Adolescent Mental Health: Using A Participatory Mapping Methodology to Identify Key Priorities for Data Collaboration
Jul 23, 2020 02:28 pm
Blog by Alexandra Shaw, Andrew J. Zahuranec, Andrew Young, Stefaan G. Verhulst, Jennifer Requejo, Liliana Carvajal: “Adolescence is a unique stage of life. The brain undergoes rapid development; individuals face new experiences, relationships, and environments. These events can be exciting, but they can also be a source of instability and hardship. Half of all mental conditions manifest by early adolescence and between 10 and 20 percent of all children and adolescents report mental health conditions. Despite the increased risks and concerns for adolescents’ well-being, there remain significant gaps in availability of data at the country level for policymakers to address these issues.
In June, The GovLab partnered with colleagues at UNICEF’s Health and HIV team in the Division of Data, Analysis, Planning & Monitoring and the Data for Children Collaborative — a collaboration between UNICEF, the Scottish Government, and the University of Edinburgh — to design and apply a new methodology of participatory mapping and prioritization of key topics and issues associated with adolescent mental health that could be addressed through enhanced data collaboration….
The event led to three main takeaways. First, the topic mapping allows participants to deliberate and prioritize the various aspects of adolescent mental health in a more holistic manner. Unlike the “blind men and the elephant” parable, a topic map allows the participants to see and discuss the interrelated parts of the topic, including those which they might be less familiar with.
Second, the workshops demonstrated the importance of tapping into distributed expertise via participatory processes. While the topic map provided a starting point, the inclusion of various experts allowed the findings of the document to be reviewed in a rapid, legitimate fashion. The diverse inputs helped ensure the individual aspects could be prioritized without a perspective being ignored.
Lastly, the approach showed the importance of data initiatives being driven and validated by those individuals representing the demand. By soliciting the input of those who would actually use the data, the methodology ensured data initiatives focused on the aspects thought to be most relevant and of greatest importance….(More)”
Governing in a pandemic: from parliamentary sovereignty to autocratic technocracy
Jul 22, 2020 07:42 pm
Paper by Eric Windholz: “Emergencies require governments to govern differently. In Australia, the changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic have been profound. The role of lawmaker has been assumed by the executive exercising broad emergency powers. Parliaments, and the debate and scrutiny they provide, have been marginalised. The COVID-19 response also has seen the medical-scientific expert metamorphose from decision-making input into decision-maker. Extensive legislative and executive decision-making authority has been delegated to them – directly in some jurisdictions; indirectly in others. Severe restrictions on an individual’s freedom of movement, association and to earn a livelihood have been declared by them, or on their advice. Employing the analytical lens of regulatory legitimacy, this article examines and seeks to understand this shift from parliamentary sovereignty to autocratic technocracy. How has it occurred? Why has it occurred? What have been the consequences and risks of vesting significant legislative and executive power in the hands of medical-scientific experts; what might be its implications? The article concludes by distilling insights to inform the future design and deployment of public health emergency powers….(More)”.
Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation: “Data sharing is fundamental to effective government and the running of public services. But it is not an end in itself. Data needs to be shared to drive improvements in service delivery and benefit citizens. For this to happen sustainably and effectively, public trust in the way data is shared and used is vital. Without such trust, the government and wider public sector risks losing society’s consent, setting back innovation as well as the smooth running of public services. Maximising the benefits of data driven technology therefore requires a solid foundation of societal approval.
AI and data driven technology offer extraordinary potential to improve decision making and service delivery in the public sector – from improved diagnostics to more efficient infrastructure and personalised public services. This makes effective use of data more important than it has ever been, and requires a step-change in the way data is shared and used. Yet sharing more data also poses risks and challenges to current governance arrangements.
