Ethical privacy guidelines for mobile connectivity measurements

by Ben Zevenbergen 07/11/2013

Measuring the mobile Internet can expose information about an individual’s location, contact details, and communications metadata.

by Ben Zevenbergen 07/11/2013

Four of the 6.8 billion mobile phones worldwide. Measuring the mobile Internet can expose information about an individual's location, contact details, and communications metadata. Image by Cocoarmani.

Ed: GCHQ / the NSA aside, who collects mobile data and for what purpose? How can you tell if your data are being collected and passed on? Ben: Data collected from mobile phones is used for a wide range of (divergent) purposes. First and foremost, mobile operators need information about mobile phones in real-time to be able to communicate with individual mobile handsets. Apps can also collect all sorts of information, which may be necessary to provide entertainment, location specific services, to conduct network research and many other reasons. Mobile phone users usually consent to the collection of their data by clicking “I agree” or other legally relevant buttons, but this is not always the case. Sometimes data is collected lawfully without consent, for example for the provision of a mobile connectivity service. Other times it is harder to substantiate a relevant legal basis. Many applications keep track of the information that is generated by a mobile phone and it is often not possible to find out how the receiver processes this data. Ed: How are data subjects typically recruited for a mobile research project? And how many subjects might a typical research data set contain? Ben: This depends on the research design; some research projects provide data subjects with a specific app, which they can use to conduct measurements (so called ‘active measurements’). Other apps collect data in the background and, in effect, conduct local surveillance of the mobile phone use (so called passive measurements). Other research uses existing datasets, for example provided by telecom operators, which will generally be de-identified in some way. We purposely do not use the term anonymisation in the report, because much research and several case studies have shown that real anonymisation is very difficult to achieve if the original raw data is collected about individuals. Datasets can be re-identified by techniques such as fingerprinting or by linking them with existing, auxiliary datasets. The size…

Development

The scramble for Africa’s data

by Linnet Taylor 08/07/2013 1 Comment

As Africa goes digital, the challenge for policymakers becomes moving from digitisation to managing and curating digital data in ways that keep people’s identities and activities secure.

by Linnet Taylor 08/07/2013 1 Comment

Africa is in the midst of a technological revolution, and the current wave of digitisation has the potential to make the continent’s citizens a rich mine of data. Intersection in Zomba, Malawi. Image by john.duffell.

After the last decade’s exponential rise in ICT use, Africa is fast becoming a source of big data. Africans are increasingly emitting digital information with their mobile phone calls, internet use and various forms of digitised transactions, while on a state level e-government starts to become a reality. As Africa goes digital, the challenge for policymakers becomes what the WRR, a Dutch policy organisation, has identified as ‘i-government’: moving from digitisation to managing and curating digital data in ways that keep people’s identities and activities secure. On one level, this is an important development for African policymakers, given that accurate information on their populations has been notoriously hard to come by and, where it exists, has not been shared. On another, however, it represents a tremendous challenge. The WRR has pointed out the unpreparedness of European governments, who have been digitising for decades, for the age of i-government. How are African policymakers, as relative newcomers to digital data, supposed to respond? There are two possible scenarios. One is that systems will develop for the release and curation of Africans’ data by corporations and governments, and that it will become possible, in the words of the UN’s Global Pulse initiative, to use it as a ‘public good’—an invaluable tool for development policies and crisis response. The other is that there will be a new scramble for Africa: a digital resource grab that may have implications as great as the original scramble amongst the colonial powers in the late 19th century. We know that African data is not only valuable to Africans. The current wave of digitisation has the potential to make the continent’s citizens a rich mine of data about health interventions, human mobility, conflict and violence, technology adoption, communication dynamics and financial behaviour, with the default mode being for this to happen without their consent or involvement, and without ethical and normative frameworks to ensure data protection or to weigh…