Tag Archives: privacy

#NoShare: A Personal Twist on Data Privacy

Posted on September 15, 2013 | 15 comments

Countless computers worldwide automatically fingerprint our use of social media around the clock without our knowledge or consent. So we’re left with the following choice: stay digital and face the Eye of Sauron, or excommunicate ourselves from social media and face digital isolation from society. I’d chose the latter were it not for the life-saving role that social media can play during disasters. So what if there were a third way? An alternative that enabled us to use social media without being fed to the machines. Imagine if the choice were ours. My PopRock Fellows (PopTech & Rockefeller Foundation) and I are pondering this question within the context of ethical community-driven resilience in the era Big Data.

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One result of this pondering is the notion of #noshare or #ns hashtag. We propose using this hashtag on anything that we don’t want sensed and turned into fodder for the machines. This could include Facebook updates, tweets, emails, SMS, post cards, cars, buildings and even our physical selves. Buildings, for example, are increasingly captured by cameras on orbiting satellites and also by high-resolution cameras fixed to cars used for Google Streetview.

The #noshare hashtag is a humble attempt at regaining some agency over the machines—and yes the corporations and governments using said machines. To this end, #noshare is a social hack that seeks to make a public statement and establish a new norm: the right to be social without being sensed or exploited without our knowledge or consent. While traditional privacy may be dead, most of us know the difference between right and wrong. This may foster positive social pressure to respect the use of #noshare.

Think of #ns hashtag as drawing a line in the sand. When you post a public tweet and want that tweet to serve the single purpose of read-only by humans, then add #noshare. This tag simply signals the public sphere that your tweet is for human consumption only, and not to be used by machines; not for download, retweet, copying, analysis, sensing, modeling or prediction. Your use of #noshare regardless of the medium represents your public vote for trust & privacy; a vote for tuning this hashtag into a widespread social norm.

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Of course, this #noshare norm is not enforceable in a traditional sense. This means that one could search for, collect and analyze all tweets with the #noshare or #ns hashtag. We’re well aware of this “Barbara Streisand effect” and there’s nothing we can do about it just yet. But the point is to draw a normative line in the sand, to create a public and social norm that provokes strong public disapproval when people violate the #ns principle. What if this could become a social norm? What if positive social pressure could make it unacceptable to violate this norm? Could this create a deterrence effect?

Either way, the line between right and wrong would be rendered publicly explicit. There would thus be no excuse: any analysis, sensing, copying, etc., of #ns tweets would be the result of a human decision to willingly violate the public norm. This social hack would make it very easy for corporations and governments to command their data mining algorithms to ignore all our digital fingerprints that use the #ns hashtag. Crossing the #noshare line would thus provide basis for social action against the owners of the machines in question. Social pressure is favorable to norm creation. Could #ns eventually become part of a Creative Commons type license?

Obviously, #ns tagged content does not mean that content should not be made public. Contented tagged with #ns is meant to be public, but only for the human public and not for computers to store and analyze. The point is simple: we want the option of being our public digital selves without being mined, sensed and analyzed by machines without our knowledge and consent. In sum, #noshare is an awareness raising initiative that seeks to educate the public about our increasingly sensed environment. Indeed, Big Data = Big Sensing.

We suggest that #ns may return a sense of moral control to individuals, a sense of trust and local agency. These are important elements for social capital and resilience, for ethical, community-driven resilience. If this norm gains traction, we may be able to code this norm into social media platforms. In sum, sensing is not bad; sensing of social media during disasters can save lives. But the decision of whether or not to be sensed should be the decision of the individual.

My PopRock Fellows and I are looking for feedback on this proposal. We’re aware of some of the pitfalls, but are we missing anything? Are there ways to strengthen this campaign? Please let us know in the comments section below. Thank you!

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Acknowledgements: Many thanks to PopRock Fellows Gustavo, Amy, Kate, Claudia and Jer for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this post. 

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Posted in Crowdsourcing, Digital Activism, Social Media

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Launching: SMS Code of Conduct for Disaster Response

Posted on February 25, 2013 | 10 comments

Shortly after the devastating Haiti Earthquake of January 12, 2010, I published this blog post on the urgent need for an SMS code of conduct for disaster response. Several months later, I co-authored this peer-reviewed study on the lessons learned from the unprecedented use of SMS following the Haiti Earth-quake. This week, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2013) in Barcelona, GSMA’s Disaster Response Program organized two panels on mobile technology for disaster response and used the event to launch an official SMS Code of Conduct for Disaster Response (PDF). GSMA members comprise nearly 800 mobile operators based in more than 220 countries.