The only way to build trust sustainably is to operate in a trustworthy way. Without adequate safeguards the collection and use of personal data risks changing power relationships between the citizen and the state. Insights derived by big data and the matching of different data sets can also undermine individual privacy or personal autonomy. Trade-offs are required which reflect democratic values, wider public acceptability and a shared vision of a data driven society. CDEI has a key role to play in exploring this challenge and setting out how it can be addressed. This report identifies barriers to data sharing, but focuses on building and sustaining the public trust which is vital if society is to maximise the benefits of data driven technology.
There are many areas where the sharing of anonymised and identifiable personal data by the public sector already improves services, prevents harm, and benefits the public. Over the last 20 years, different governments have adopted various measures to increase data sharing, including creating new legal sharing gateways. However, despite efforts to increase the amount of data sharing across the government, and significant successes in areas like open data, data sharing continues to be challenging and resource-intensive. This report identifies a range of technical, legal and cultural barriers that can inhibit data sharing.
Barriers to data sharing in the public sector
Technical barriers include limited adoption of common data standards and inconsistent security requirements across the public sector. Such inconsistency can prevent data sharing, or increase the cost and time for organisations to finalise data sharing agreements.
While there are often pre-existing legal gateways for data sharing, underpinned by data protection legislation, there is still a large amount of legal confusion on the part of public sector bodies wishing to share data which can cause them to start from scratch when determining legality and commit significant resources to legal advice. It is not unusual for the development of data sharing agreements to delay the projects for which the data is intended. While the legal scrutiny of data sharing arrangements is an important part of governance, improving the efficiency of these processes – without sacrificing their rigour – would allow data to be shared more quickly and at less expense.
Even when legal, the permissive nature of many legal gateways means significant cultural and organisational barriers to data sharing remain. Individual departments and agencies decide whether or not to share the data they hold and may be overly risk averse. Data sharing may not be prioritised by a department if it would require them to bear costs to deliver benefits that accrue elsewhere (i.e. to those gaining access to the data). Departments sharing data may need to invest significant resources to do so, as well as considering potential reputational or legal risks. This may hold up progress towards finding common agreement on data sharing. When there is an absence of incentives, even relatively small obstacles may mean data sharing is not deemed worthwhile by those who hold the data – despite the fact that other parts of the public sector might benefit significantly….(More)”.
German coronavirus experiment enlists help of concertgoers
Jul 22, 2020 06:53 pm
Philip Oltermann at the Guardian: “German scientists are planning to equip 4,000 pop music fans with tracking gadgets and bottles of fluorescent disinfectant to get a clearer picture of how Covid-19 could be prevented from spreading at large indoor concerts.
As cultural mass gatherings across the world remain on hold for the foreseeable future, researchers in eastern Germany are recruiting volunteers for a “coronavirus experiment” with the singer-songwriter Tim Bendzko, to be held at an indoor stadium in the city of Leipzig on 22 August.
Participants, aged between 18 and 50, will wear matchstick-sized “contact tracer” devices on chains around their necks that transmit a signal at five-second intervals and collect data on each person’s movements and proximity to other members of the audience.
Inside the venue, they will also be asked to disinfect their hands with a fluorescent hand-sanitiser – designed to not just add a layer of protection but allow scientists to scour the venue with UV lights after the concerts to identify surfaces where a transmission of the virus through smear infection is most likely to take place.
Vapours from a fog machine will help visualise the possible spread of coronavirus via aerosols, which the scientists will try to predict via computer-generated models in advance of the event.
The €990,000 cost of the Restart-19 project will be shouldered between the federal states of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. The project’s organisers say the aim is to “identify a framework” for how larger cultural and sports events could be held “without posing a danger for the population” after 30 September….
To stop the Leipzig experiment from becoming the source of a new outbreak, signed-up volunteers will be sent a DIY test kit and have a swab at a doctor’s practice or laboratory 48 hours before the concert starts. Those who cannot show proof of a negative test at the door will be denied entry….(More)”.
