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The HSE’s New Covid Tracking App

July 2, 2020 in Essays

Update: Since publishing this post, the HSE app has been released. You can download it here.

The HSE have released the details of their new public facing app “Covid Tracker“. They released a very comprehensive overview, access to the app’s source code, and their detailed Data Protection Impact Assessment.

With the details of app now public, journalists, policy makers and citizens will want to start analysing and appraising the app. So what are the questions we should be asking? What constitutes a good app or a bad one? What are the trade-offs other countries had been considering, and how have they been handled here?

I’ve sketched out a series of questions which I hope are a useful framework for analysing this, or any other app that is used in the fight against Covid-19.

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    Overview – A “Touchpoint” for the Wider Regime

    We couldn’t assess a restaurant’s new app for food delivery, without the wider context of the restaurant business itself. Is an app good if it’s always accessible, but the kitchen is only open and making food in the mornings?

    Here too it’s worth a quick recap on contact tracing as a wider programme of activity before we assess how an individual app fits within that.

    A contact tracing regime is a prediction exercise that takes in data from infected patients (cases), makes predictions about others they may have infected (contacts) and then takes action on those predictions. Here’s an example:

    Data: A person gets diagnosed with Covid at a hospital. A staff member at the hospital asks them for all the names and phone numbers of all the people they’ve seen in the last week.

    Prediction: Their contacts are predicted to have an increased likelihood of infection.

    Action: Somebody calls them to recommend they self-isolate or come in for testing.

    An app is a tool that can play a part in this wider regime. Most countries are looking at an app to a) help gather more data to make infection predictions and b) take action by notifying people they are at risk. Some countries, mostly Asian, are also adding proactive testing as an action, deploying resources to schools, workplaces, churches etc. where infection is predicted.

    Key Questions

    With this in mind, here are some of the key questions we can ask about an app, to assess its role in the wider trace & test regime, the data and privacy implications of the data it gathers and the actions it will enable our health service to take.

    I’ve discussed each question in more detail below, but here’s the cheatsheet to get started:

    Key Question Answer Implications
    Use Bluetooth? Yes Uncertainty around the accuracy of a “contact” prediction with bluetooth
    Apple/Google Framework Yes International standard. Better than any alternative bluetooth option. Anonymised solution.
    Using GPS? No No sense of “place” for the virus. Can’t use location for contact prediction. Can’t show where outbreaks are occurring
    Contact Notification Yes Alerts users to potential infection. Introduces spoofing risk.
    Self-Diagnosis No Only allows confirmed diagnoses from HSE. Removes risk of fake activity.
    Symptom Tracking Yes Anonymous information passed to HSE, but “probably” positive people are encouraged to isolate and test
    Behaviour Change Yes Goes beyond “news” seen in other apps. Encourages people to “check in” every day and shows country-wide stats on app downloads, check-ins and symptom reporting.

    Let’s dig into each of these here in detail.

    The Apple/Google Bluetooth Exposure Notification Service

    This is one of the core functionality choices within the app. They have chosen to use bluetooth to measure proximity and predict a contact.

    Generally, a contact is defined someone you share a pocket of air with for a period of time. This app will endeavour to record anyone you’ve been near for a while (within 2 metres or less, for 15 minutes or more) in the 14 days leading up to either of you getting diagnosed with covid. This is the European CDC definition of a close contact.

    The Apple/Google exposure notification framework sits “always on” in the background on your phone. It gives your phone an anonymised id. When your phone comes near another person with the app installed, your phones swap ids via bluetooth. Later, if one of you get diagnosed with Covid, you’ll be asked if you have the app installed.

    If you do, then the HSE will ask if you’re willing to upload your contact history, which is a list of all the anonymised ids you came in contact within the previous 14 days. If you say yes, the HSE send you a code by SMS. You input this into your app and it uploads a list of all the IDs of contacts on your phone.

    The HSE servers will send this list to every single app. Each app will scan through the list, and if one of the IDs matches that person’s phone, the person gets an alert.

     

    GPS and Location Data

    This app does not ask the users to automatically share location data. This was a big choice by the HSE, which alleviates many privacy concerns, but removes any sense of “place” from the data the app gathers.

    This means that bluetooth will be the only measure of proximity when determining a contact. The app will know if a likely contact took place, but not where in the country that was, or who the people involved were.

    This will surely calm the concerns of many privacy experts and advocates. It helps the HSE avoid the risk of headlines that read “HSE app tracks your location data” which could severely hamper adoption and public trust in the app.

    On the flip-side, it means the app gives the HSE less information about where the virus is in Ireland, but I think they have made some clever prompts and additions in other parts of the app and system which will capture much of this information in different ways, but without the attention-grabbing headlines of location tracking.

    Contact Notification

    Because the contact predictions are all being done anonymously, the HSE cannot text, call or visit anyone who might have the virus, they can just send them an anonymous push notification.

    The app will alert a contact with a push and with a persistent in-app message. It will then show them a list of recommendations for keeping safe and self-isolating.

    Most interestingly, it will also ask if they would like to share their phone number and get a call from the HSE. This will allow for more traditional contact tracing to take place. It will be really interesting to see what the uptake rate on this option is.

    Proactive Testing

    One feature of successful contact tracing regimes, like Singapore and South Korea, is proactive testing. Reaching out to people and groups of people (like workplaces) where contacts might have occurred and proactively test as many of them as you can.

