-based data in order to ask questions and address problems in an increasingly networked, globalizing world.
Using Geodata and Geolocation in the Social Sciences: Mapping our Connected World provides an engaging and accessible introduction to the Geoweb with clear, step-by-step guides for:
- capturing Geodata from sources including GPS, sensor networks, and Twitter
- visualizing Geodata using programmes including QGIS, GRASS and R
Packed with colour images and practical exercises, this book is the perfect guide for students and researchers looking to incorporate location-based data into their social science research….(More) (Companion Website)”