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Thanks to Kyla Reid, Director for Disaster Response at GSMA, and to Souktel’s Jakob Korenblum, my calls for an SMS code of conduct were not ignored. The three of us spent a considerable amount of time in 2012 drafting and re-drafting a detailed set of principles to guide SMS use in disaster response. During this process, we benefited enormously from many experts on the mobile operators side and the humanitarian community; many of whom are at MWC 2013 for the launch of the guidelines. It is important to note that there have been a number of parallel efforts that our combined work has greatly benefited from. The Code of Conduct we launched this week does not seek to duplicate these important efforts but rather serves to inform GSMA members about the growing importance of SMS use for disaster response. We hope this will help catalyze a closer relationship between the world’s leading mobile operators and the international humanitarian community.

Since the impetus for this week’s launch began in response to the Haiti Earth-quake, I was invited to reflect on the crisis mapping efforts I spearheaded at the time. (My slides for the second panel organized by GSMA are available here. My more personal reflections on the 3rd year anniversary of the earthquake are posted here). For several weeks, digital volunteers updated the Ushahidi-Haiti Crisis Map (pictured above) with new information gathered from hundreds of different sources. One of these information channels was SMS. My colleague Josh Nesbit secured an SMS short code for Haiti thanks to a tweet he posted at 1:38pm on Jan 13th (top left in image below). Several days later, the short code (4636) was integrated with the Ushahidi-Haiti Map.

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We received about 10,000 text messages from the disaster-affected population during the during the Search and Rescue phase. But we only mapped about 10% of these because we prioritized the most urgent and actionable messages. While mapping these messages, however, we had to address a critical issue: data privacy and protection. There’s an important trade-off here: the more open the data, the more widely useable that information is likely to be for professional disaster responders, local communities and the Diaspora—but goodbye privacy.

Time was not a luxury we had; an an entire week had already passed since the earthquake. We were at the tail end of the search and rescue phase, which meant that literally every hour counted for potential survivors still trapped under the rubble. So we immediately reached out to 2 trusted lawyers in Boston, one of them a highly reputable Law Professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy who also a specialist on Haiti. You can read the lawyers’ written email replies along with the day/time they were received on the right-hand side of the slide. Both lawyers opined that consent was implied vis-à-vis the publishing of personal identifying information. We shared this opinion with all team members and partners working with us. We then made a joint decision 24 hours later to move ahead and publish the full content of incoming messages. This decision was supported by an Advisory Board I put together comprised of humanitarian colleagues from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative who agreed that the risks of making this info public were minimal vis-à-vis the principle of Do No Harm. Ushahidi thus launched a micro-tasking platform to crowdsource the translation efforts and hosted this on 4636.Ushahidi.com [link no longer live], which volunteers from the Diaspora used to translate the text messages.

I was able to secure a small amount of funding in March 2010 to commission a fully independent evaluation of our combined efforts. The project was evaluated a year later by seasoned experts from Tulane University. The results were mixed. While the US Marine Corps publicly claimed to have saved hundreds of lives thanks to the map, it was very hard for the evaluators to corroborate this infor-mation during their short field visit to Port-au-Prince more than 12 months after the earthquake. Still, this evaluation remains the only professional, independent and rigorous assessment of Ushahidi and 4636 to date.

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The use of mobile technology for disaster response will continue to increase for years to come. Mobile operators and humanitarian organizations must therefore be pro-active in managing this increase demand by ensuring that the technology is used wisely. I, for one, never again want to spend 24+ precious hours debating whether or not urgent life-and-death text messages can or cannot be mapped because of uncertainties over data privacy and protection—24 hours during a Search and Rescue phase is almost certain to make the difference between life and death. More importantly, however, I am stunned that a bunch of volunteers with little experience in crisis response and no affiliation whatsoever to any established humanitarian organization were able to secure and use an official SMS short code within days of a major disaster. It is little surprise that we made mistakes. So a big thank you to Kyla and Jakob for their leadership and perseverance in drafting and launching GSMA’s official SMS Code of Conduct to make sure the same mistakes are not made again.

While the document we’ve compiled does not solve every possible challenge con-ceivable, we hope it is seen as a first step towards a more informed and responsible use of SMS for disaster response. Rest assured that these guidelines are by no means written in stone. Please, if you have any feedback, kindly share them in the comments section below or privately via email. We are absolutely committed to making this a living document that can be updated.

To connect this effort with the work that my CrisisComputing Team and I are doing at QCRI, our contact at Digicel during the Haiti response had given us the option of sending out a mass SMS broadcast to their 2 million subscribers to get the word out about 4636. (We had thus far used local community radio stations). But given that we were processing incoming SMS’s manually, there was no way we’d be able to handle the increased volume and velocity of incoming text messages following the SMS blast. So my team and I are exploring the use of advanced computing solutions to automatically parse and triage large volumes of text messages posted during disasters. The project, which currently uses Twitter, is described here in more detail.