    At first glance, with anonymised bluetooth and no GPS, it would seem that this app wouldn’t support such activity, but digging a bit deeper it looks like it might?

    The first way it does this is by offering users the ability to request a phone call from the HSE once they get a contact notification. On that phone call, there’s every possibility that the person can be asked some extra information, if they wish to share it, about where in the country they live. They could be also be encouraged to take a test, at which point their details could be taken, including where they live and a verbal contact history recorded, as happens today without the app.

    The other place some additional personal data can be captured is in the app’s symptom tracking section.

    Symptom Tracking

    This is, to my mind, the most unique part of the Irish app, which I haven’t seen in any other country’s apps. The app will encourage people to “Check In” every day, and report how they’re feeling.

     

    One of the motivators to do this is the nationwide stats that will be shared within the app – how many tens of thousands “checked-in” today. Sort of like an Operation Transformation, but for Covid fighting.

    This is really hard to assess before launch. You can see the potential if it goes well, but also the risk of how publicly and visibly it could fail. Those aren’t the kind of risks usually taken by the civil service, so fair play to them on that front.

    If it works, a large portion of the country will be recording their symptoms. Without any extra information, there isn’t much action that can be taken based on that data, but the app does prompt users to enter their sex, age range and location. So the HSE can get some self-reported data on location and demographics of users who are reporting symptoms. They also keep capturing extra data on confirmed cases outside the app, like they do today.

     

    Conclusion

    You can see the balance they’re trying to strike here. Removing any functionality that is greedy for user data, or could even be perceived as a privacy concern, will help build trust and get adoption. Using the Apple/Google exposure notification system is the most privacy conscious route to allow for contact notification, but it doesn’t really support “contact tracing”.

    They then layer in some behavioural nudges in the form of “join the fight” daily check ins and “would you like a phone call?” notifications, which capture just a small amount of actionable data, and from only the most interesting users (probable infections) and in a manual way that doesn’t feel invasive. In that way they bring in some contact tracing elements, but just the minimum effective dose.

    There are probably 3 key risks they need to overcome with the launch:

    1. That the Apple/Google bluetooth system proves effective enough at recording contacts accurately
    2. That people trust the app and download it
    3. That people check it regularly enough to make the data capture from check-ins meaningful

    It seems like a very well intentioned, good faith effort at balancing all the competing concerns and I hope, for all of our sakes, that the bets they’ve made pay off.

     

    Peter’s Newsletter 05 – 26th June

    June 26, 2020 in Weekly Newsletter

    I send this newsletter every Friday morning. Subscribe for free here. In this week’s issue:

    💡 Ideas:
    Apple’s New Updates,
    Are Tech Tools Neutral?
    📖  Interesting Links: 
    Wrongfully accused by an algorithm,
    Workhuman is a unicorn,
    Fact-checking Fake Images,
    Citizen neuroscience.
    🎧  Podcast Recommendation: 
    How Facebook Is Undermining ‘Black Lives Matter’

    💡 Ideas

    Apple’s New Updates.
    On Monday Apple had their annual developer conference, with lots of interesting tech changes announced. Here’s some of the more interesting one from a public policy perspective:

    1. They’re re-designing the way apps ask for your data. They want to balance information that is both comprehensive, but also easy to understand and digest. If someone can’t understand what they’re agreeing to, can they really consent? Apple talks about its new labelling system like a nutrition label on food, and I think it’s a big step in the right direction.

    2. They’ve also given more power to users in the ways they share data, with the options to give an app access to a single picture, rather than the whole library, to grant approximate location so an app can know roughly, but not exactly, where you are. There’s also a mic/camera indicator on phones (like the green light on your laptop’s webcam) that will let you know an app is using your microphone or camera.

    3. They have a few extra “good corporate citizen” updates – The Safari browser will show how many trackers and cookies it blocks on each website, Apple Watch prompts to wash your hands and Memoji wearing face-masks. Read more.

    Are Tech Tools Neutral?
    One expression that techies love (myself included) is that “tech is neutral.” Tools in general are neutral, a hammer can be used to build a house or kill a person. The intent of the user can be good or evil, but the tool itself is neutral.

    Scratching one layer beneath the surface and it’s clear that tools and tech aren’t always entirely neutral. The paper “Do Artefacts Have Politics?” published in 1980 by Langdon Winner suggests that, while of course the intent of the user and the social context in which it is used matters, it’s also true that “artefacts can contain political properties.” He says:

    “At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and pro ductivity […] but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority.”

    “Consciously or not, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are differently situated and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.”

    He breaks the possible ways in which technologies are political into two categories. In the first, flexible technologies have a range of choices for how they can be implemented and adopted, and these choices can have political significance. In the second, the mere adoption or creation of a technology has consequences for the way it re-structures power and authority around it.

    In the first instance, the configuration of a technology is political. Broadband cables may be neutral, but we shift economic power towards communities where we install it, and away from communities that we don’t.

    Some choices are less obvious and intentional. Every tech service that doesn’t make itself accessible to those with disabilities has (often unintentionally) removed power and access from already marginalised communities – not just from the tech, but from jobs, relationships and active citizenry that they enable.

