Open banking, crowdsourced ethics & the predictive power of cars
Welcome to The Web This Week, a weekly rundown of stories our team has been reading. Want to share it with a friend? They can sign up here.
‘Fake news’ engagement up in 2017 — Despite Facebook’s efforts to stamp out ‘fake news’, the most viral hoaxes in 2017 got more engagement than everon the platform, according to research from Buzzfeed.
Wide reach, little impact — New research on ‘fake news’ ahead of the US 2016 election suggests that while false stories were widely read, they made up just a fraction of readers’ news diets: one percent among Clinton supporters and six percent among those who supported Trump (New York Times).
AI school inspectors — The UK National Association of Head Teachers has criticised plans to use machine learning algorithms to measure performance of UK schools and prioritise school inspections (BBC).
Crowdsourced ethics — Two researchers building decision-making algorithms for self-driving cars are using a dataset of 18 million votes from humans asked how they would react in various collision scenarios. Critics point out that this approach doesn’t make an AI ethical — it makes it as ethical or unethical as aggregate humans (The Outline).
Counting cars, predicting politics — Stanford University researchers have used AI and image-recognition technology to analyse US neighbourhoodsusing Google Street View data — accurately predicting income, race, education and voting patterns by analysing cars in 50 million images (New York Times).
Opening up banking — Open banking rules come into effect in the UK this month, requiring that banks allow customers to share their data with third-parties (BBC). These changes have the potential to shake up a stagnant banking sector, writes Rowland Manthorpe in a Wired piece about Nesta’s Open Up Challenge — a competition for startups building financial products for small businesses.
Open contracting in Colombia — María Victoria Angulo, the education secretary for Bogotá, wrote in the Guardian about how the city used Colombia’s new open contracting data to overhaul the procurement of food for the city’s schools, reducing costs and improving transparency.
Beneficial ownership data — The OpenOwnership Register has been updated with Ukrainian beneficial ownership data, including the beneficial owners of 240,000 of Ukranian companies.
Congressional Review Act — The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published the final version of its plan to undermine net neutrality rules on Thursday. Fight for the Future, a pro-net neutrality organisation, is calling for supporters to ask their Representatives to use the Congressional Review Act(CRA) to stop the repeal of net neutrality.
The wide impact of repeal — Devex’s Catherine Cheney asks what the repeal of net neutrality means for development and speaks to a number of experts, including Alliance for Affordable Internet Senior Research Manager Dhanaraj Thakur, about how the US decision affects markets overseas.
2018 game plan — Legal wrangling, Federal and state Congressional action, and political pressure ahead of this year’s midterms: Martin Giles outlines some of the strategies net neutrality advocates will use to protect the open internet in 2018 (MIT Technology Review).
The state of internet access in 2017 — Internet researcher David Belson takes a look back at some of the major shutdowns and outages, as well as improvements to access, in the past year — from devastating hurricanes and politically motivated shutdowns to potential improvements in North Korean and Cuban connectivity (Oracle + DYN).
Global threats to internet freedom — Internet shutdowns are becoming ‘normal’ in many parts of the world as a growing number of countries step up control, writes Sally Shipman Wentworth for Quartz. Governments are also using more subtle methods to reduce access, including increasing mobile data charges and blocking or throttling encrypted apps. Such restrictions do major damage to economies as well as undermine human rights.
Shutting down dissent — Internet and phone services were blocked in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ahead of planned demonstrations this week (Guardian). Meanwhile in Iran, the largest protests since 2009 have prompted the government to restrict access to encrypted messaging apps like Telegram (Motherboard).
Affordable access in Andhra Pradesh — In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, President Ram Nath Kovind launched a new Fibre Grid providing internet access to around 100,000 households at a nominal monthly rate of Rs 149 (£1.75). It is hoped the network will be available to 3 million households by 2019 (Indian Express).
‘Almost every system’ affected — Two critical security flaws, dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre”, in Intel processors and some ARM chips, leave Windows, Mac and Linux systems vulnerable to having their data breached. Developers are scrambling to patch the security bug (ZDNet).
Amid crackdown, Iranians seek privacy — As government demonstrations continue, a growing number of people in Iran are using privacy technologies. While encrypted messaging apps like Telegram have been blocked in the country, the use of anonymity network Tor is higher than ever (Sky News).
A new breach for a new year — In yet another example of a data-mining company failing to protect personal data, the Washington Post reports that analytics firm Alteryx failed to properly secure the data it stores on 123 million US households.
The man who keeps his face off Facebook — Like many of us, Jonathan Hirshon posts about his life on the internet. However, he has insisted on keeping his face private for over 25 years: “My face is the essence of me individually and this is about refusing to give up the last piece of identifiable information that I can control” (BBC).
Time’s up on sexism — Following last year’s high-profile revelations of sexual assault and the #MeToo movement, a new initiative called TIME’S UP seeks to transform the position of women in the workplace. The movement, organised by women in entertainment, envisions “nationwide leadership that reflects the world in which we live”.
Defining harassment — A new survey from Pew Research Centre survey asked participants what counts as online harassment. They survey found a slightly higher share of the US public thinks platforms should tackle behaviours related to sexual harassment than they do racial harassment.
Unsafe online — Erica Gendell and Catherine Highet look at how technology can amplify gender-based violence in a blog for the Digital Impact Alliance.
Dhanaraj Thakur, Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) Senior Research Manager, was quoted in an article in Devex, discussing how the repeal of net neutrality protections in the US impacts low and middle-income countries.
New A4AI research on broadband pricing data was featured in Global Voices’ Netizen report — also published by Slate.
A4AI’s Affordability Report was cited in a piece looking at Nigeria’s ICT Policies for 2018 and the country’s efforts to increase broadband availability (Punch).
A4AI’s ‘1 for 2’ internet affordability target — 1GB of data for no more than 2% of monthly average income — was mentioned in a piece arguing that internet access remains prohibitively expensive in much of the world (Fast Net).
Our Women’s Rights Online and Web Index research was cited in a blog post on the impact of digital technology on gender-based violence (Digital Impact Alliance).
An interview with Nanjira Sambuli, discussing challenges to digital equality, was listed as a top article for 2017 by Usbek & Rica (French).
Moldova’s Open Data Barometer ranking was cited in an overview of how the country performed in various international indexes and reports in 2017 (Komsomolskaya Pravda — Russian).
The Web Foundation was mentioned in a column by Eliana Quiroz in La Razón where she discusses the recent World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial conference in Buenos Aires (Spanish).
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