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Perils of Crisis Mapping: Lessons from Gun Map

Posted on January 23, 2013 | 7 comments

Any CrisisMapper who followed the social firestorm surrounding the gun map published by the Journal News will have noted direct parallels with the perils of Crisis Mapping. The digital and interactive gun map displayed the (lega-lly acquired) names and addresses of 33,614 handgun permit holders in two counties of New York. Entitled “The Gun Owner Next Door,” the project was launched on December 23, 2012 to highlight the extent of gun proliferation in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown. The map has been viewed over 1 million times since. This blog post documents the consequences of the gun map and explains how to avoid making the same mistakes in the field of Crisis Mapping.

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The backlash against Journal News was swift, loud and intense. The interactive map included the names and addresses of police officers and other law enforcement officials such as prison guards. The latter were subsequently threatened by inmates who used the map to find out exactly where they lived. Former crooks and thieves confirmed the map would be highly valuable for planning crimes (“news you can use”). They warned that criminals could easily use the map either to target houses with no guns (to avoid getting shot) or take the risk and steal the weapons themselves. Shotguns and hand-guns have a street value of $300-$400 per gun. This could lead to a proliferation of legally owned guns on the street.

The consequences of publishing the gun map didn’t end there. Law-abiding citizens who do not own guns began to fear for their safety. A Democratic legislator told the media: “I never owned a gun but now I have no choice […]. I have been exposed as someone that has no gun. And I’ll do anything, anything to protect my family.” One resident feared that her ex-husband, who had attempted to kill her in the past, might now be able to find her thanks to the map. There were also consequences for the journalists who published the map. They began to receive death threats and had to station an armed guard outside one of their offices. One disenchanted blogger decided to turn the tables (reverse panopticon) by publishing a map with the names and addresses of key editorial staffers who work at  Journal News. The New York Times reported that the location of the editors’ children’s schools had also been posted online. Suspicious packages containing white powder were also mailed to the newsroom (later found to be harmless).

News about a burglary possibly tied to the gun map began to circulate (although I’m not sure whether the link was ever confirmed). But according to one report, “said burglars broke in Saturday evening, and went straight for the gun safe. But they could not get it open.” Even if there was no link between this specific burglary and the gun map, many county residents fear that their homes have become a target. The map also “demonized” gun owners.

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After weeks of fierce and heated “debate” the Journal News took the map down. But were the journalists right in publishing their interactive gun map in the first place? There was nothing illegal about it. But should the map have been published? In my opinion: No. At least not in that format. The rationale behind this public map makes sense. After all, “In the highly charged debate over guns that followed the shooting, the extent of ownership was highly relevant. […] By publishing the ‘gun map,’ the Journal News gave readers a visceral understanding of the presence of guns in their own community.” (Politico). It was the implementation of the idea that was flawed.

I don’t agree with the criticism that suggests the map was pointless because criminals obviously don’t register their guns. Mapping criminal activity was simply not the rationale behind the map. Also, while Journal News could simply have published statistics on the proliferation of gun ownership, the impact would not have been as … dramatic. Indeed, “ask any editor, advertiser, artist or curator—hell, ask anyone whose ever made a PowerPoint presentation—which editorial approach would be a more effective means of getting the point across” (Politico). No, this is not an endorsement of the resulting map, simply an acknowledgement that the decision to use mapping as a medium for data visualization made sense.

The gun map could have been published without the interactive feature and without corresponding names and addresses. This is eventually what the jour-nalists decided to do, about four weeks later. Aggregating the statistics would have also been an option in order to get away from individual dots representing specific houses and locations. Perhaps a heat map that leaves enough room for geographic ambiguity would have been less provocative but still effective in de-picting the extent of gun proliferation. Finally, an “opt out” feature should have been offered, allowing those owning guns to remove themselves from the map (still in the context of a heat map). Now, these are certainly not perfect solutions—simply considerations that could mitigate some of the negative consequences that come with publishing a hyper-local map of gun ownership.

The point, quite simply, is that there are various ways to map sensitive data such that the overall data visualization is rendered relatively less dangerous. But there is another perhaps more critical observation that needs to be made here. The New York Time’s Bill Keller gets to the heart of the matter in this piece on the gun map:

“When it comes to privacy, we are all hypocrites. We howl when a newspaper publishes public records about personal behavior. At the same time, we are acquiescing in a much more sweeping erosion of our privacy —government surveillance, corporate data-mining, political micro-targeting, hacker invasions—with no comparable outpouring of protest. As a society we have no coherent view of what information is worth defending and how to defend it. When our personal information is exploited this way, we may grumble, or we may seek the largely false comfort of tweaking our privacy settings […].”