    On the flip side, look at the “sound recognition” features Apple announced this week, which alert deaf users to sounds the phone hears like “baby crying” and “smoke alarm.”

    “Technological innovations are similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework for public order that will endure over many generations. For that reason, the same careful attention one would give to the rules, roles, and relationships of politics must also be given to such things as the building of high ways, the creation of television networks, and the tailoring of seemingly insignificant features on new machines. The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and transistors, nuts and bolts.”

    In his second category of technologies, he’s talking about the political changes in society that new technologies create around themselves. One interesting example he gives is nuclear power vs. solar.

    If a nation decides to adopt nuclear technology, certain forms of government are almost a necessity. “If you accept nuclear power plants, you also accept a techno-scientific-industrial military elite. Without these people in charge, you could not have nuclear power.”

    Solar Power, on the other hand, can be decentralised and localised. You could imagine ways in which that technology would empower individuals to be less reliant on the military-nuclear state or economically reliant on the company that owns the coal plant. Or, you can imagine communities and local authorities managing power generation locally and using the proceeds from it to fund local projects. What if wind power generation was considered a local natural resource and taxed at the local level?

    Social Media Platforms can be considered for the way they restructure political power too. They caused the collapse of many traditional gatekeepers. These include newspaper editors and TV anchors, but also incumbent politicians, large advertisers and religious leaders. The printing press and broadcast TV and mass advertising technologies structured power in their favour in a way that the internet does not. 

    As they are no longer the primary gatekeepers of information, their loss of power and influence (and many times, moderation) has restructured society, as has the increase in power gained by the average citizen, artist, small business and new political candidate. 

    Of course, as the social networks have dismantled the power of old gatekeepers and distributed it to individuals, they have also accrued vast amounts of it for themselves as the new algorithmic gatekeepers.

    “The things we call ‘technologies’ are ways of building order in our world.”

    “The adoption of a given technical system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a distinctive political cast. For example, centralized or decentralized, egalitarian or inegalitarian, repressive or liberating.”

    “Taking the most obvious example, the atom bomb is an inherently political artifact. As long as it exists at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command closed to all influences that might make its workings unpredictable. The internal social system of the bomb must be authoritarian; there is no other way. The state of affairs stands as a practical necessity independent of any larger political system in which the bomb is embedded, independent of the kind of regime or character of its rulers. Indeed, democratic states must try to find ways to ensure that the social structures and mentality that characterize the management of nuclear weapons do not “spin off’ or “spill over” into the polity as a whole.”

    This is true for the structures of government that manage technologies, but also for the kinds of companies that produce and sell them.

    The dominant form of industry in the 1800s, the small family firm, could not manage the new technology of the railroad. It required layers of management and centralised authority to co-ordinate and therefore the modern corporation. Did railroad technology make the modern corporation inevitable? Or put another way, was inventing the corporation the only way society could get the benefit railroads delivered?

    We could ask questions like this about Amazon’s size and dominance. Does the very nature of eCommerce demand an Amazon? Are there aspects of online commerce – the economies of scale, the delivery infrastructure, the catalogue – that imply Amazon as the only model of organising authority and power? Or can other models exist – like infrastructure for many small businesses (Shopify or Stripe) or standalone marketplaces (eBay, Etsy). 

    In this reality, the emergence of eCommerce created a man worth $100bn (Jeff Bezos), but was that inevitable? Could it have happened another way? Do the benefits of eCommerce demand to be managed by a large, centralised and hierarchical organisation?

    Another interesting modern parallel is the politics of contact-tracing apps for Covid-19. We often focus on the privacy issues inherent (“does the Dept of Health know my GPS location?”), but less so the political systems they shape around them – authorities that can tell citizens where to go, what to wear, how to behave etc.

    I’ll give Langdon Winner the last word:

    “In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accord with technological innovation at the same time they would resist similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds. If for no other reason than that, it is important for us to achieve a clearer view of these matters than has been our habit so far.”

    📖  Interesting Links

    Wrongfully accused by an algorithm. The New York Times reports on a faulty facial recognition match led to a Michigan man’s arrest for a crime he did not commit. Read more.

    Workhuman is a unicorn. First Stripe, then Intercom, now Workhuman is the next Irish-run tech company to reach a $1bn valuation (a.k.a a Unicorn). Read more.

    Fact-checking Fake Images. Google are now showing fact checking notices on Google Images search results, which is great to see. We often focus so much on social newsfeeds that we forget just how many people perform searches every day, and how large the potential for misinformation is there. Read more.

    Citizen neuroscience. “The rise of do-it-yourself (DIY) neuroscience may provide an enriched fund of neural data for researchers, but also raises difficult questions about data quality, standards, and the boundaries of scientific practice.” Read more.

    🎧  Podcast Recommendation
    How Facebook Is Undermining ‘Black Lives Matter’, an episode from New York Time’s “The Daily”. Link.

    Programme for Government 2020 – The Digital Impact

    June 18, 2020 in Public Policy

    This week the coalition of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party published their Programme for Government document. This post is a first-look at some of the key areas in the document relating to tech and digital.

