S05E07: Data Bill of Rights, the 3 I's, Decarbonization
Today we're looking at some fresh thinking around data rights as well as decarbonization, and some pretty unexpected angles of potential surveillance.
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Data Bill of Rights
Well-thought out piece about data rights by Martin Tisné of Omidyar's Luminate group. I wasn't aware of his work, but I'll be following much more closely going forward. In it, he re-frames data rights away from the (data-commercial) focus on data ownership to a much more fundamental human right. It's something I've believed to be true for quite some time, too. But it's not easy to solve, so I especially appreciate that he doesn't try to also come up with the be-all and end-all list of points this bill of rights should be comprised of. Excellent! Here are a couple of previews:
"Data rights should protect privacy, and should account for the fact that privacy is not a reactive right to shield oneself from society. It is about freedom to develop the self away from commerce and away from governmental control. But data rights are not only about privacy. Like other rights—to freedom of speech, for example—data rights are fundamentally about securing a space for individual freedom and agency while participating in modern society."
Also (highlights mine):
"“data ownership” is a category error with pernicious consequences: you can’t really own most of your data, and even if you could, it often wouldn’t protect you from unfair practices. Why, then, is the idea of data ownership such a popular solution? (…) The answer is that policy experts and technologists too often tacitly accept the concept of “data capitalism.” They see data either as a source of capital (e.g., Facebook uses data about me to target ads) or as a product of labor (e.g., I should be paid for the data that is produced about me). It is neither of these things. Thinking of data as we think of a bicycle, oil, or money fails to capture how deeply relationships between citizens, the state, and the private sector have changed in the data era. A new paradigm for understanding what data is—and what rights pertain to it—is urgently needed if we are to forge an equitable 21st-century polity."
In related notes:
- I like Jon Evans' framing of privacy as a commons rather than a commodity.
- Chinese database that tracks the movement of the Uyghur Muslim population was left online unprotected, exposing tons of personal data.
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Consider the 3 I's
I wrote a blog! (That's how the kids say it these days, innit?)
When discussing how to make sure that tech works to enrich society — rather than extract value from many for the benefit of a few — we often see a focus on incentives. I argue that that’s not enough: We need to consider and align incentives, interests, and implications.
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Decarbonize the world
Ramez Naam, researcher, computer scientist and sci-fi author, is a really smart guy with a strong sense of purpose, and one I think highly of. The few times we met I found him both incredibly well-informed and also arguing with a clarity I found refreshing. So when he talks about climate change and potential ways to tackle it, I tend to listen closely.
He's written up a longer post on TechCrunch, nominally about the Green New Deal, but really about the way we might go about approaching energy/climate policy and regulation. I recommend reading it, it's as straightforward as a whole as it was surprising to me in some details. Some quotes to get you started:
good climate policy has 3 key traits:
- It has a large, meaningful impact on carbon emissions and climate change.
- It specifically tackles the problems that aren’t already being tackled by the market.
- It actually gets passed into law.
He points to the US being the world's largest overall contributor to climate change so far with a (hugely disproportionate) 15% of global carbon emissions but cutting this won't be enough — we have to de-carbonize the world.
A huge leverage he sees is public investment to jumpstart carbon-reducing technologies, much like Germany's (and later China's and the US's) investment in regenerative energy like solar and wind has lowered the prices of the technology, and the resulting energy, for everyone (highlights by the original author):
"Almost all technologies improve via Wright’s Law, often referred to as the learning curve or the experience curve. In the late 1930s, Theodore Paul Wright, an aeronautical engineer, observed that every doubling of production of US aircraft brought down prices by 13%. Since then, a similar effect has been found in nearly every technology area, going back to the Ford Model T. Electricity from solar power, meanwhile, drops in cost by 25-30% for every doubling in scale. Battery costs drop around 20-30% per doubling of scale. Wind power costs drop by 15-20% for every doubling. Scale leads to learning, and learning leads to lower costs…
By scaling the clean energy industries, Germany lowered the price of solar and wind for everyone, worldwide, forever."
This, in tandem with some market competition, might just hit the sweet spot:
"The lesson for US climate policy is clear: The biggest impact we can have is by driving down the cost of technologies that reduce carbon emissions, to the point that clean technologies are cheapest way to provide the energy, food, and transportation that everyone around the world desires, and then spreading those technologies to the world. That means a mix of early-stage government R&D, government incentives to scale deployment in the private sector, and a very healthy dollop of private sector competition."