In conclusion, the “smoking guns” (no pun intended) were never found. Law enforcement officials and former criminals seemed to imply that thieves would go on a rampage with map in hand. So why did we not see a clear and measurable increase in burglaries? The gun map should obviously have given thieves the edge. But no, all we have is just one unconfirmed report of an unsuccessful crime that may potentially be linked to the map. Surely, there should be an arsenal of smoking guns given all the brouhaha.

In any event, the controversial gun map provides at least six lessons for those of us engaged in crisis mapping complex humanitarian emergencies:

First, just because data is publicly-accessible does not mean that a map of said data is ethical or harmless. Second, there are dozens of ways to visualize and “blur” sensitive data on a map. Third, a threat and risk mitigation strategy should be standard operating procedure for crisis maps. Fourth, since crisis mapping almost always entails risk-taking when tracking conflicts, the benefits that at-risk communities gain from the resulting map must always and clearly outweigh the expected costs. This means carrying out a Cost Benefit Analysis, which goes to the heart of the “Do No Harm” principle. Fifth, a code of conduct on data protection and data security for digital humanitarian response needs to be drafted, adopted and self-enforced; something I’m actively working on with both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and GSMA’s  Disaster Response Program. Sixth, the importance of privacy can—and already has—been hijacked by attention-seeking hypocrites who sensationalize the issue to gain notoriety and paralyze action. Non-action in no way implies no-harm.

Update: Turns out the gan ownership data was highly inaccurate!

See also:

  • Does Digital Crime Mapping Work? Insights on Engagement, Empowerment & Transparency [Link]
  • On Crowdsourcing, Crisis Mapping & Data Protection [Link]
  • What do Travel Guides and  Nazi Germany have to do with Crisis Mapping and Security? [Link]

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Why the Public Does (and Doesn’t) Use Social Media During Disasters

Posted on January 13, 2013 | 6 comments

The University of Maryland has just published an important report on “Social Media Use During Disasters: A Review of the Knowledge Base and Gaps” (PDF). The report summarizes what is empirically known and yet to be determined about social media use pertaining to disasters. The research found that members of the public use social media for many different reasons during disasters:

  • Because of convenience
  • Based on social norms
  • Based on personal recommendations
  • For humor & levity
  • For information seeking
  • For timely information
  • For unfiltered information
  • To determine disaster magnitude
  • To check in with family & friends
  • To self-mobilize
  • To maintain a sense of community
  • To seek emotional support & healing

Conversely, the research also identified reasons why some hesitate to use social media during disasters: (1) privacy and security fears, (2) accuracy concerns, (3) access issues, and (4) knowledge deficiencies. By the latter they mean the lack of knowledge on how to use social media prior to disasters. While these hurdles present important challenges they are far from being insurmountable. Educa-tion, awareness-raising, improving technology access, etc., are all policies that can address the stated constraints. In terms of accuracy, a number of advanced computing research centers such as QCRI are developing methodologies and pro-cesses to quantify credibility on social media. Seasoned journalists have also been developing strategies to verify crowdsourced information on social media.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is privacy, security and ethics. Perhaps the new mathematical technique, “differential privacy,” may provide the necessary break-through to tackle the privacy/security challenge. Scientific American writes that differential privacy “allows for the release of data while meeting a high standard for privacy protection. A differentially private data release algorithm allows researchers to ask practically any question about a database of sensitive informa-tion and provides answers that have been ‘blurred’ so that they reveal virtually nothing about any individual’s data—not even whether the individual was in the database in the first place.”

The approach has already been used in a real-world applications: a Census Bureau project called OnTheMap, “which gives researchers access to agency data. Also, differential privacy researchers have fielded preliminary inquiries from Facebook and the federally funded iDASH center at the University of California, San Diego, whose mandate in large part is to find ways for researchers to share biomedical data without compromising privacy.” So potential solutions are al-ready on the horizon and more research is on the way. This doesn’t mean there are no challenges left. There will absolutely be more. But the point I want to drive home is that we are not completely helpless in the face of these challenges.

The Report concludes with the following questions, which are yet to be answered:

  • What, if any, unique roles do various social media play for commu-nication during disasters?
  • Are some functions that social media perform during disasters more important than others?
  • To what extent can the current body of research be generalized to the U.S. population?
  • To what extent can the research on social media use during a specific disaster type, such as hurricanes, be generalized to another disaster type, such as terrorism?

Have any thoughts on what the answers might be and why? If so, feel free to add them in the comments section below. Incidentally, some of these questions could make for strong graduate theses and doctoral dissertations. To learn more about what people actually tweet during this disasters, see these findings here.

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Posted in Crowdsourcing, Social Media

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Big Data for Development: Challenges and Opportunities

Posted on June 5, 2012 | 5 comments

The UN Global Pulse report on Big Data for Development ought to be required reading for anyone interested in humanitarian applications of Big Data. The purpose of this post is not to summarize this excellent 50-page document but to relay the most important insights contained therein. In addition, I question the motivation behind the unbalanced commentary on Haiti, which is my only major criticism of this otherwise authoritative report.

