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Ben Snaith

Access-Now-recommendations-on-Covid-and-data-protection-and-privacy.pdf - 0 views

Data Coronavirus Privacy

shared by Ben Snaith on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • 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
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  • In ​India​, at least two state governments — including the state of Karnataka, housing the tech hub of Bangalore — have uploaded PDF files online with names, house addresses, and travel history of people ordered into COVID-19 quarantines. The 12 information is accessible by everyone.
  • In particular, the ongoing crisis highlights how much the public and public authorities are depending on tech companies to function: from providing broadband access, to allowing people to work from home, to providing video-conferencing solutions or tools that respond directly to the crisis, such as diagnosis apps.
  • In ​Tunisia​,​ ​Enova Robotics signed an agreement with the Ministry of Interior to start operating PGuard robots. These robots will be equipped with a set of infrared 39 cameras and used to stop people from leaving their houses. There is no information as to where these robots will be deployed, what information they will gather, how long they will keep the data and who would have access to it.
Ben Snaith

Arundhati Roy: 'The pandemic is a portal' | Financial Times - 0 views

www.ft.com/...e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

India Coronavirus

shared by Ben Snaith on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.
  • The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.
  • Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Ben Snaith

Which Covid-19 Data Can You Trust? - 2 views

hbr.org/...ch-covid-19-data-can-you-trust

Data Mobility Coronavirus Contact-Tracing Health Algorithms Models

shared by Ben Snaith on 11 May 20 - No Cached
  • In a crisis situation like the one we are in, data can be an essential tool for crafting responses, allocating resources, measuring the effectiveness of interventions, such as social distancing, and telling us when we might reopen economies. However, incomplete or incorrect data can also muddy the waters, obscuring important nuances within communities, ignoring important factors such as socioeconomic realities, and creating false senses of panic or safety, not to mention other harms such as needlessly exposing private information.
  • Unfortunately, many of these technological solutions — however well intended — do not provide the clear picture they purport to. In many cases, there is insufficient engagement with subject-matter experts, such as epidemiologists who specialize in modeling the spread of infectious diseases or front-line clinicians who can help prioritize needs. But because technology and telecom companies have greater access to mobile device data, enormous financial resources, and larger teams of data scientists, than academic researchers do, their data products are being rolled out at a higher volume than high quality studies.
  • To some extent, all data risk breaching the privacy of individual or group identities, but publishing scorecards for specific neighborhoods risks shaming or punishing communities, while ignoring the socioeconomic realities of people’s lives that make it difficult for them to stay home.
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  • Even more granular examples, such as footfalls at identifiable business locations, risks de-identifying religious groups; patients visiting cancer hospitals, HIV clinics, or reproductive health clinics; or those seeking public assistance. The medical and public health communities long ago deemed the un-masking of such information without consent unacceptable, but companies have recently been releasing it on publicly available dashboards.
  • Until we know more about how these changing movement patterns impact epidemiological aspects of the disease, we should use these data with caution.
  • Simply presenting them, or interpreting them without a proper contextual understanding, could inadvertently lead to imposing or relaxing restrictions on lives and livelihoods, based on incomplete information.
  • In the absence of a tightly coupled testing and treatment plan, however, these apps risk either providing false reassurance to communities where infectious but asymptomatic individuals can continue to spread disease, or requiring an unreasonably large number of people to quarantine. The behavioral response of the population to these apps is therefore unknown and likely to vary significantly across societies.
  • Some contact-tracing apps follow black-box algorithms, which preclude the global community of scientists from refining them or adopting them elsewhere. These non-transparent, un-validated interventions — which are now being rolled out (or rolled back) in countries such as China, India, Israel and Vietnam — are in direct contravention to the open cross-border collaboration that scientists have adopted to address the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • pidemiological models that can help predict the burden and pattern of spread of Covid-19 rely on a number of parameters that are, as yet, wildly uncertain. We still lack many of the basic facts about this disease, including how many people have symptoms, whether people who have been infected are immune to reinfection, and — crucially — how many people have been infected so far. In the absence of reliable virological testing data, we cannot fit models accurately, or know confidently what the future of this epidemic will look like for all these reasons, and yet numbers are being presented to governments and the public with the appearance of certainty
  • Telenor, the Norwegian telco giant has led the way in responsible use of aggregated mobility data from cell phone tower records. Its data have been used, in close collaboration with scientists and local practitioners, to model, predict, and respond to outbreaks around the world. Telenor has openly published its methods and provided technological guidance on how telco data can be used in public health emergencies in a responsible, anonymized format that does not risk de-identification.
  • The Covid-19 Mobility Data Network, of which we are part, comprises a voluntary collaboration of epidemiologists from around the world analyzes aggregated data from technology companies to provide daily insights to city and state officials from California to Dhaka, Bangladesh.
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