Maps and lies

In this day and age, Google Maps (or the people behind it) holds a lot of responsibility – and it’s not always correct. To highlight just how dependent we are upon them, look at the consequences. Last week, a house in Texas in the United States was demolished by mistake after the company hired was given the wrong Google Maps search result. But that’s not even the most extreme example: in 2010, Nicaraguan troops accidentally invaded Costa Rica, and the person responsible explained it by saying that Google Maps had shown that piece of land to be Nicaraguan. (As it happens, Bing Maps actually had that particular border definition correct.)

So, what does this say about the way we understand maps? Clearly, general levels of visual literacy lead us not to question or verify what we see on a map, but to accept it as some kind of “truth”. This is not a good path for us to go down. Maybe it’s time to figure out how we might put the “self” back into mapping visualisations, or include some degree of uncertainty - as Catherine D’Ignazio explores in this post on feminist data visualisation. And, while we’re on the topic of myopia in mapping, here’s a list of influential women mapmakers who are commonly forgotten in cartography history.

Tracking employees

“Taking work home with you” has been taking on a whole new creepy level, as some employers are requiring their employees to wear fitness or health tracking devices so that they can track them - even in their sleep. But some good news: that won’t be happening anymore in the Netherlands. A couple of weeks ago, the Dutch Data Protection Authority ruled that it’s impossible for employees truly give “free consent” for employers to collect such sensitive personal data given the clear financial dependency of employees on their employers, and consequently banned employers from monitoring staff with such devices. It’s refreshing to see recognition of the clear power asymmetry between data collector and data subject, accompanied by policy changes to reflect that power imbalance. Still, to be fair, employers have been tracking health information of their staff long before the era of wearables technology.

Digitising the lay of the land

Digitising land data to increase access sounds like a pretty straightforward, useful exercise. Put it online → more people can see it, more transparency → fewer secret deals. Sadly, this is not always the case. One of the most well-known of these cases was the Bhoomi program, a World Bank initiative which started in 2001, aiming at digitising land titles in the state of Karnataka, India. But researchers later discovered several unforeseen consequences, some of which had negative effects on the least powerful actors - the smallholder farmers, who had to obtain an ‘identity paper’ known as a Record of Rights Tenancy and Crops (RTC) as an integral part of the program.

From infochange technology, written in 2003:

Ironically, while Bhoomi aims to help the poor, in regions like Bijapur in Karnataka, which has the highest demand for RTCs, it is the poor who appear to be struggling most with the new system.

With this in mind, it’s great to hear that privacy is one of the main concerns in this recently announced initiative exploring open land data from Cadasta Foundation and Open Knowledge. At the engine room, we’ll also be looking more at the responsible data challenges around agricultural data together with the Global Open Data for Agriculture & Nutrition network, (GODAN) in the not-so-distant future - watch this space for more details.

Responsible whistleblowing

It would be remiss of me not to mention the very exciting #PanamaPapers - a huge leak of documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, revealing details of dodgy tax dealings, procurement processes, tax evasion and more, from their starry line up of clients. We’re only on Day 2 of apparently 14 days of big stories - and hopefully the documents themselves will be released to the public soon - so there is a lot more to come.

But how easy is it to for those kinds of leaks to happen? Martin Shelton did an analysis on the number of PGP keys associated with email addresses from major newsrooms in the US - and, with the exception of Buzzfeed and the New York Times, there’s actually not been much increase in the use of PGP since the Snowden leaks, which would enable secure communications to take place between potential leakers and journalists. To pave the way for future leaks, maybe more newsrooms need a guide like this from The Intercept, which outlines step by step how to securely and responsibly leak documents to them.

Food for thought:

Community updates

• Our project partners Amnesty International are hiring for a technologist, based in Berlin, for their their growing international work on technology and human rights.

• The UK’s national data science institute, the Alan Turing Institute, is hiring for a Research Assistant working on data ethics, based in London.

• Last week, together with project partners, we held a Responsible Data Forum on Human Rights Documentation just before RightsCon - write-ups coming soon.

• On a similar topic: WITNESS just launched this ‘Video as Evidence Field Guide’, a resource for people using video in human rights investigations.

• The Web We Want programme has an open call for small grants in support of their #FASTAfrica programme, campaigning for Fast, Affordable, Safe and Transparent Internet across Africa.

• Our friends at Aspiration are running the second Humanitarian Technology Festival in June in Cambridge, MA, on June 4-5. Registration is now open, and it looks like a fantastic event.

• The next community call on human rights documentation will be on April 5th (tomorrow) at 6pm CEST. Join us to talk (or just listen) about technology and emerging data streams in human rights documentation - details here.