Real-time “does not always mean occurring immediately. Rather, “real-time” can be understood as information which is produced and made available in a relatively short and relevant period of time, and information which is made available within a timeframe that allows action to be taken in response i.e. creating a feedback loop. Importantly, it is the intrinsic time dimensionality of the data, and that of the feedback loop that jointly define its characteristic as real-time. (One could also add that the real-time nature of the data is ultimately contingent on the analysis being conducted in real-time, and by extension, where action is required, used in real-time).”

Data privacy “is the most sensitive issue, with conceptual, legal, and technological implications.” To be sure, “because privacy is a pillar of democracy, we must remain alert to the possibility that it might be compromised by the rise of new technologies, and put in place all necessary safeguards.” Privacy is defined by the International Telecommunications Union as the “right of individuals to control or influence what information related to them may be disclosed.” Moving forward, “these concerns must nurture and shape on-going debates around data privacy in the digital age in a constructive manner in order to devise strong principles and strict rules—backed by adequate tools and systems—to ensure “privacy-preserving analysis.”

Non-representative data is often dismissed outright since findings based on such data cannot be generalized beyond that sample. “But while findings based on non-representative datasets need to be treated with caution, they are not valueless […].” Indeed, while the “sampling selection bias can clearly be a challenge, especially in regions or communities where technological penetration is low […],  this does not mean that the data has no value. For one, data from “non-representative” samples (such as mobile phone users) provide representative information about the sample itself—and do so in close to real time and on a potentially large and growing scale, such that the challenge will become less and less salient as technology spreads across and within developing countries.”

Perceptions rather than reality is what social media captures. Moreover, these perceptions can also be wrong. But only those individuals “who wrongfully assume that the data is an accurate picture of reality can be deceived. Furthermore, there are instances where wrong perceptions are precisely what is desirable to monitor because they might determine collective behaviors in ways that can have catastrophic effects.” In other words, “perceptions can also shape reality. Detecting and understanding perceptions quickly can help change outcomes.”

False data and hoaxes are part and parcel of user-generated content. While the challenges around reliability and verifiability are real, Some media organizations, such as the BBC, stand by the utility of citizen reporting of current events: “there are many brave people out there, and some of them are prolific bloggers and Tweeters. We should not ignore the real ones because we were fooled by a fake one.” And have thus devised internal strategies to confirm the veracity of the information they receive and chose to report, offering an example of what can be done to mitigate the challenge of false information.” See for example my 20-page study on how to verify crowdsourced social media data, a field I refer to as information forensics. In any event, “whether false negatives are more or less problematic than false positives depends on what is being monitored, and why it is being monitored.”

“The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has developed a system that monitors Twitter for significant spikes in the volume of messages about earthquakes,” and as it turns out, 90% of user-generated reports that trigger an alert have turned out to be valid. “Similarly, a recent retrospective analysis of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston demonstrated that mining Twitter and online news reports could have provided health officials a highly accurate indication of the actual spread of the disease with two weeks lead time.”

This leads to the other Haiti example raised in the report, namely the finding that SMS data was correlated with building damage. Please see my previous blog posts here and here for context. What the authors seem to overlook is that Benetech apparently did not submit their counter-findings for independent peer-review whereas the team at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center did—and the latter passed the peer-review process. Peer-review is how rigorous scientific work is validated. The fact that Benetech never submitted their blog post for peer-review is actually quite telling.

In sum, while this Big Data report is otherwise strong and balanced, I am really surprised that they cite a blog post as “evidence” while completely ignoring the JRC’s peer-reviewed scientific paper published in the Journal of the European Geosciences Union. Until counter-findings are submitted for peer review, the JRC’s results stand: unverified, non-representative crowd-sourced text messages from the disaster affected population in Port-au-Prince that were in turn translated from Haitian Creole to English via a novel crowdsourced volunteer effort and subsequently geo-referenced by hundreds of volunteers  which did not undergo any quality control, produced a statistically significant, positive correlation with building damage.

In conclusion, “any challenge with utilizing Big Data sources of information cannot be assessed divorced from the intended use of the information. These new, digital data sources may not be the best suited to conduct airtight scientific analysis, but they have a huge potential for a whole range of other applications that can greatly affect development outcomes.”