But here's an angle that to be honest I hadn't considered: That electricity and cars are big problems, sure, but they're "also the areas where we’ve made the most progress, with incredible declines in the price of clean electricity and electric vehicles that put us at the edge of a tipping point. We aren’t over the hump yet, but the solutions are here – and if we continue to push them with policy, we can decarbonize electricity and cars."
"Our hardest climate problems – the ones that are both large and lack obvious solutions – are agriculture (and deforestation – its major side effect) and industry. Together these are 45% of global carbon emissions. And solutions are scarce. Agriculture and land use account for 24% of all human emissions. That’s nearly as much as electricity, and twice as much all the world’s passenger cars combined…"
"Cows should scare you more than coal."
Ramez goes on to propose a number of pretty concrete approaches for setting up the research and policy infrastructure if you will — the kind of investment structures and regulatory frameworks that might put us on the right track.
In the meantime, I hope that the EU states get their shit together as well, between a dysfunctional US government and a Chinese government that's been advancing a (surprising?) number of green initiatives, there's more than enough need to pull the world more strongly into a sustainable direction. After all, for all the talk about data here, data isn't everything. 🌈
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Miscellanea
Quantum what? Excellent thread on the state of quantum computing, sorting hype from facts. I learned a lot.
EU Copyright Reform = bad. A highly controversial shitty copyright reform law that might or might not be passed on the European level soon. It contains some exquisitely bad lobbyist language that clearly aims at offering publishers a direct revenue line from Google and Facebook, which is bad enough. But it's also phrased so badly that it is likely to have pretty extreme collateral damage for everyone who quotes things online. Summary (in English) by David Meyer: "The Copyright Directive made it through trilogue negotiations and is now heading for the finish line, with the rather horrible Articles 11 and 13 in tow, if not entirely intact. Article 11, which is designed to whack Google with the EU-wide introduction of ancillary copyright, now comes with an exemption for "individual words or very short extracts of a press publication" – hooray for the freedom to reproduce individual words! Article 13 will still pretty much force everyone to install upload filters." (Will this newsletter even still legal in its current form? It probably won't be if this passes and holds up in court, because there's no way I could possibly license all the quotes etc. I work with.) Here's a good overview of where we stand with this.
Oh by the way, there's a mic in your device. "If you bought into Google’s Nest Secure home security and alarm system, you probably won’t have realized until this month that the system’s devices contain hidden microphones. That’s because Google forgot to tell you." (Fortune) That's right, Google included mics in internet-connected smart home security devices and did not mention them. (Makes me wonder if we should have kept the simple question "do you label what types of sensors are embedded in your device?" as part of the Trustable Technology Mark assessment. At the time it didn't make the cut because it seemed to basic. 🙄)
Sky Net is coming to the US. Speaking of unexpected surveillance, the South China Morning Post reports that the US (NYC specifically) is buying facial recognition software from a state-owned Chinese company. "The surveillance tools are identical to those used in Sky Net in China, the largest video surveillance system on Earth, Chinese government research institutes and a company involved in the project said." The Sky Net program, for those who are not familiar with it, "now renamed Pingan Chengshi, or Safe Cities, claimed to have connected 170 million cameras across China last year. By 2020, another 400 million units will be installed, it said, casting a watchful eye on every two citizens. Beijing plans to be able to identify anyone, anytime, anywhere in China within three seconds." I wonder how reliably hard the newly collected data can be firewalled from the company that makes/owns the software? But hey, what could possibly go wrong.
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What's next?
Wrapping up the administrational bits of my Mozilla Fellowship, then off to Lisbon for a conference and a couple of panels around European Large-Scale IoT Pilots. For ThingsCon, we're putting together a small un-conference-style event with peers (Berlin, 24 May 2019). If you'd like to join, please let me know and I'll send you on an invitation.
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If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability, so let's have a chat! I'm currently doing the planning for Q2 and Q3 2019.
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I wish you an excellent rest of the week, and a relaxing weekend.
Yours truly,
Peter
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018-19, Peter is a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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Images: Public Domain Review, The Art of Book Covers (1820–1914). Unsplash (erika akire/@itteqimasu)