Government “only” retaining online metadata still presents a privacy risk

by Brent Mittelstadt 30/11/2015

When considered in relation to individuals’ privacy, metadata should not be viewed as fundamentally different to data about the content of a communication.

by Brent Mittelstadt 30/11/2015

Since 13 October 2015 telecommunications providers in Australia have been required to retain metadata on communications for two years. Image by h2hox (Flickr)

Issues around data capture, retention and control are gaining significant attention in many Western countries—including in the UK. In this piece originally posted on the Ethics Centre Blog, the OII’s Brent Mittelstadt considers the implications of metadata retention for privacy. He argues that when considered in relation to individuals’ privacy, metadata should not be viewed as fundamentally different to data about the content of a communication. Australia’s new data retention law for telecommunications providers, comparable to extant UK and US legislation, came into effect 13 October 2015. Telecoms and ISPs are now required to retain metadata about communications for two years to assist law enforcement agencies in crime and terrorism investigation. Despite now being in effect, the extent and types of data to be collected remain unclear. The law has been widely criticised for violating Australians’ right to privacy by introducing overly broad surveillance of civilians. The Government has argued against this portrayal. They argue the content of communications will not be retained but rather the “data about the data”—location, time, date and duration of a call. Metadata retention raises complex ethical issues often framed in terms of privacy which are relevant globally. A popular argument is that metadata offers a lower risk of violating privacy compared to primary data—the content of communication. The distinction between the “content” and “nature” of a communication implies that if the content of a message is protected, so is the privacy of the sender and receiver. The assumption that metadata retention is more acceptable because of its lower privacy risks is unfortunately misguided. Sufficient volumes of metadata offer comparable opportunities to generate invasive information about civilians. Consider a hypothetical. I am given access to a mobile carrier’s dataset that specifies time, date, caller and receiver identity in addition to a continuous record of location constructed with telecommunication tower triangulation records. I see from this that when John’s wife Jane leaves the house, John often calls Jill and visits…

Democracy, Politics & Government

Does crowdsourcing citizen initiatives affect attitudes towards democracy?

by Henrik Serup Christensen 22/11/2015

Exploring how involvement in the citizen initiatives affects attitudes towards democracy

by Henrik Serup Christensen 22/11/2015

Crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. In their Policy and Internet journal article ‘Does Crowdsourcing Legislation Increase Political Legitimacy? The Case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland’, Henrik Serup Christensen, Maija Karjalainen and Laura Nurminen explore how involvement in the citizen initiatives affects attitudes towards democracy. They find that crowdsourcing citizen initiatives can potentially strengthen political legitimacy, but both outcomes and procedures matter for the effects. Crowdsourcing is a recent buzzword that describes efforts to use the Internet to mobilise online communities to achieve specific organisational goals. While crowdsourcing serves several purposes, the most interesting potential from a democratic perspective is the ability to crowdsource legislation. By giving citizens the means to affect the legislative process more directly, crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. Recent years have witnessed a scholarly debate on whether such new forms of participatory governance can help cure democratic deficits such as a declining political legitimacy of the political system in the eyes of the citizenry. However, it is still not clear how taking part in crowdsourcing affects the political attitudes of the participants, and the potential impact of such democratic innovations therefore remain unclear. In our study, we contribute to this research agenda by exploring how crowdsourcing citizens’ initiatives affected political attitudes in Finland. The non-binding Citizens’ Initiative instrument in Finland was introduced in spring 2012 to give citizens the chance to influence the agenda of the political decision making. In particular, we zoom in on people active on the Internet website Avoin Ministeriö (Open Ministry), which is a site based on the idea of crowdsourcing where users can draft citizens’ initiatives and deliberate on their contents. As is frequently the case for studies of crowdsourcing, we find that only a small portion of the users are actively involved in the crowdsourcing process. The option to deliberate…

Collective Action, Interviews, Politics & Government

Do Finland’s digitally crowdsourced laws show a way to resolve democracy’s “legitimacy crisis”?

by Taneli Heikka 16/11/2015

Discussing the digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage that was passed in Finland and analysing how the campaign created practices that affect democratic citizenship.

