ODI General

On one hand, this is how the internet works now. When we brought our concerns to Better Help the company essentially brushed them off, telling us their methods were standard and that they “typically far exceed all applicable regulatory, ethical and legal requirements.” And it’s true: There are no laws against a therapy app telling Facebook every time a person talks to their therapist, or sharing patients’ pseudo-anonymous feelings about suicide with an analytics company that helps clients measure how “addicted” users are to an app. But it is a particularly stark illustration of how limited medical privacy regulations are in the expanding world of online health. Unless the people who trust Better Help deftly analyze the fine print, they might not have much of an idea of how far their intimate information is traveling, in a way that’s designed to make companies bigger and richer while patients become more easily gamed.

Facebook, for instance, is alerted every time a person opens the app, essentially signaling to the social media company how often we were going to a “session” and when we booked our appointments. (To confirm Facebook’s retention of this information, we downloaded personal data from Facebook and identified the associated records from Better Help.) During a session with a therapist, we found that metadata from every message, though not its contents, was also sent to the social media company, meaning that Facebook knew what time of day we were going to therapy, our approximate location, and how long we were chatting on the app.

The age of the “Smart City” is upon us! It’s just that, we don’t really know what that means. Or, at least, not yet. —The Boston Smart City Playbook (2016)

To technologists, cities are a collection of straightforward optimization problems for which more data and computing power can only be helpful—who could argue with making traffic flow better and delivering services more efficiently?

Although presented as utopian, the smart city in fact represents a drastic and myopic reconceptualization of cities into technology problems. Reconstructing the foundations of urban life and municipal governance in accordance with this perspective will lead to cities that are superficially smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequity. The smart city threatens to be a place where self-driving cars have the run of downtowns and force out pedestrians, where civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, where police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and where governments and companies surveil public space to control behavior .

The message of Mr. Balsillie and other prominent critics is blunt: They argue that foreign tech investment in Canada ultimately sucks knowledge out of the country, creating a net drain on the economy. Mr. Balsillie described Sidewalk’s Toronto plan as a move by Google to use data from people’s lives in the physical world in the same way it now exploits their online lives — an assertion that Sidewalk vigorously denies

Today, Uber launches the New Mobility heat map in eight cities across the globe: Brussels, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. This product aggregates JUMP bike and scooter activity and maps it to the city streets visualizing where these new modes are most common. This tool is the latest addition to the Uber Movement datasets which makes aggregated and anonymized mobility data free and publicly available.

Uber launched a version of this product as a part of its City Mobility Campaign, which supports legislation that requires new mobility lanes to be added as a part of street repaving projects.

Typically, planners and advocates are left to rely on anecdotal evidence and dispersed bike counters to gather information about new mobility lane usages, leaving massive gaps in understanding of biking and scootering activity. The new mobility heatmap provides unprecedented coverage of new mobility activity across the city in order to understand how travel patterns of these new options may differ and where bike lanes are most needed.

Despite this, the majority (84 per cent) of respondents said they are open to sharing their personally identifiable information with a government department in exchange for a more personalised customer service experience.

Over three-quarters (78 per cent) of citizens said they see benefits to using virtual agents – artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled customer-service assistants or chatbots – to receive services from government agencies, and 47 per cent said they would like to complete some transactions using virtual agents.

International and national laws recognize that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures. This means that certain fundamental rights, including the rights to privacy and data protection, may be restricted to address the current health crisis as long as basic democratic principles and a series of safeguards are applied, and the interference is lawful, limited in time, and not arbitrary.

Special legal orders and measures should be written and broadcast, and disseminated broadly in appropriate languages and forums. They must have a sunset clause; indefinite term measures are not acceptable. Potential extension could be considered if necessary, but extraordinary measures must be limited in their severity, duration, and geographic scope. Governments and authorities must take every measure to restore regular rules as soon as possible at the end of a special legal order.

The National Health Institute of​ Perú​ developed a platform where you can consult the health reports of patients who were tested for COVID-19 by entering their national identity document. For a few days, the information was therefore accessible to the public, not limited to the patient. After receiving criticism, the national 10 authorities included a second authenticator. To connect to the platform, an SMS-based code is now necessary. 11

The model, based on 13-year-old code for a long-feared influenza pandemic, assumed that the demand for intensive care units would be the same for both infections. Data from China soon showed this to be dangerously wrong, but the model was only updated when more data poured out of Italy, where intensive care was swiftly overwhelmed and deaths shot up.

It did not consider the impact of widespread rapid testing, contact tracing and isolation, which can be used in the early stages of an epidemic or in lockdown conditions to keep infections down to such an extent that when restrictions are lifted the virus should not rebound.

Not satisfied with the recent uplift in chip sales, Intel appears to be topping up its expensive bet on self-driving. The semiconductor giant is reportedly interested in Israeli public transport app Moovit. This would sit comfortably with its 2017 acquisition of Israeli autonomous vehicle sensor company Mobileye.

Moovit’s estimated annual revenues of about $30m would have little impact on Intel’s near $74bn in forecast sales this year. The app has 800m users — up sixfold in less than two years — but it is data, not customers, that Intel is likely to be interested in.

Combining two mobility tech groups is only logical if the initial diversification made sense. Autonomous vehicle accidents and nervous regulators mean proof of that may be decades away. The deal more reliably demonstrates that Intel is still seeking a task as compelling as making chips for the first wave of the tech revolution.

The OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, reckons that if data were more widely exchanged, many countries could enjoy gains worth between 1% and 2.5% of GDP. The estimate is based on heroic assumptions (such as putting a number on business opportunities created for startups). But economists agree that readier access to data is broadly beneficial, because data are “non-rivalrous”: unlike oil, say, they can be used and re-used without being depleted, for instance to power various artificial-intelligence algorithms at once.

On the surface, then, Microsoft appears to be committed to fighting climate change. Google has constructed a similar reputation. But in reality, these companies are doing just enough to keep their critics distracted while teaming up with the industry that is at the root of the climate crisis. Why go through the effort of using clean energy to power your data centers when those same data centers are being used by companies like Chevron to produce more oil?