Experts say one of the things that went wrong with America’s reaction to the U. S. But it’s not the first time The COVID-19 was the search for touches, or his absence. In the absence of a federal program for this purpose, touch tracking has been one-on-one. shooting effort involving states that hire tracers themselves, too few and too late; and various public and usage entities that create smartphone apps to track people’s whereabouts and tell them later if they come across a user who carries the virus. Anticipating the ongoing need for this generation and the diversity of disruptions it creates, from smartphone access to knowledge. privacy to surveillance abuses, the MacArthur Foundation announced on July 30 that it would distribute $1. 6 million to a handful of study organizations to locate tactics that would make those teams fairer and safer.
Some grants had not yet been circulated last week, however, a press release on the main points of the foundation the five beneficiaries as follows:
In short, grants will not produce teams to locate contacts themselves, but will create rules, at the local, state, national and foreign levels, on how the government or personal entities can do so in a responsible manner. Eric Sears, senior program manager The MacArthur Foundation, which runs its Technology program in the public interest, said the organization had developed the grant package as a networking and information gathering effort that went beyond a single entity.
“At the highest fundamental level, programs count and rely on the use of the smartphone generation,” he said. “While the smartphone generation is broader, there is an asymmetric distribution of it, and if you look at where the uptake is lowest, which includes traditionally underserved communities in the United States, and we know that those Array populations . . . were disproportionately affected by the COVID crisis. “
Sears said the base had listened conscientiously to traditionally marginalized teams about what it called “the dual pandemic of COVID-19 and anti-black racism. ” He said his considerations – combined through universal considerations of how knowledge is used, who can use it, where and for how long it is stored – motivated the $ 1. 6 million investment.
“We listened to the problems faced by policymakers regarding the use of generation to respond to COVID-19,” he said. “And also, as a global foundation, we are interested in finding opportunities to create links between what is happening in other parts of the world and how it might happen to us here in the United States, and even locally in Chicago. “
At Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center, Chief Executive Urs Gasser said a persistent challenge in the world with these technologies is the fragmentation of experience: other people who know a lot about the generation don’t necessarily know public aptitude, and vice versa. freedom issues, but experts in this field may not be in communication with technologists or public fitness experts.
To solve this problem, the Berkman Klein Center is creating a functioning organization and channeling its expertise into a program called BKC Policy Practice: Digital Pandemic Response. The main public for this will be governments.
“Think of it as a legal clinic without an appointment. You can present your inquiry or problem, and we can combine this problem, bring combined experts from those other disciplines and paintings on public policy responses to provide other stakeholders,” Gasser said. “One of the first classes learned in some of these conversations is the importance of accepting as true with and the difficulty, especially in a time of crisis like the existing crisis, of building to accept as true with. , there is not much confidence, given the circumstances. This formation of trust . . . wants many interested parties.
Gasser cited Switzerland as an example of a government that its citizens accept as true and that seemed to have done everything right: implement a proximity location app with Google’s secure framework, conduct pre-verification investigations, and discover that other people were more likely to do so. Accept as true with an application if you marked yourself through the federal fitness firm instead of a university or generation company, and have not yet adopted it all.
“One of the reasons, when you ask other people after publication, is that there are still doubts about what happens to the data, what’s the role of Google and Apple, and all that. Secondly . . . other people weren’t in a position to make decisions, for example, do I automatically stay home for two weeks if I don’t have symptoms?He said, it is therefore desirable that, even in the most productive circumstances, there should be those who are accepted as true with disorders. an environment like here in the United States, under existing conditions, is incredibly complex and has a long history. “
Gasser admitted that the big challenge is how to make these programs useful and useful in the low-income communities that want them most; how to ensure the fairness of a pandemic tool that is based on an unevenly distributed resource, such as smartphone technology. I didn’t have an answer, but I was under pressure on the importance of bringing disadvantaged communities to the table. Berkman Klein Center members also wrote an opinion paper in the New York Times in July, asking governors to come together and design a check infrastructure that is more available to underned communities.
Gasser said that when it comes to convincing others to download apps, it’s not just about the message, it’s about the messenger, who trusts the network you want to get the message.
“These are structural inequalities that have a long history, are systemic, and you can’t just take a solutionist approach, whether it’s an application that needs to expand or anything else. It’s incredibly complex,” he said. In terms of a global approach, I think what we’re seeing on a global scale is running with communities and adding communities to the tool creation procedure you’re generating, whether it’s an app, a workflow, an awareness campaign. . . Make sure you have representative and inclusive design procedures. »
At the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which conducts interdisciplinary studies on generation and security issues other than human rights, the new $ 250,000 grant will be more foreign in scope. The lab’s founder and director, Ron Deibert, said their efforts included 4 areas of precedence, the first of which you’ll read about censorship on Chinese social media platforms like WeChat and YY. The moment will read about emergency measures and policies similar to COVID-19 in Southeast Asia, assessing whether they have empowered government or military agencies to put civil society in the lab it already has, but the grant can do more. large these paintings to other regions, adding the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and others.
“Many of these countries are already facing demanding democratic situations in some way,” he said. “The pandemic is supposed to be used here as a means of strengthening the bureaucracy of the illegitimate regime, so we must stick to this very carefully. “
Deibert said the third domain of activity of laboratory misinformation, for which they had already made follow-up paints in government-sponsored campaigns in Russia and Iran.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of mis information around COVID-19. A lot of other people are already following that,” he said. We haven’t started looking at this systematically, but once we get the grant, I’ll probably promote it for a postdoctoral researcher or fellow who specializes in this domain to take a course and see what we can locate. “
Finally, The Citizen Lab will analyze corporations in the US. But it’s not the first time And outdoors in the U. S. They are taking a step forward with touch tracking programs and location services. Deibert said the personal sector of location tracking equipment is generally not well regulated and said many companies are not making all the effort they deserve to protect their own knowledge-gathering practices, so knowledge violations are common.
To compare those applications, Deibert said, The Citizen Lab downloads them, reverse engineers them, examines your network traffic, and attempts to gain a concept of architecture and design principles related to them. For example, he claimed that the lab had tested a United Arab Emirates to look for the application of interest to Amnesty International and had discovered that it was more or less a form of spyware.
But in addition to suspicious software in the United Arab Emirates or the Philippines, what about Western democracies?Deibert said some of the lab’s considerations for the West related to accidental consequences, for example, which could happen if governments standardized the concept of tracking people. to send that knowledge to companies, law enforcement or other third parties.
“We already know that the use of alpassrhythms, for example through police and law enforcement, can exacerbate the types of discrimination around racialized police services. COVID hits marginalized communities that are already worse off than others. the generation used to monitor staff when they move on to paintings, which can be used by coincidence for another bureaucracy of discrimination or unfair painting practices,” he said. With all this knowledge collected, to what extent purposes that have not much to do with the pandemic will be used for national security?”
As with other MacArthur Fellows, citizen Lab’s contribution to search and fair contacts will be primarily investigated. Deibert said the lab publishes independently on its own website, as well as in peer-reviewed journals and other educational platforms. a sunset for this short-term search.
“Many of those apps, once installed, probably won’t go away,” he said. “New practices are being set up around police surveillance, emergency measures and surveillance technologies that will be with us after the pandemic has disappeared. stay with that for a while. “
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Andrew Westrope is editor of Government Technology. Before that, he was a reporter and editor of network newspapers for seven years. He holds a bachelor’s degree in body structure from Michigan State University and lives in Northern California.
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