by Taneli Heikka 16/11/2015

There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. In his article The Rise of the Mediating Citizen: Time, Space, and Citizenship in the Crowdsourcing of Finnish Legislation, Taneli Heikka (University of Jyväskylä) discusses the digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage that was passed in Finland in 2014, analysing how the campaign used new digital tools and created practices that affect democratic citizenship and power making. Ed: There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. For example, less than half of the Finnish electorate under 40 choose to vote. In your article you argue that Finland’s 2012 Citizens’ Initiative Act aimed to address this problem by allowing for the crowdsourcing of ideas for new legislation. How common is this idea? (And indeed, how successful?) Taneli: The idea that digital participation could counter the “legitimacy crisis” is a fairly common one. Digital utopians have nurtured that idea from the early years of the internet, and have often been disappointed. A couple of things stand out in the Finnish experiment that make it worth a closer look. First, the digital crowdsourcing system with strong digital identification is a reliable and potentially viral campaigning tool. Most civic initiative systems I have encountered rely on manual or otherwise cumbersome, and less reliable, signature collection methods. Second, in the Finnish model, initiatives that break the threshold of 50,000 names must be treated in the Parliament equally to an initiative from a group of MPs. This gives the initiative constitutional and political weight. Ed: The Act led to the passage of Finland’s first equal marriage law in 2014. In this case, online platforms were created for collecting signatures as well as drafting legislation. An NGO created a well-used platform, but it subsequently had to shut it down because it couldn’t afford the electronic signature system. Crowds are great, but not a silver bullet if something as prosaic as authentication is impossible. Where should the…

Politics & Government

Assessing crowdsourcing technologies to collect public opinion around an urban renovation project

by Simo Hosio 09/11/2015

How do you increase the quality of feedback without placing citizens on different-level playing fields from the outset—particularly where technology is concerned?

by Simo Hosio 09/11/2015

Ed: Given the “crisis in democratic accountability”, methods to increase citizen participation are in demand. To this end, your team developed some interactive crowdsourcing technologies to collect public opinion around an urban renovation project in Oulu, Finland. What form did the consultation take, and how did you assess its impact? Simo: Over the years we’ve deployed various types of interactive interfaces on a network of public displays. In this case it was basically a network of interactive screens deployed in downtown Oulu, next to where a renovation project was happening that we wanted to collect feedback about. We deployed an app on the screens, that allowed people to type feedback directly on the screens (on-screen soft keyboard), and submit feedback to city authorities via SMS, Twitter and email. We also had a smiley-based “rating” system there, which people could us to leave quick feedback about certain aspects of the renovation project. We ourselves could not, and did not even want to, assess the impact—that’s why we did this in partnership with the city authorities. Then, together with the city folks we could better evaluate if what we were doing had any real-world value whatsoever. And, as we discuss, in the end it did! Ed: How did you go about encouraging citizens to engage with touch screen technologies in a public space—particularly the non-digitally literate, or maybe people who are just a bit shy about participating? Simo: Actually, the whole point was that we did not deliberately encourage them by advertising the deployment or by “forcing” anyone to use it. Quite to the contrary: we wanted to see if people voluntarily used it, and the technologies that are an integral part of the city itself. This is kind of the future vision of urban computing, anyway. The screens had been there for years already, and what we wanted to see is if people find this type of service on their own when…

Social Data Science

Creating a semantic map of sexism worldwide: topic modelling of content from the “Everyday Sexism” project

by taha yasseri 07/10/2015

What are the most common types of sexism globally, and (how) do they relate to each other? Do experiences of sexism change from one country to another?

by taha yasseri 07/10/2015

When barrister Charlotte Proudman recently spoke out regarding a sexist comment that she had received on the professional networking website LinkedIn, hundreds of women praised her actions in highlighting the issue of workplace sexism—and many of them began to tell similar stories of their own. It soon became apparent that Proudman was not alone in experiencing this kind of sexism, a fact further corroborated by Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project, who asserted that workplace harassment is “the most reported kind of incident” on the project’s UK website. Proudman’s experience and Bates’ comments on the number of submissions to her site concerning harassment at work provokes a conversation about the nature of sexism, not only in the UK but also at a global level. We know that since its launch in 2012, the Everyday Sexism Project has received over 100,000 submissions in more than 13 different languages, concerning a variety of topics. But what are these topics? As Bates has stated, in the UK, workplace sexism is the most commonly discussed subject on the website – but is this also the case for the Everyday Sexism sites in France, Japan, or Brazil? What are the most common types of sexism globally, and (how) do they relate to each other? Do experiences of sexism change from one country to another? The multi-lingual reports submitted to the Everyday Sexism project are undoubtedly a gold mine of crowdsourced information with great potential for answering important questions about instances of sexism worldwide, as well as drawing an overall picture of how sexism is experienced in different societies. So far much of the research relating to the Everyday Sexism project has focused on qualitative content analysis, and has been limited to the submissions written in English. Along with Principal Investigators Taha Yasseri and Kathryn Eccles, I will be acting as Research Assistant on a new project funded by the John Fell Oxford University Press…

Ethics

Ethics in Networked Systems Research: ACM SigComm Workshop Report

by Ben Zevenbergen 15/09/2015

Experimentation and research on the Internet require ethical scrutiny in order to give useful feedback to engineers and researchers about the social impact of their work.

by Ben Zevenbergen 15/09/2015

The image shows the paths taken through the Internet to reach a large number of DNS servers in China used in experiments on DNS censorship by Joss Wright and Ning Wang, where they queried blocked domain names across China to discover patterns in where the network filtered DNS requests, and how it responded.

