Four short links: 7 December 2017
Measurement, Value, Privacy, and Openness
- Emerging Gov Tech: Measurement — presenters from inside and outside of government to share how they were using measurement to inform decision-making. The hologram reminding people to dump biosecurity material was nifty, and the Whare Hauora project is much needed in a country with a lot of dank draughty houses.
- When Is a Dollar Not a Dollar — a dollar of cost savings is worth one dollar to the customer, but a dollar of extra revenue is usually worth dimes or pennies (depending on the customer’s profit margin).
- Learning with Privacy at Scale (Apple) — about their differential privacy work. Their attention to detail is lovely. Whenever an event is generated on-device, the data is immediately privatized via local differential privacy and temporarily stored on-device using data protection, rather than being immediately transmitted to the server. After a delay based on device conditions, the system randomly samples from the differentially private records subject to the above limit and sends the sampled records to the server.
- When Open Data is a Trojan Horse: The Weaponization of Transparency in Science and Governance — We suggest that legislative efforts that invoke the language of data transparency can sometimes function as ‘‘Trojan Horses’’ through which other political goals are pursued. Framing these maneuvers in the language of transparency can be strategic, because approaches that emphasize open access to data carry tremendous appeal, particularly in current political and technological contexts.