Gov.UK: “The document provides guidance and advice to help policy officials follow open government principles when carrying out their work…
The Playbook has been developed as a response to the growing demand from policymakers, communications, and digital professionals to integrate the principles of open government in their roles. The content of the Playbook was drafted using existing resources (see the ‘further reading’ section), and was consulted with open government experts from Involve and Open Government Partnership….(More)”.
Paper by Albert Meijer & Marcel Thaens: “The positive features of innovation are well known but the dark side of public innovation has received less attention. To fill this gap, this article develops a theoretical understanding of the dark side of public innovation. We explore a diversity of perverse effects on the basis of a literature review and an expert consultation. We indicate that these perverse effects can be categorized on two dimensions: low public value and low public control. We confront this exploratory analysis with the literature and conclude that the perverse effects are not coincidental but emerge from key properties of innovation processes such as creating niches for innovation and accepting uncertainty about public value outcomes. To limit perverse effects, we call for the dynamic assessment of public innovation. The challenge for innovators is to acknowledge the dark side and take measures to prevent perverse effects without killing the innovativeness of organizations…(More)“.
Coronavirus: how the pandemic has exposed AI’s limitations
Jul 21, 2020 08:57 pm
Kathy Peach at The Conversation: “It should have been artificial intelligence’s moment in the sun. With billions of dollars of investment in recent years, AI has been touted as a solution to every conceivable problem. So when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, a multitude of AI models were immediately put to work.
Some hunted for new compounds that could be used to develop a vaccine, or attempted to improve diagnosis. Some tracked the evolution of the disease, or generated predictions for patient outcomes. Some modelled the number of cases expected given different policy choices, or tracked similarities and differences between regions.
The results, to date, have been largely disappointing. Very few of these projects have had any operational impact – hardly living up to the hype or the billions in investment. At the same time, the pandemic highlighted the fragility of many AI models. From entertainment recommendation systems to fraud detection and inventory management – the crisis has seen AI systems go awry as they struggled to adapt to sudden collective shifts in behaviour.
The unlikely hero
The unlikely hero emerging from the ashes of this pandemic is instead the crowd. Crowds of scientists around the world sharing data and insights faster than ever before. Crowds of local makers manufacturing PPE for hospitals failed by supply chains. Crowds of ordinary people organising through mutual aid groups to look after each other.
COVID-19 has reminded us of just how quickly humans can adapt existing knowledge, skills and behaviours to entirely new situations – something that highly-specialised AI systems just can’t do. At least yet….
In one of the experiments, researchers from the Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione in Rome studied the use of an AI system designed to reduce social biases in collective decision-making. The AI, which held back information from the group members on what others thought early on, encouraged participants to spend more time evaluating the options by themselves.
The system succeeded in reducing the tendency of people to “follow the herd” by failing to hear diverse or minority views, or challenge assumptions – all of which are criticisms that have been levelled at the British government’s scientific advisory committees throughout the pandemic…(More)”.
Privacy‐Preserving Data Visualization: Reflections on the State of the Art and Research Opportunities
Jul 21, 2020 08:48 pm
Paper by Kaustav Bhattacharjee, Min Chen. and Aritra Dasgupta: “Preservation of data privacy and protection of sensitive information from potential adversaries constitute a key socio‐technical challenge in the modern era of ubiquitous digital transformation. Addressing this challenge needs analysis of multiple factors: algorithmic choices for balancing privacy and loss of utility, potential attack scenarios that can be undertaken by adversaries, implications for data owners, data subjects, and data sharing policies, and access control mechanisms that need to be built into interactive data interfaces.
Visualization has a key role to play as part of the solution space, both as a medium of privacy‐aware information communication and also as a tool for understanding the link between privacy parameters and data sharing policies. The field of privacy‐preserving data visualization has witnessed progress along many of these dimensions. In this state‐of‐the‐art report, our goal is to provide a systematic analysis of the approaches, methods, and techniques used for handling data privacy in visualization. We also reflect on the road‐map ahead by analyzing the gaps and research opportunities for solving some of the pressing socio‐technical challenges involving data privacy with the help of visualization….(More)”.