One such application is disaster response. Earlier this year, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, gave a superb presentation on “Real Time Awareness” in which he relayed an example of how he and his team used Big Data (twitter) during a series of devastating tornadoes in 2011:

“Mr. Fugate proposed dispatching relief supplies to the long list of locations immediately and received pushback from his team who were concerned that they did not yet have an accurate estimate of the level of damage. His challenge was to get the staff to understand that the priority should be one of changing outcomes, and thus even if half of the supplies dispatched were never used and sent back later, there would be no chance of reaching communities in need if they were in fact suffering tornado damage already, without getting trucks out immediately. He explained, “if you’re waiting to react to the aftermath of an event until you have a formal assessment, you’re going to lose 12-to-24 hours…Perhaps we shouldn’t be waiting for that. Perhaps we should make the assumption that if something bad happens, it’s bad. Speed in response is the most perishable commodity you have…We looked at social media as the public telling us enough information to suggest this was worse than we thought and to make decisions to spend [taxpayer] money to get moving without waiting for formal request, without waiting for assessments, without waiting to know how bad because we needed to change that outcome.”

“Fugate also emphasized that using social media as an information source isn’t a precise science and the response isn’t going to be precise either. “Disasters are like horseshoes, hand grenades and thermal nuclear devices, you just need to be close— preferably more than less.”

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Stranger than Fiction: A Few Words About An Ethical Compass for Crisis Mapping

Posted on February 12, 2012 | 11 comments

The good people at the Sudan Sentinel Project (SSP), housed at my former “alma matter,” the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), have recently written this curious piece on crisis mapping and the need for an “ethical compass” in this new field. They made absolutely sure that I’d read the piece by directly messaging me via the @CrisisMappers twitter feed. Not to worry, good people, I read your masterpiece. Interestingly enough, it was published the day after my blog post reviewing IOM’s data protection standards.

To be honest, I was actually not going to spend any time writing up a response because the piece says absolutely nothing new and is hardly pro-active. Now, before any one spins and twists my words: the issues they raise are of paramount importance. But if the authors had actually taken the time to speak with their fellow colleagues at HHI, they would know that several of us participated in a brilliant workshop last year which addressed these very issues. Organized by World Vision, the workshop included representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Care International, Oxfam GB, UN OCHA, UN Foundation, Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF), Ushahidi, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and obviously Word Vision. There were several data protection experts at this workshop, which made the event one of the most important workshops I attended in all of 2011. So a big thanks again to Phoebe Wynn-Pope at World Vision for organizing.

We discussed in-depth issues surrounding Do No Harm, Informed Consent, Verification, Risk Mitigation, Ownership, Ethics and Communication, Impar-tiality, etc. As expected, the outcome of the workshop was the clear need for data protection standards that are applicable for the new digital context we operate in, i.e., a world of social media, crowdsourcing and volunteer geographical informa-tion. Our colleagues at the ICRC have since taken the lead on drafting protocols relevant to a data 2.0 world in which volunteer networks and disaster-affected communities are increasingly digital. We expect to review this latest draft in the coming weeks (after Oxfam GB has added their comments to the document). Incidentally, the summary report of the workshop organized by World Vision is available here (PDF) and highly recommended. It was also shared on the Crisis Mappers Google Group. By the way, my conversations with Phoebe about these and related issues began at this conference in November 2010, just a month after the SBTF launched.

I should confess the following: one of my personal pet peeves has to do with people stating the total obvious and calling for action but actually doing absolutely nothing else. Talk for talk’s sake just makes it seem like the authors of the article are simply looking for attention. Meanwhile, many of us are working on these new data protection challenges in our own time, as volunteers. And by the way, the SSP project is first and foremost focused on satellite imagery analysis and the Sudan, not on crowdsourcing or on social media. So they’re writing their piece as outsiders and, well, are hence less informed as a result—particularly since they didn’t do their homework.

Their limited knowledge of crisis mapping is blatantly obvious throughout the article. Not only do the authors not reference the World Vision workshop, which HHI itself attended, they also seem rather confused about the term “crisis mappers” which they keep using. This is somewhat unfortunate since the Crisis Mappers Network is an offshoot of HHI. Moreover, SSP participated and spoke at last year’s Crisis Mappers Conference—just a few months ago, in fact. One outcome of this conference was the launch of a dedicated Working Group on Security and Privacy, which will now become two groups, one addressing security issues and the other data protection. This information was shared on the Crisis Mappers Google Group and one of the authors is actually part of the Security Working Group.

To this end, one would have hoped, and indeed expected, that the authors would write a somewhat more informed piece about these issues. At the very least, they really ought to have documented some of the efforts to date in this innovative space. But they didn’t and unfortunately several statements they make in their article are, well… completely false and rather revealing at the same time. (Incidentally, the good people at SSP did their best to disuade the SBTF from launching a Satellite Team on the premise that only experts are qualified to tag satellite imagery; seems like they’re not interested in citizen science even though some experts I’ve spoken to have referred to SSP as citizen science).