    Contents:

    1. The National Digital Strategy
    2. Energy
    3. Sláintecare
    4. Broadband
    5. Online Safety
    6. Cybersecurity
    7. Apprenticeships
    8. Electoral Reform
    9. Media
    10. Advertising
    11. Remote Working / Regional Development
    12. The Irish Tech Sector

    1. National Digital Strategy

    On Page 29, the PFG sets out the National Digital Strategy:

    We will develop a new National Digital Strategy, which will:

    • Utilise the increased level of national connectivity that is being delivered by the National Broadband Plan, particularly in rural Ireland.
    • Drive digital transformation in the public service, with greater integration of digital services.
    • Further develop Ireland’s leadership in new digital technologies, including cloud computing, data analytics, blockchain, Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence.
    • Direct the Office of Government Procurement (OGP) to support the adoption of new technologies through the development of new public service frameworks.
    • Explore how Ireland can be at the forefront of protecting citizens’ rights with respect to facial recognition technology, access to encryption tools, and net neutrality.

    We will commence a public consultation on the National Digital Strategy, with a view to completing and publishing the strategy within six months.

    I’m not too sure how to assess any of that, not a huge amount of concrete items to latch onto. The “increased level of national connectivity” won’t go un-utilised, so I guess that’s a relief? 🤷‍♂️

    Our last National Digital Strategy was published in 2013 and was focused on getting individuals and businesses online, so probably no harm to refresh it. The goals included:

    • To get 10,000 Irish businesses online for the first time
    • To halve the number of “non-liners” (people who have not yet engaged with the internet) by 2016
    • Completion of the rollout of 100mbs to all post primary schools

    The Dept of Taoiseach published a public consultation on a new National Digital Strategy back in October 2018. “Following the conclusion of the consultation phase, all submissions will be published online and Government will draft and publish a Strategy that reflects them.” I can’t find where any of that happened, but the website of the National Digital Strategy team says the consultation feedback is still “under review”.

    2. Energy

    There are some good, time-bound targets around smart-grid type activity in the Green New Deal section (p. 36), including:

    • Prioritise the development of microgeneration, letting people sell excess power back to the grid by June 2021.
    • Ensure that the energy efficiency potential of smart meters starts to be deployed in 2021 and that all mechanical electricity meters are replaced by 2024

    3. Sláintecare

    e-Health is a major part of the agreed Sláintecare plan, so it has a decent mention on page 45. It repeats support for several plans that are already underway – the “eHealth Strategy for Ireland“, the Individual Health Identifier programme and implementing the Electronic Health Record system in the new National Children’s Hospital, then nationally.

    The only new piece is “exploring the potential for introducing a 24-hour triage and health-concerns telephone and website service”

    4. Broadband

    There’s a broadband section on page 72 but it just says things like “Seek to accelerate the roll-out of the National Broadband Plan” and supporting other things that are already ongoing. The only new thing is potentially “greater powers of enforcement” for ComReg.

    5. Online Safety

    The Domestic and Sexual Violence section (p. 87) commits to “Enact the Harassment & Harmful Communications Bill (as amended), in order to outlaw image-based sexual abuse and to prevent the abusive sharing of intimate images online.”

    The Online Safety section also has commits to establishing the Online Safety Commissioner, which is an interesting office:

    We will enact the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill and establish an Online Safety Commissioner. The Online Safety Commissioner will:

    • Require online platforms to set out the steps they will take to keep their users safe online and to build safety into the design of their platforms.
    • Ensure that new Online Safety Codes can combat cyber bullying material and material promoting eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide.
    • Provide a mechanism for further categories of harmful content to be added following consultation with the Oireachtas.
    • Require that services operate effective complaints procedures.
    • Ensure that advertising, sponsorship, and product placement are not harmful and that they uphold minimum standards.
    • Require platforms to have takedown measures that are timely and effective.
    • Promote positive digital citizenship among children and young people, in conjunction with Webwise and other educational partners, schools, and the Ombudsman for Children.
    • Develop a research programme led by internationally recognised experts to review the existing and developing literature in relation to (a) the consequences, benefits and potential harms to society and children specifically of digital activity and (b) the concept of duty of care and the public interest in the design of online platforms.

    The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) will be replaced with a new Media and Online Safety Commission, when the legislation is enacted.

    We will support digital literacy schemes across the country and will continue to support the Digital Skills for Citizens Scheme.

    This could be one of the more interesting developments to follow over the lifetime of this Government, especially with the Digital Services Act coming down the line, the Irish Online Safety Commissioner could become a pivotal role just like the Irish Data Protection Commissioner has become since GDPR.

    6. Cybersecurity

    “We will take the necessary actions to protect Ireland against hacking, cybercrime, crypto-jacking, hacktivism, and cyber espionage.

    We will:

    • Build the capacity of the National Centre for Cyber Security (NCCS) to protect the public and private sectors against cybercrime on foot of the capacity review currently underway.
    • Expand the NCCS’s ability to monitor and respond to cyber security incidents and developing threats.
    • Implement the National Cyber Security Strategy, recognising the potential and important role of the Defence Forces.
    • Increase digital literacy among citizens and businesses to better enable the identification of threats online.
    • Develop cyber security capacity in Ireland to better protect citizens, companies, and institutions”

    I left the introductory line in here just because I like that “crypto-jacking” is a phrase that made it into the Programme for Government.

    7. Apprenticeships

    Unfortunately the apprenticeships section (p. 99) doesn’t reference anything on digital apprenticeships. As software becomes an integral part of every industry there will be an increasing number of job opportunities that shouldn’t need someone to do a 4 year computer science degree to write or fix a bit of code.