The detection and location estimation of disasters using Twitter and the identification of Non-Governmental Organisations using crowdsourcing
Jul 21, 2020 08:09 pm
Paper by Christopher Loynes, Jamal Ouenniche & Johannes De Smedt: “This paper provides the humanitarian community with an automated tool that can detect a disaster using tweets posted on Twitter, alongside a portal to identify local and regional Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that are best-positioned to provide support to people adversely affected by a disaster. The proposed disaster detection tool uses a linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC) to detect man-made and natural disasters, and a density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to accurately estimate a disaster’s geographic location. This paper provides two original contributions. The first is combining the automated disaster detection tool with the prototype portal for NGO identification. This unique combination could help reduce the time taken to raise awareness of the disaster detected, improve the coordination of aid, increase the amount of aid delivered as a percentage of initial donations and improve aid effectiveness. The second contribution is a general framework that categorises the different approaches that can be adopted for disaster detection. Furthermore, this paper uses responses obtained from an on-the-ground survey with NGOs in the disaster-hit region of Uttar Pradesh, India, to provide actionable insights into how the portal can be developed further…(More)”.
Ethical and Legal Aspects of Open Data Affecting Farmers
Jul 21, 2020 08:05 pm
Report by Foteini Zampati et al: “Open Data offers a great potential for innovations from which the agricultural sector can benefit decisively due to a wide range of possibilities for further use. However, there are many inter-linked issues in the whole data value chain that affect the ability of farmers, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, to access, use and harness the benefits of data and data-driven technologies.
There are technical challenges and ethical and legal challenges as well. Of all these challenges, the ethical and legal aspects related to accessing and using data by the farmers and sharing farmers’ data have been less explored.
We aimed to identify gaps and highlight the often-complex legal issues related to open data in the areas of law (e.g. data ownership, data rights) policies, codes of conduct, data protection, intellectual property rights, licensing contracts and personal privacy.
This report is an output of the Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon 2020. The Hackathon addressed key topics identified by the IST-Africa 2020 conference, such as: Agriculture, environmental sustainability, collaborative open innovation, and ICT-enabled entrepreneurship.
The goal of the event was to continue to build on the efforts of the 2019 Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon, further strengthening relationships between various EU projects and African communities. It was a successful event, with more than 200 participants representing 26 African countries. The INSPIRE Hackathons are not a competition, rather the main focus is building relationships, making rapid developments, and collecting ideas for future research and innovation….(More)”.
How to engage with policy makers: A guide for academics in the arts and humanities
Jul 21, 2020 07:59 pm
Institute for Government: “The Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Institute for Government have been working in partnership for six years on the Engaging with Government programme – a three-day course for researchers in the arts and humanities. This programme helps academics develop the knowledge and skills they need to engage effectively with government and parliamentary bodies at all levels, along with the other organisations involved in the policy-making process. We, in turn, have learned a huge amount from our participants, who now form an active alumni network brimming with expertise about how to engage with policy in practice. This guide brings together some of that learning.
Arts and humanities researchers tend to have fewer formal and established routes into government than scientists. But they can, and do, engage productively in policy making. They contribute both expertise (advice based on knowledge of a field) and evidence (facts and information) and provide new ways of framing policy debates that draw on philosophical, cultural or historical perspectives.
As this guide shows, there are steps that academics can take to improve their engagement with public policy and to make it meaningful for their research. While these activities may involve an investment of time, they offer the opportunity to make a tangible difference, and are often a source of great satisfaction and inspiration for further work.
The first part of this guide describes the landscape of policy making in the UK and some of the common ways academics can engage with it.
Part two sets out six lessons from the Engaging with Government programme, illustrated with practical examples from our alumni and speaker network. These lessons are:
Understand the full range of individuals and groups involved in policy making – who are the key players and who do they talk to?
Be aware of the political context – how does your research fit in with current thinking on the issue?