To maintain an open and working Internet, we need to make sense of how the complex and decentralised technical system operates. Research groups, governments, and companies have dedicated teams working on highly technical research and experimentation to make sense of information flows and how these can be affected by new developments, be they intentional or due to unforeseen consequences of decisions made in another domain. These teams, composed of network engineers and computer scientists, therefore analyse Internet data transfers, typically by collecting data from devices of large groups of individuals as well as organisations. The Internet, however, has become a complex and global socio-technical information system that mediates a significant amount of our social or professional activities, relationships, as well as mental processes. Experimentation and research on the Internet therefore require ethical scrutiny in order to give useful feedback to engineers and researchers about the social impact of their work. The organising committee of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) SigComm (Signal Communications) conference has regularly encountered paper submissions that can be considered dubious from an ethical point of view. A strong debate on the research ethics of the ACM was sparked by the paper entitled “Encore: Lightweight Measurement of Web Censorship with Cross-Origin Requests,” among others submitted for the 2015 conference. In the study, researchers directed unsuspecting Internet users to test potential censorship systems in their country by directing their browser to specified URLs that could be blocked in their jurisdiction. Concerns were raised about whether this could be considered ‘human subject research’ and whether the unsuspecting users could be harmed as a result of this experiment. Consider, for example, a Chinese citizen continuously requesting the Falun Gong website from their Beijing-based laptop with no knowledge of this occurring whatsoever. As a result of these discussions, the ACM realised that there was no formal procedure or methodology in place to make informed decisions about the ethical dimensions of such…

Politics & Government

Crowdsourcing for public policy and government

by Jonathan Bright 27/08/2015

The growing interest in crowdsourcing for government and public policy must be understood in the context of the contemporary malaise of politics, which is being felt across the democratic world.

by Jonathan Bright 27/08/2015

If elections were invented today, they would probably be referred to as “crowdsourcing the government.” First coined in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine (Howe, 2006), the term crowdsourcing has come to be applied loosely to a wide variety of situations where ideas, opinions, labor or something else is “sourced” in from a potentially large group of people. Whilst most commonly applied in business contexts, there is an increasing amount of buzz around applying crowdsourcing techniques in government and policy contexts as well (Brabham, 2013). Though there is nothing qualitatively new about involving more people in government and policy processes, digital technologies in principle make it possible to increase the quantity of such involvement dramatically, by lowering the costs of participation (Margetts et al., 2015) and making it possible to tap into people’s free time (Shirky, 2010). This difference in quantity is arguably great enough to obtain a quality of its own. We can thus be justified in using the term “crowdsourcing for public policy and government” to refer to new digitally enabled ways of involving people in any aspect of democratic politics and government, not replacing but rather augmenting more traditional participation routes such as elections and referendums. In this editorial, we will briefly highlight some of the key emerging issues in research on crowdsourcing for public policy and government. Our entry point into the discussion is a collection of research papers first presented at the Internet, Politics & Policy 2014 (IPP2014) conference organised by the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) and the Policy & Internet journal. The theme of this very successful conference—our third since the founding of the journal—was “crowdsourcing for politics and policy.” Out of almost 80 papers presented at the conference in September last year, 14 of the best have now been published as peer-reviewed articles in this journal, including five in this issue. A further handful of papers from the conference focusing on labor…

Economics, Governance & Security

Uber and Airbnb make the rules now — but to whose benefit?

by admin 27/07/2015

Outlining a more nuanced theory of institutional change that suggests that platforms’ effects on society will be complex and influence different people in different ways.

by admin 27/07/2015

The "Airbnb Law" was signed by Mayor Ed Lee in October 2014 at San Francisco City Hall, legalising short-term rentals in SF with many conditions. Image of protesters by Kevin Krejci (Flickr).