In any case, the authors keep on referring to “crisis mappers this” and “crisis mappers that” throughout their article. But who exactly are they referring to? Who knows. On the one hand, there is the International Network of Crisis Mappers, which is a loose, decentralized, and informal network of some 3,500 members and 1,500 organizations spanning 150+ countries. Then there’s the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF), a distributed, global network of 750+ volunteers who partner with established organizations to support live mapping efforts. And then, easily the largest and most decentralized “group” of all, are all those “anonymous” individuals around the world who launch their own maps using whatever technologies they wish and for whatever purposes they want. By the way, to define crisis mapping as mapping highly volatile and dangerous conflict situations is really far from being accurate either. Also, “equating” crisis mapping with crowdsourcing, which the authors seem to do, is further evidence that they are writing about a subject that they have very little understanding of. Crisis mapping is possible without crowdsourcing or social media. Who knew?

Clearly, the authors are confused. They appear to refer to “crisis mappers” as if the group were a legal entity, with funding, staff, administrative support and brick-and-mortar offices. Furthermore, and what the authors don’t seem to realize, is that much of what they write is actually true of the formal professional humanitarian sector vis-a-vis the need for new data protection standards. But the authors have obviously not done their homework, and again, this shows. They are also confused about the term “crisis mapping” when they refer to “crisis mapping data” which is actually nothing other than geo-referenced data. Finally, a number of paragraphs in the article have absolutely nothing to do with crisis mapping even though the authors seem insinuate otherwise. Also, some of the sensationalism that permeates the article is simply unnecessary and poor taste.

The fact of the matter is that the field of crisis mapping is maturing. When Dr. Jennifer Leaning and I co-founded and co-directed HHI’s Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning from 2007-2009, the project was very much an exploratory, applied-research program. When Dr. Jen Ziemke and I launched the Crisis Mappers Network in 2009, we were just at the beginning of a new experiment. The field has come a long way since and one of the consequences of rapid innovation is obviously the lack of any how-to-guide or manual. These certainly need to be written and are being written.

So, instead of  stating the obvious, repeating the obvious, calling for the obvious and making embarrassing factual errors in a public article (which, by the way, is also quite revealing of the underlying motives), perhaps the authors could actually have done some research and emailed the Crisis Mappers Google Group. Two of the authors also have my email address; one even has my private phone number; oh, and they could also have DM’d me on Twitter like they just did.

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Humanitarian Technologies, Satellite Imagery, Social Media

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On Crowdsourcing, Crisis Mapping and Data Protection Standards

Posted on February 5, 2012 | 12 comments

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) just published their official Data Protection Manual. This report is hugely informative and should be required reading. At the same time, the 150-page report does not mention social media even once. This is perfectly understandable given IOM’s work, but there is no denying that disaster-affected communities are becoming more digitally-enabled—and thus increasingly the source of important, user-generated information. Moreover, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how to apply all of IOM’s Data Protection Principles to this new digital context and the work of the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF).

The IOM Manual recommends that a risk-benefit assessment be conducted prior to data collection. This means weighing the probability of harm against the anticipated benefits and ensuring that the latter significantly outweigh the potential risks. But IOM explains that “the risk–benefit assessment is not a technical evaluation that is valid under all circumstances. Rather, it is a value judgement that often depends on various factors, including, inter alia, the prevailing social, cultural and religious attitudes of the target population group or individual data subject.”

The Manual also states that data collectors should always put themselves in the shoes of the data subject and consider: “How would a reasonable person, in the position of data subject, react to the data collection and data processing practices?” Again, this a value judgment rather than a technical evaluation. Applying this consistently across IOM will no doubt be a challenge.

The IOM Principles, which form the core of the manual, are as follows (keep in mind that they are obviously written with IOM’s mandate explicitly in mind):

1. Lawful & Fair Collection
2. Specified and Legitimate Purpose
3. Data quality
4. Consent
5. Transfer to Third Parties
6. Confidentiality
7. Access and Transparency
8. Data Security
9. Retention of Personal Data
10. Application of the Principles
11. Ownership of Personal Data
12. Oversight, Compliance & Internal Remedies
13. Exceptions

Take the first principle, which states that “Personal data must be obtained by lawful and fair means with the knowledge or consent of the data subject.” What does this mean when the data is self-generated and voluntarily placed in the public domain? This question also applies to a number of other principles including “Consent” and “Confidentiality”. In the section on “Consent”, the manual lists various ways that consent can be acquired. Perhaps the most a propos to our discussion is “Implicit Consent: no oral declaration or written statement is obtained, but the action or inaction of the data subjects un-equivocally indicates voluntary participation in the IOM project.”

Indeed, during the Ushahidi-Haiti Crisis Mapping Project (UHP), a renowned professor and lawyer at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy was consulted to determine whether or not text messages from the disaster-affected community could be added to a public map). This professor stated there was “Implicit Consent” to map these text messages. (Incidentally, experts at Harvard’s Berkman Center were also consulted on this question at the time).