Communicate in ways that policy makers find useful – consider your audience and be prepared to make practical recommendations.
Develop and maintain networks – seek to make connections with people who share your policy interest, both in person and online.
Remember that you are the expert – be prepared to share your general knowledge of a subject as well as your specific research.
Adopt a long-term perspective – you will need to be open-minded and patient to engage successfully….(More)”.
Do nudgers need budging? A comparative analysis of European smart meter implementation
Jul 21, 2020 07:57 pm
Paper by Sarah Giest: “Nudging is seen to complement or replace existing policy tools by altering people’s choice architectures towards behaviors that align with government aims, but has fallen short in meeting those targets. Crucially, governments do not nudge citizens directly, but need private agents to nudge their consumers. Based on this notion, the paper takes on an institutional approach towards nudging. Rather than looking at the relationship between nudger and nudgee, the research analyses the regulatory and market structures that affect nudge implementation by private actors, captured by the ‘budge’ idea. Focusing on the European energy policy domain, the paper analyses the contextual factors of green nudges that are initiated by Member States, and implemented by energy companies. The findings show that in the smart meter context, there are regulatory measures that affect implementation of smart meters and that government has a central role to ‘budge’, due to the dependence on private agents….(More)”.
Responsible, practical genomic data sharing that accelerates research
Jul 21, 2020 01:32 pm
James Brian Byrd, Anna C. Greene, Deepashree Venkatesh Prasad, Xiaoqian Jiang & Casey S. Greene in Nature: “Data sharing anchors reproducible science, but expectations and best practices are often nebulous. Communities of funders, researchers and publishers continue to grapple with what should be required or encouraged. To illuminate the rationales for sharing data, the technical challenges and the social and cultural challenges, we consider the stakeholders in the scientific enterprise. In biomedical research, participants are key among those stakeholders. Ethical sharing requires considering both the value of research efforts and the privacy costs for participants. We discuss current best practices for various types of genomic data, as well as opportunities to promote ethical data sharing that accelerates science by aligning incentives….(More)”.
Citizen initiatives facing COVID-19: Due to spontaneous generation or the product of social capital in Mexico City?
Jul 21, 2020 01:00 pm
UNDP: “Since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Mexico, multiple citizen responses[1] have emerged to tackle its impacts: digital aid platforms such as Frena la Curva (Stop the curve) and México Covid19;groups of makers that design medical and protective equipment; Zapotec indigenous women that teach how to make hand sanitizer at home; public buses that turn into mobile markets; and much more.
There are initiatives that aid 10, 20, 3,000 or more people; initiatives that operate inside a housing unit, a municipality or across the City. Some responses have come from civil society organizations; others from collectives of practitioners or from groups of friends and family; there are even those made out of groups of strangers that the pandemic turned into partners working for the same goal….
Within the plurality of initiatives that have emerged, sometimes, seemingly in a spontaneous way, there is a common denominator: people are reacting in a collaboratively way to the crisis to solve the needs that the pandemic is leaving behind.
Different research studies connect social cohesion and social capital with the response’s capacity of a community in situations of crisis and natural disasters; and with its subsequent recovery. These concepts —derived from sociology— include aspects such as the level of union; relationships and networks; and interaction between people in a community.
This can be seen when, for example, a group of people in a neighborhood gets together to buy groceries for neighbors who have lost their incomes. Also, when a collective of professionals react to the shortages of protective equipment for health workers by creating low-cost prototypes, or when a civil organization collaborates with local authorities to bring water to households that lack access to clean water.
It would seem that a high rate of social capital and social cohesion might ease the rise of the citizen initiatives that aim to tackle the challenges that ensue from the pandemic. These do not come out of nowhere….(More)”.