    8. Electoral Reform

    The electoral reform section commits to establishing an Electoral Commission by the end of 2021, which has been a long time coming. It will be given the powers “to regulate online political advertising in the public interest and introduce a consistent regime relating to political advertising across all media.”

    It also promises to improve voter registration:

    “Complete the modernisation process for voter registration, involving:

    • The simplification of forms and the registration process, including an online option.
    • A rolling (continuously updated) Electoral Register.
    • A single, national Electoral Register Database.
    • A move to a system of identity verification, using one’s PPSN.”

    I would be very excited if this actually comes to pass.

    Also, not strictly Digital, but I’m also excited about the plast to examing “replacing by-elections with an alternate list system [….], the use of postal voting, with a view to expanding its provision [and] a fund to support political and electoral research by academics and researchers.”

    9. Media

    Although the specifics are vague, I like the way this section (p. 122) talks about the future of media in Ireland in general. For legacy reasons, we have considered our media in separate silos based on their distribution – “Broadcasts” covers radio and TV, print is separate, online is too. This document first talks about “Bring[ing] together all policy functions relating to broadcast media, print media and online media into a single media division within a government department.”

    It also commits to “expand the remit of the Public Service Broadcasting Commission to become a Future of Media Commission and to consider the future of print, broadcast, and online media in a platform agnostic fashion.” which I think makes a lot of sense.

    Other than that it’s quite light on specifics, but do I hope whoever drafted it ends up working in the relevant ministry.

    10. Advertising

    The document plans a move away from self-regulation towards giving the CCPC “a more active enforcement role.” This is a recurring theme in the document, giving more teeth to regulators, like ComReg, The Central Bank and CCPC.

    11. Remote Working / Regional Development

    The National Economic Plan (p. 20) will be guided by principles, including “Innovation in our workplaces through digitalisation, remote and flexible work practices.” and commits to “Publish a Regional Technology and Clustering Programme to strengthen the links between SMEs, Educational Training Boards, multinational corporations and third-level educational institutions and help drive competitiveness, productivity, and innovation in the regions.”

    The “Green New Deal” section (p. 33) also features remote working as the 4th key policy change “Developing a strategy for remote working and remote service delivery, taking advantage of the opportunity for a rapid roll-out of the National Broadband Plan.”

    The “Balanced Regional Development” section (p. 61) commits to “Develop a national remote working policy to facilitate employees in working from home, or from co-working spaces in rural areas, and to support the retention of skilled young people in rural communities.”, to “Examine the feasibility and merits of changing tax arrangements to encourage more people to work remotely.” and, strikingly, “Mandate public sector employers, colleges, and other public bodies to move to 20% home and remote working in 2021.“

    This sentence is repeated again on page 121, but with this bit extra at the end – “and provide incentives for private- sector employers to do likewise.”

    12. The Irish Tech Sector

    Page 19 commits to “Enact legislation for the introduction of a new €2 billion Credit Guarantee Scheme, SURE scheme, and the warehousing of tax liabilities.” and “Scale up MicroFinance Ireland so that it can support greater numbers of small businesses and start-ups in accessing finance. Review how we can utilise and leverage European Investment Bank funding and other opportunities for external funding to the maximum extent possible, to support our recovery and transition to a low-carbon future.”

    The National Economic Plan (p. 20) commits to “Scale up Enterprise Ireland support for smaller companies to invest in technology for clean processes, waste, and energy efficiency.”

    Peter’s Newsletter 04 – 12th June

    June 18, 2020 in Weekly Newsletter

    Dehumanizing Zoom. Court hearings moving to zoom could lead to harsher outcomes. Studies have shown that people are more likely to be deported in immigration hearings if they appear on video than in person, and people applying for asylum are less likely to be granted it over video too. Read more.

    Outsourced Moderators. New York University released a report with 8 key recommendations for Social Media companies to improve content moderation. The big one is to stop outsourcing the work. These workers have to watch the worst of what the internet has to offer and then decide if it breaks to rules. The report’s recommendations are intended both to improve the wellbeing of the workers and to make the moderation outcomes better. Better outcomes are particularly important in volatile regions like Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Ethiopia, where it social media content has sparked violence and resulted in deaths. Read more.

    Many of these outsourced jobs are based in Dublin, paying about €12 per hour. Jennifer O’Connell did a great piece in The Irish Times on the work involved last year. Read more.

    “Deepfakes” are the product of a new video editing technique, essentially photoshopping someone’s face into a video. Many people are worried about their use in politics. “What if someone fake’s a video of Trump declaring war?” But Deepfakes were originally invented by Reddit users to put women’s faces into porn videos and unfortunately, that’s what most of it is used for now. A study found that over 90% of deep-fake videos online involve non-consensually photoshopping a woman into porn. Often celebrities or women they know personally. Vox produced a great video on this emerging vector of harassment online. Link.

    End-to-End Encryption involves trade-offs between privacy and safety, so it’s interesting to see how Zoom are planning to strike the balance. If you get a paid account, they’ll make your video calls E2E encrypted, meaning no Zoom employee could listen in – for the company or on behalf of law enforcement. But they won’t be encrypting calls for free accounts. Zoom’s explanation is that most nefarious action happens with free accounts, with people unwilling to enter their billing details, which I guess makes sense. It’s an interesting place to draw the line between privacy and safety, which isn’t an option available to most messaging services like WhatsApp or FB Messenger, which typically have no paid users. Read more.