Ride-hailing app Uber is close to replacing government-licensed taxis in some cities, while Airbnb’s accommodation rental platform has become a serious competitor to government-regulated hotel markets. Many other apps and platforms are trying to do the same in other sectors of the economy. In my previous post, I argued that platforms can be viewed in social science terms as economic institutions that provide infrastructures necessary for markets to thrive. I explained how the natural selection theory of institutional change suggests that people are migrating from state institutions to these new code-based institutions because they provide a more efficient environment for doing business. In this article, I will discuss some of the problems with this theory, and outline a more nuanced theory of institutional change that suggests that platforms’ effects on society will be complex and influence different people in different ways. Economic sociologists like Neil Fligstein have pointed out that not everyone is as free to choose the means through which they conduct their trade. For example, if buyers in a market switch to new institutions, sellers may have little choice but to follow, even if the new institutions leave them worse off than the old ones did. Even if taxi drivers don’t like Uber’s rules, they may find that there is little business to be had outside the platform, and switch anyway. In the end, the choice of institutions can boil down to power. Economists have shown that even a small group of participants with enough market power—like corporate buyers—may be able to force a whole market to tip in favour of particular institutions. Uber offers a special solution for corporate clients, though I don’t know if this has played any part in the platform’s success. Even when everyone participates in an institutional arrangement willingly, we still can’t assume that it will contribute to the social good. Cambridge economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie has pointed out that an institution that…

Economics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Why are citizens migrating to Uber and Airbnb, and what should governments do about it?

by admin 27/07/2015

What if we dug into existing social science theory to see what it has to say about economic transformation and the emergence of markets?

by admin 27/07/2015

Protest for fair taxi laws in Portland; organisers want city leaders to make ride-sharing companies play by the same rules as cabs and Town cars. Image: Aaron Parecki (Flickr).

Cars were smashed and tires burned in France last month in protests against the ride hailing app Uber. Less violent protests have also been staged against Airbnb, a platform for renting short-term accommodation. Despite the protests, neither platform shows any signs of faltering. Uber says it has a million users in France, and is available in 57 countries. Airbnb is available in over 190 countries, and boasts over a million rooms, more than hotel giants like Hilton and Marriott. Policy makers at the highest levels are starting to notice the rise of these and similar platforms. An EU Commission flagship strategy paper notes that “online platforms are playing an ever more central role in social and economic life,” while the Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop on the topic in Washington. Journalists and entrepreneurs have been quick to coin terms that try to capture the essence of the social and economic changes associated with online platforms: the sharing economy; the on-demand economy; the peer-to-peer economy; and so on. Each perhaps captures one aspect of the phenomenon, but doesn’t go very far in helping us make sense of all its potentials and contradictions, including why some people love it and some would like to smash it into pieces. Instead of starting from the assumption that everything we see today is new and unprecedented, what if we dug into existing social science theory to see what it has to say about economic transformation and the emergence of markets? Economic sociologists are adamant that markets don’t just emerge by themselves: they are always based on some kind of an underlying infrastructure that allows people to find out what goods and services are on offer, agree on prices and terms, pay, and have a reasonable expectation that the other party will honour the agreement. The oldest market infrastructure is the personal social network: traders hear what’s on offer through word of mouth and…

Politics & Government, Social Data Science

How big data is breathing new life into the smart cities concept

by Jonathan Bright 23/07/2015

If all the cars have GPS devices, all the people have mobile phones, and all opinions are expressed on social media, then do we really need the city to be smart at all?

by Jonathan Bright 23/07/2015

“Big data” is a growing area of interest for public policy makers: for example, it was highlighted in UK Chancellor George Osborne’s recent budget speech as a major means of improving efficiency in public service delivery. While big data can apply to government at every level, the majority of innovation is currently being driven by local government, especially cities, who perhaps have greater flexibility and room to experiment and who are constantly on a drive to improve service delivery without increasing budgets. Work on big data for cities is increasingly incorporated under the rubric of “smart cities”. The smart city is an old(ish) idea: give urban policymakers real time information on a whole variety of indicators about their city (from traffic and pollution to park usage and waste bin collection) and they will be able to improve decision making and optimise service delivery. But the initial vision, which mostly centred around adding sensors and RFID tags to objects around the city so that they would be able to communicate, has thus far remained unrealised (big up front investment needs and the requirements of IPv6 are perhaps the most obvious reasons for this). The rise of big data—large, heterogeneous datasets generated by the increasing digitisation of social life—has however breathed new life into the smart cities concept. If all the cars have GPS devices, all the people have mobile phones, and all opinions are expressed on social media, then do we really need the city to be smart at all? Instead, policymakers can simply extract what they need from a sea of data which is already around them. And indeed, data from mobile phone operators has already been used for traffic optimisation, Oyster card data has been used to plan London Underground service interruptions, sewage data has been used to estimate population levels, the examples go on. However, at the moment these examples remain largely anecdotal, driven forward by a few…