#HumanRights: The Technologies and Politics of Justice Claims in Practice. Stanford
Jul 21, 2020 08:38 am
Book by Ronald Niezen: “Social justice and human rights movements are entering a new phase. Social media, artificial intelligence, and digital forensics are reshaping advocacy and compliance. Technicians, lawmakers, and advocates, sometimes in collaboration with the private sector, have increasingly gravitated toward the possibilities and dangers inherent in the nonhuman. #HumanRights examines how new technologies interact with older models of rights claiming and communication, influencing and reshaping the modern-day pursuit of justice.
Ronald Niezen argues that the impacts of information technologies on human rights are not found through an exclusive focus on sophisticated, expert-driven forms of data management but in considering how these technologies are interacting with other, “traditional” forms of media to produce new avenues of expression, public sympathy, redress of grievances, and sources of the self. Niezen considers various ways that the pursuit of justice is happening via new technologies, including crowdsourcing, social media–facilitated mobilizations (and enclosures), WhatsApp activist networks, and the selective attention of Google’s search engine algorithm. He uncovers how emerging technologies of data management and social media influence the ways that human rights claimants and their allies pursue justice, and the “new victimology” that prioritizes and represents strategic lives and types of violence over others. #HumanRights paints a striking and important panoramic picture of the contest between authoritarianism and the new tools by which people attempt to leverage human rights and bring the powerful to account….(More)”.
Preservation of Individuals’ Privacy in Shared COVID-19 Related Data
Jul 20, 2020 08:26 pm
Paper by Stefan Sauermann et al: “This paper provides insight into how restricted data can be incorporated in an open-be-default-by-design digital infrastructure for scientific data. We focus, in particular, on the ethical component of FAIRER (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Ethical, and Reproducible) data, and the pseudo-anonymization and anonymization of COVID-19 datasets to protect personally identifiable information (PII). First we consider the need for the customisation of the existing privacy preservation techniques in the context of rapid production, integration, sharing and analysis of COVID-19 data. Second, the methods for the pseudo-anonymization of direct identification variables are discussed. We also discuss different pseudo-IDs of the same person for multi-domain and multi-organization. Essentially, pseudo-anonymization and its encrypted domain specific IDs are used to successfully match data later, if required and permitted, as well as to restore the true ID (and authenticity) in individual cases of a patient’s clarification.Third, we discuss application of statistical disclosure control (SDC) techniques to COVID-19 disease data. To assess and limit the risk of re-identification of individual persons in COVID-19 datasets (that are often enriched with other covariates like age, gender, nationality, etc.) to acceptable levels, the risk of successful re-identification by a combination of attribute values must be assessed and controlled. This is done using statistical disclosure control for anonymization of data. Lastly, we discuss the limitations of the proposed techniques and provide general guidelines on using disclosure risks to decide on appropriate modes for data sharing to preserve the privacy of the individuals in the datasets….(More)”.
Reinventing Public Administration for a Dangerous Century
Jul 20, 2020 08:15 pm
Paper by Alasdair S. Roberts: “The first two decades of this century have shown there is no simple formula for governing well. Leaders must make difficult choices about national priorities and the broad lines of policy – that is, about the substance of their strategy for governing. These strategic choices have important implications for public administration. Scholars in this field should study the processes by which strategy is formulated and executed more closely than they have over the last thirty years. A new agenda for public administration should emphasize processes of top-level decision-making, mechanisms to improve foresight and the management of societal risks, and problems of large-scale reorganization and inter-governmental coordination, among other topics. Many of these themes have been examined more closely by researchers in Canada than by those abroad. This difference should be recognized an advantage rather than a liability….(More)”.
This is also an opportunity for HHS to make this data machine readable and thereby more accessible to data scientists and data journalists. The Open Government Data Act, signed into law by President Trump, treats data as a strategic asset and makes it open by default. This act builds upon the Open Data Executive Order, which recognized that the data sets collected by the government are paid for by taxpayers and must be made available to them.