    Shared Micromobility, a term which encompasses bike share schemes like Dublin Bikes and electric scooters like Lime, is set to benefit from Covid. In particular as cities return to work, but commuters look for alternatives to busy public transport. Read more. 

    Moby, the second private Micromobility company set to launch its electric bike-sharing scheme in Dublin, is profiled in The Currency. Link.

    But e-scooters still aren’t legal in Ireland. They’re classed as Mechanically Propelled Vehicles, so must be taxed and insured, but according to the Gardaí “As it is currently not possible to tax or insure eScooters etc., they are not considered suitable for use in a public place.” Read More.

    Here’s a beautiful flowchart of where all of our energy comes from. Link.

    German restaurant seatings (on the OpenTable app) are now back to pre-lockdown levels. Link.

    Is Remote Working the new Tourism? If we understand the benefit of spending money to attract tourists to our towns for a week or two, surely the same Return-on-Investment calculations can be done on attracting remote workers out of Dublin for several years? Interesting idea gleaned from a Twitter conversation between people working in tourism, remote working and on Clare County council. Read more.

    Podcast recommendation. A few years ago Reply All did an episode about a computer system to record crime stats and the effect it had on the NYPD. It’s a great example of Goodhart’s law – “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” As pressure mounted to increase stops, searches and arrests, a system to measure crime ends up creating it. Worth a listen amid the current conversation around the future of policing in the US. Link.

    The Parliamentary Budget Office have produced a digital, visual flowchart of how tax receipts and government spending have been impacted by Covid. More of this please. Link.

    RTE’s posts will get start getting tagged on Facebook soon, as will the posts of all other state-owned or state-backed content producers. Youtube has been already doing this for quite a while. In Ireland, the tags will only appear on the page itself or in the Ads Library (where nobody but nerds like us look), but in the US posts in the newsfeed will be individually tagged, so hopefully that happens here too shortly. Read more.

    Challenger Banks are making a significant impact in Ireland. N26 now has 100,000 customers here and Revolut has a million. It has the same number of customers as bank of Ireland, but 6% of the staff (1.5k vs 24k). As this ecosystem evolves I think we’ll start thinking about our Pillar Banks (BOI, AIB, PTSB) as the core banking infrastructure layer, similar to how we think about Eir’s broadband network or ESB networks – with consumer facing apps built on top of them. But which parts of banking, like mortgages, deposit insurance or transfers, sit in which layer is still to be discovered. 

    • The Currency have an interview with N26’s Head of Europe. Link.
    • A great overview of the difference between opening an account with a traditional vs. challenger bank. Link

    Ask the experts. “When 511 Epidemiologists Expect to Fly, Hug and Do 18 Other Everyday Activities Again.” Link. 

    Peter’s Newsletter 03 – 5th June 2020

    June 18, 2020 in Weekly Newsletter

    Trump’s Tweets. It’s been a long week, but near the start of it (last Wednesday to be exact), US President Trump sent a Tweet containing the phrase “when the looting starts the shooting stars.” Twitter didn’t remove it, but they did hide the contents so that users would have to click into it to view, on the basis that it promotes or glorifies violence. The same post was shared on Facebook, but the company has left it unchanged.

    Twitter seems to be viewing this as a choice between two evils – either promoting a message that glorifies violence, or hiding from the public the fact that the president holds these views, which might be important for people to know. This is how they arrive at the half-way solution of leaving it accessible, but adding a warning.

    It’s unclear how effective this strategy is. Studies in the past showed that marking only some posts as “disputed” made people more likely to believe all of the others that were not. The little exclamation marks or warning symbols also drew more attention to the content. That happened here too – the fact that Twitter did this made headlines and the Tweet itself was read out on the RTE 9 O’Clock news.

    Trump then threatened legislative changes in retaliation. Many speculate that his retaliation is really aimed at Facebook. He’s seeking to intimidate them into inaction as his campaign plans to use the platform for voter suppression to secure re-election in November. 

    “We see the executive order as very clear retaliation that’s designed to deter social media companies from fighting misinformation and voter suppression,” said Alexandra Givens, the leader of Center for Democracy and Technology.

    Mark Zuckerberg continues to stand over the decision not to moderate any of Trump’s actions, which a lot of Facebook employees are unhappy about.

    These are difficult decisions. You probably have your own opinion on whether or not these posts should be left alone, removed, or tagged in some way. Whatever your opinion, it’s useful to understand the decision making process within these companies, as they will continue to impact the spread of political speech throughout the world.

    Testing the limits. Someone set up a Twitter account that tweets Trump’s tweets word-for-word, which Twitter then suspended for 12 hours for glorifying violence. Link.

    Fake pics. Twitter are also adding “manipulated media” tags to posts. For example, this one of a photoshopped photo of Hitler to make it look like he and Trump held the bible in the same way. Link.