The first IOM principle further stipulates that “communication with data subjects should be encouraged at all stages of the data collection process.” But what if this communication poses a danger to the data subject? The manual further states that “Personal data should be collected in a safe and secure environment and data controllers should take all necessary steps to ensure that individual vulnerabilities and potential risks are not enhanced.” What if data subjects are not in a safe and secure environment but nevertheless voluntarily share potentially important information on social media channels?

Perhaps the only guidance provided by IOM on this question is as follows: “Data controllers should choose the most appropriate method of data collection that will enhance efficiency and protect the confidentiality of the personal data collected.” But again, what if the data subject has already volunteer information with their personal data and placed this information in the public domain?

The third principle, “Data Quality” is obviously key but the steps provided to ensure accuracy are difficult to translate within the context of crowdsourced information from the social media space. The same is true of several IOM Data Protection Principles. But some are certainly applicable with modification. Take the seventh principle on “Access and Transparency” which recommends that complaint procedures should be relatively straightforward so that data subjects can easily request to rectify or delete content previously collected from them.

“Data Security”, the eighth principle, is also directly applicable. For example, data from social media could be classified according the appropriate level of sensitivity and treated accordingly. During the response to the Haiti earthquake, for example, we kept new information on the location of orphans confidential, sharing this only with trusted colleagues in the humanitarian community. “Separating personal data from non-personal data” is another procedure that can (and has) been used in crisis mapping projects. This is for me an absolutely crucial point. Depending on the situation, we need to separate information mana-gement systems that contain data with personal identifiers from crisis mapping platforms. Obviously, the former thus need to be more secure. Encryption is also proposed for data security and applicable to crisis mapping.

The tenth IOM principle, i.e., “The Application of the Principles”, provides additional guidance on how to implement data protection and security. For example, the manual describes three appropriate methods for depersonalizing data: data-coding;  pseudonymization; and anonymization. Each of these could be applied to crisis mapping projects.

To conclude, the IOM Data Protection Manual is an important contribution and some of the principles described therein can be applied to crowdsourcing and crisis mapping. I look forward to folding these into the workflows and standard operating procedures of the SBTF (with guidance from the SBTF’s Advisory Board and other experts). There still remains a gap, however, vis-a-vis those IOM principles that are not easily customizable for the context in which the SBTF operates. There is also an issue vis-a-vis the Terms of Service of many social media platforms with respect to privacy and data protection standards.

This explains why I am actively collaborating with a major humanitarian organi-zation to explore the development of appropriate data protection standards for crowdsourcing crisis information in the context of social media. Many humanitarian organizations are struggling with these exact same issues. Yes, these organizations have long had data privacy and protection protocols in place but these were designed for a world devoid of social media. One major social media company is also looking to revisit its terms of service agreements given the increasing relevance of their platform in humanitarian response. The challenge, for all, will be to strike the right balance between innovation and regulation.

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Social Media

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Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management

Posted on July 9, 2011 | 7 comments

“Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management: Online Dispute Resolution, Governance, Participation” is the title of a new book edited by Marta Poblet. I recently met Marta in Vienna, Austria during the UN Expert Meeting on Croudsource Mapping organized by UN SPIDER. I’m excited that her book has just launched. The chapters are is divided into 3 sections: Disruptive Applications of Mobile Technologies; Towards a Mobile ODR; and Mobile Technologies: New Challenges for Governance, Privacy and Security.

The book includes chapters by several colleagues of mine like Mike Best on “Mobile Phones in Conflict Stressed Environments”, Ken Banks on “Appropriate Mobile Technologies,” Oscar Salazar and Jorge Soto on “How to Crowdsource Election Monitoring in 30 Days,” Jacok Korenblum and Bieta Andemariam on “How Souktel Uses SMS Technology to Empower and Aid in Conflict-Affected Communities,” and Emily Jacobi on “Burma: A Modern Anomaly.”

My colleagues Jessica Heinzelman, Rachel Brown and myself also contributed one of the chapters. I include the introduction below.

I had long wanted to collaborate on a peer-reviewed chapter in which I could combine my earlier study of conflict resolution theory with my experience in conflict early warning and crisis mapping. See also this earlier blog post on “Crowdsourcing for Peace Mapping.”  I’ve been a big fan of Will Ury’s approach ever since coming across his work while at Columbia University back in 2003. Little did I know then that I’d be co-authoring this book chapter with two new stellar colleagues. Rachel has taken much of this thinking and applied it to the real world in her phenomenal project called Sisi ni Amni, or “We Are Peace.” You can follow them on Twitter. Jessica now serves on their Advisory Board.

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Early Warning, Social Media

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