As a country, the United States has lagged behind in so many dimensions of response to this crisis, from the availability of PPE to testing to statewide mask orders. Its treatment of data has lagged as well. On March 7, as this crisis was unfolding, there was no national testing data. Alexis Madrigal, Jeff Hammerbacher, and a group of volunteers started the COVID Tracking Project to aggregate coronavirus information from all 50 state websites into a single Google spreadsheet. For two months, until the CDC began to share data through its own dashboard, this volunteer project was the sole national public source of information on cases and testing.
With more than 150 volunteers contributing to the effort, the COVID Tracking Project sets the bar for how to treat data as an asset. I serve on the advisory board and am awed by what this group has accomplished. With daily updates, an API, and multiple download formats, they’ve made their data extraordinarily useful. Where the CDC’s data is cited 30 times in Google Scholar and approximately 10,000 times in Google search results, the COVID Tracking Project data is cited 299 times in Google Scholar and roughly 2 million times in Google search results.
Sharing reliable data is one of the most economical and effective interventions the United States has to confront this pandemic. With the Coronavirus Task Force daily briefings a thing of the past, it’s more necessary than ever for all covid-related data to be shared with the public. The effort required to defeat the pandemic is not just a federal response. It is a federal, state, local, and community response. Everyone needs to work from the same trusted source of facts about the situation on the ground. Data is not a partisan affair or a bureaucratic preserve. It is a public trust—and a public resource….(More)”.
Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group: “This position paper on Indigenous Protocol (IP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a starting place for those who want to design and create AI from an ethical position that centers Indigenous concerns. Each Indigenous community will have its own particular approach to the questions we raise in what follows. What we have written here is not a substitute for establishing and maintaining relationships of reciprocal care and support with specific Indigenous communities. Rather, this document offers a range of ideas to take into consideration when entering into conversations which prioritize Indigenous perspectives in the development of artificial intelligence.
The position paper is an attempt to capture multiple layers of a discussion that happened over 20 months, across 20 time zones, during two workshops, and between Indigenous people (and a few non-Indigenous folks) from diverse communities in Aotearoa, Australia, North America, and the Pacific.
Our aim, however, is not to provide a unified voice. Indigenous ways of knowing are rooted in distinct, sovereign territories across the planet. These extremely diverse landscapes and histories have influenced different communities and their discrete cultural protocols over time. A single ‘Indigenous perspective’ does not exist, as epistemologies are motivated and shaped by the grounding of specific communities in particular territories. Historically, scholarly traditions that homogenize diverse Indigenous cultural practices have resulted in ontological and epistemological violence, and a flattening of the rich texture and variability of Indigenous thought….(More)”.
Blind-sided by privacy? Digital contact tracing, the Apple/Google API and big tech’s newfound role as global health policy makers
Jul 18, 2020 07:43 pm
Paper by Tamar Sharon: “Since the outbreak of COVID-19, governments have turned their attention to digital contact tracing. In many countries, public debate has focused on the risks this technology poses to privacy, with advocates and experts sounding alarm bells about surveillance and mission creep reminiscent of the post 9/11 era. Yet, when Apple and Google launched their contact tracing API in April 2020, some of the world’s leading privacy experts applauded this initiative for its privacy-preserving technical specifications. In an interesting twist, the tech giants came to be portrayed as greater champions of privacy than some democratic governments.
This article proposes to view the Apple/Google API in terms of a broader phenomenon whereby tech corporations are encroaching into ever new spheres of social life. From this perspective, the (legitimate) advantage these actors have accrued in the sphere of the production of digital goods provides them with (illegitimate) access to the spheres of health and medicine, and more worrisome, to the sphere of politics. These sphere transgressions raise numerous risks that are not captured by the focus on privacy harms. Namely, a crowding out of essential spherical expertise, new dependencies on corporate actors for the delivery of essential, public goods, the shaping of (global) public policy by non-representative, private actors and ultimately, the accumulation of decision-making power across multiple spheres. While privacy is certainly an important value, its centrality in the debate on digital contact tracing may blind us to these broader societal harms and unwittingly pave the way for ever more sphere transgressions….(More)”.