    Profiling the Police. There are many stories of police using big data and algorithms to try predict bad behaviour in the public, but what if we turned the tech around and used it to predict bad behaviour from the police? This study in 2019 did just that, with two very interesting (but probably unsurprising) findings. 1. “You are the average of the company you keep” applies to police too, with bad behaviour in one acting as a strong predictor of bad behaviour in their partner. 2. “The presence of female officers in the group reduced the chances of anyone receiving complaints of excessive force in the future.” Read More.

    Grow Remote, a group trying to revive rural Irish towns with remote working, are hiring a General Manager. Link.

    Local Digital in the UK have a good repository of online resources to help local councils in their response to Covid-19, including frequent webinars that anyone can join. Read more.

    Ireland’s Competitiveness Scorecard 2020 was published. I’ve never read one before, so I was surprised by how holistic the focus is – on environmentally sustainable growth, quality of life, civic engagement and, of course, the main economic indicators. The full PDF is worth a skim, but the key out-take is that we perform well in many areas, but quite poorly on “the environment, broadband coverage, digital skills, and the productivity of the SME sector. Dealing with these competitiveness weaknesses will be paramount to achieving a sustainable and balanced recovery in a period of heightened global uncertainty.” Read more.

    Data Protection and Contact Tracing. The ICCL, Digital Rights Ireland and other experts have published a set of guidelines for any new technology the HSE may wish to use to help fight Covid. The framework seems sensible, aiming for a good balance that allows for enough data gathered to be useful, but no more than necessary, and urging careful consideration of where that line is drawn. Read more.

    Keelvar, a spin-out from University College Cork (UCC) that uses AI to help supply chain departments operate more efficiently, has secured $18m in Series A funding. Read More.

    5km. Apparently 2 million of us used the 2kmfromhome website David Bolger built in his spare time, to see how far we could roam during lockdown. Read more.

    First Tiki-Torches, now Hawaiian shirts. A bizarre but interesting thread on why, based on memes about the 1980s movie “Breaking 2: Electric Boogaloo”, racist young men in America now wear Hawaiian shirts to signify the coming of a second civil war. Link.

    Print Newspaper’s ad revenues fell by 70% in the UK. Link.

    Health Tracking. The Chinese city of Hangzhou has announced plans to extend it’s health-tracking QR code for monitoring people’s health status at all times — regardless of whether there is a public health emergency. It’s already meeting intense backlash online in China as a privacy overreach. Read More.

    Peter’s Newsletter 02 – 29th May 2020

    June 18, 2020 in Weekly Newsletter

    Encryptions vs Safety. Most popular messaging services, like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, are moving towards end-to-end encryption. This means that if I send you a text through Facebook Messenger, no Facebook employee will be able to read the contents of our message. This is good if we’re planning to protest our government, or if we’re building a Facebook competitor, or for any host of other privacy reasons. But it’s bad if the messages are hateful, or predatory or criminal. 

    So how do you police bad behaviour in messages when you can’t read them? Many governments approach this by asking “how can law enforcement have a key, but nobody else?” Which is tricky. Tech companies instead are phrasing the question as “assuming a scenario where no-one but the sender and recipient can read the message, what other things could we do to improve safety?”

    In that spirit, Facebook have announced plans to build safety alerts based on the metadata about the encrypted messages. For example, if an older person is sending messages to many young people they aren’t friends with, that might flag as potentially predatory. In that instance, Facebook would alert the recipients and encourage them to report it.

    WhatsApp already do metadata analysis like this. If a text message (or a meme or a link) has been forwarded 5 times in a row, they limit people’s ability to share it further. This helps reduce the spread of disinformation, and it can be done without knowing the content of the message.

    This broadly feels like the right approach, encrypting securely and layering safety on top. Read More.

    Maximum Media, owners of Joe.ie and Her.ie, is set to enter examinership. Aaron Rogan has a good overview of the rise and fall in the Business Post. While some of the details involve bad behaviour – like artificially inflating viewership figures for advertisers – most of the financial troubles are fairly run-of-the-mill. Paying large, fixed costs for high profile sports stars and broadcasters and getting low-margin, variable revenue from digital advertising, especially since Covid-19. Whatever happens to the business, it unfortunate to see the end of one of the few media properties aimed at young men which talks frequently about mental health, wellbeing and sexual consent. Read More.

    RTE tried to invest in Maximum. The most interesting nugget in all of this, for me, was the emergence of the fact that RTE had bid for a minority ownership stake in the business back in 2018. I don’t have any strong opinion on the specifics of the deal but I do find the strategy quite interesting and generally positive. We often refer to RTE as our “national broadcaster”, but these days it seems more apt to think about their two key functions separately – the “national content producer” and “national content distributor”. Investing in teams that produce popular, Irish, digital content probably makes sense. Link.

    How Facebook Moderates Content. Richard Allen, formerly of Facebook, shared a framework for how social media platforms think about a controversial content and decide whether or not it should be removed.

    He describes a weighing scales. On one side is both “Harm” and “Falsity”. If something is very harmful, but not false, they’ll probably remove it. If something is very false but not particularly harmful (“the moon is made of cheese!”) they’ll leave it.

    On the other side of the scale is “resilience” and “partisanship”, which increase the likelihood the content will be left up. Resilience refers to the notion that a population may already be well educated against a claim, and therefore naturally recognise its falsity, so it may not need to be removed. Partisanship is a measure on whether removing it would disproportionately impact one political side, party or candidate.

    Covid-19, for example, has been mostly non-partisan. All sides of the political debate are generally agreed, so removing disinformation doesn’t favour one side/party/candidate over the other. But saying “this government is doing a bad job handling Covid-19”

    This framework why Mark Zuckerberg said they wouldn’t remove political ads containing lies about opponents, but that they would remove political ads with incorrect information on election dates or polling centre locations, for example.

    It’s a good framework for understanding the inner workings of their arbitration policies, but one would worry the “partisanship” measure just further incentivise bad actors to make partisan issues out of conspiracy theories. Read More.

    Eir sold it’s tower infrastructure to Phoenix Tower International for €300m. This is the concrete and the metal part of their mobile network. Always interesting to see how different the economics of mobile data are to wired, where competition can happen much easier with spectrum than with fibre. I guess that’s why privatisation of our rural-fibre causes ministerial resignations, but this proceeds without much notice Link. 

    Getting Irish Business Online. Two interesting case studies from Enterprise Ireland on Irish businesses who have used some of the Department’s €2m Covid-19 Online Retail Scheme (up to €40k per business). Good to see supports there to push through the transitions while demand is high. Kilkenny Group. Inish Pharmacy.

    Remote legislating. The UK Parliament has moved to remote, digital voting during the lock-down. Link

    Shane Curran, the 20-year old Irish founder, has just raised $16m for his security startup, Evervault. He’s certainly one to watch. Link.

    E-Scooters. The UK Govt are looking at legalising e-scooter rentals. These operate in many European cities already. With our newfound desire not to pack into buses and trains, it may be worth looking at here. Link.

    Virgin Media is offering Free TV AD space to Irish SMEs affected by Covid-19. Link.

    Uber let go 140 of it’s 500 staff based in Limerick. Link.

    Peter’s Newsletter 01 – 31st May 2020

    June 18, 2020 in Weekly Newsletter

    The Death of the IFSC?
    Last week Twitter, which employs 170 people in Dublin, told all of its employees that they can work from home “forever.” It soon became clear that Twitter was just a first in a series of dominoes. Shopify (employing over 300 in Ireland), Spotify and most significantly Facebook (employing 4,000 here) all followed suit this week. And it’s not just the tech giants. Jes Staley, CEO of Barclays Bank recently commented that “the notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past.”

    In many ways what we’re seeing is an acceleration of 5-10 years worth of change over the course of just a few months. Everyone (who could) took the plunge, invested in their home office setup, changed business practices to allow for remote working. James Gorman CEO of Morgan Stanley has said they have “proven we can operate with no footprint. That tells you an enormous amount about where people need to be physically.” The wider fund management industry employs 14,000 in Ireland.

    What are the implications for our cities (Silicon Docks and the IFSC in particular) – if this becomes a permanent trend? Or a 5-10 year de-urbanisation trend? I think there are a few important areas work considering:

    • The most obvious is transport. What happens when 10,000 fewer people need to move in and out of Dublin each day. Or 50,000? That would be 38% of the total as of the last census.
    • Our FDI and broad industrial policy may need rethinking too. Facebook, Google et al have their accounting units based here for tax purposes, but they also have their larger EU offices here for the ability to attract bright young people from across the globe to work in their Dublin office. What happens when those bright young things don’t need to come to Dublin?
    • There is possibly a knock on effect for innovation. These companies are a great place for like-minded people to meet, learn and start companies together. In many ways they have acted like University Campuses for Ireland. Is this destined to change?
    • The return-on-investment on any sort of broadband infrastructure, including rural broadband, grows more compelling with every passing day.

    TikTok Usage in Ireland
    It was reported in Jan that 870k Irish people have installed the app, but usage figures were generally unknown. Vodafone recently ran the first ad campaign on TikTok in Ireland. The figures they shared give an interesting glimpse into how popular the app has become here. Over just 24 hours their ad was viewed 1.7 million times. The ad was set to show every time a user opened the app, and TikTok reports that the average user checks their app 5 times per day, which would imply there are now approximately 340k daily active Irish users of TikTok. Link.

    Payout for Content Moderators
    In an effort to keep Facebook free from abuse, violence and other bad activities, the company employed 30k people globally to review and remove offensive material. Many of these moderators were based in Dublin. Facebook scaled this activity very fast, but it didn’t scale proper supports or procedures for these workers and many have suffered depression, anxiety and PTSD as a result. In the US this week a payout settlement of $52m was reached for the workers there. Content moderators here initiated legal proceedings last September, but not result for them yet.

    Contact Tracing. 
    A good overview from the BBC on the difference between centralised and de-centralised contact tracing apps that most countries are looking at. Link.

    Facebook bought Giphy for $400m
    The price tag probably makes more sense expressed as “0.06% of Facebook’s total worth” rather than “almost half a billion dollars”, but it’s still eye watering for a company that does animated gif reactions. There’s probably a wider advertising component to the price tag (the Giphy infrastructure is used in Instagram, Twitter and most other popular social media and messaging apps), but it’s also a reminder of how much we humans need visual queues in communication. Our journey with mobile messaging has been a constant endeavour to enhance the flat written word with facial expressions, from emoticons :- ) to emojis 🙂 to animated reaction gifs. Link.

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    April 17, 2016 in Essays, Uncategorized

     

    Vanity Metrics

    Faux Metrics

    Singular Focus