Big Data, Small Credit: The Digital Revolution and Its Impact on Emerging Market Consumers

This research report sheds light on a new cadre of technology companies who are disrupting the credit scoring business in emerging markets. Using non-financial data -- such as social media activity and mobile phone usage patterns -- complex algorithms and big data analytics are forever changing the economics of how we identify, score, and underwrite credit to consumers who have been invisible to lenders until now

Privacy and Accountability in Black-Box Medicine

Black-box medicine—the use of big data and sophisticated machine learning techniques for health-care applications—could be the future of personalized medicine. Black-box medicine promises to make it easier to diagnose rare diseases and conditions, identify the most promising treatments, and allocate scarce resources among different patients. But to succeed, it must overcome two separate, but related, problems: patient privacy and algorithmic accountability. Privacy is a problem because researchers need access to huge amounts of patient health information to generate useful medical predictions. And accountability is a problem because black-box algorithms must be verified by outsiders to ensure they are accurate and unbiased, but this means giving outsiders access to this health information. This article examines the tension between the twin goals of privacy and accountability and develops a framework for balancing that tension. It proposes three pillars for an effective system of privacy-preserving accountability: substantive limitations on the collection, use, and disclosure of patient information; independent gatekeepers regulating information sharing between those developing and verifying black-box algorithms; and information-security requirements to prevent unintentional disclosures of patient information. The article examines and draws on a similar debate in the field of clinical trials, where disclosing information from past trials can lead to new treatments but also threatens patient privacy

Configuring the Networked Citizen

Among legal scholars of technology, it has become commonplace to acknowledge that the design of networked information technologies has regulatory effects. For the most part, that discussion has been structured by the taxonomy developed by Lawrence Lessig, which classifies code as one of four principal regulatory modalities, alongside law, markets, and norms. As a result of that framing, questions about the applicability of constitutional protections to technical decisions have taken center stage in legal and policy debates. Some scholars have pondered whether digital architectures unacceptably constrain fundamental liberties, and what public design obligations might follow from such a conclusion. Others have argued that code belongs firmly on the private side of the public/private divide because it originates in the innovative activity of private actors. In a forthcoming book, the author argues that the project of situating code within one or another part of the familiar constitutional landscape too often distracts legal scholars from more important questions about the quality of the regulation that networked digital architectures produce. The gradual, inexorable embedding of networked information technologies has the potential to alter, in largely invisible ways, the interrelated processes of subject formation and culture formation. Within legal scholarship, the prevailing conceptions of subjectivity tend to be highly individualistic, oriented around the activities of speech and voluntary affiliation. Subjectivity also tends to be understood as definitionally independent of culture. Yet subjectivity is importantly collective, formed by the substrate within which individuality emerges. People form their conceptions of the good in part by reading, listening, and watching—by engaging with the products of a common culture—and by interacting with one another. Those activities are socially and culturally mediated, shaped by the preexisting communities into which individuals are born and within which they develop. They are also technically mediated, shaped by the artifacts that individuals encounter in common use. The social and cultural patterns that mediate the activities of self-constitution are being reconfigured by the pervasive adoption of technical protocols and services that manage the activities of content delivery, search, and social interaction. In developed countries, a broad cross-section of the population routinely uses networked information technologies and communications devices in hundreds of mundane, unremarkable ways. We search for information, communicate with each other, and gain access to networked resources and services. For the most part, as long as our devices and technologies work as expected, we give little thought to how they work; those questions are understood to be technical questions. Such questions are better characterized as sociotechnical. As networked digital architectures increasingly mediate the ordinary processes of everyday life, they catalyze gradual yet fundamental social and cultural change. This chapter—originally published in Imagining New Legalities: Privacy and Its Possibilities in the 21st Century, edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (2012)—considers two interrelated questions that flow from understanding sociotechnical change as (re)configuring networked subjects. First, it revisits the way that legal and policy debates locate networked information technologies with respect to the public/private divide. The design of networked information technologies and communications devices is conventionally treated as a private matter; indeed, that designation has been the principal stumbling block encountered by constitutional theorists of technology. The classification of code as presumptively private has effects that reach beyond debates about the scope of constitutional guarantees, shaping views about the extent to which regulation of technical design decisions is normatively desirable. This chapter reexamines that discursive process, using lenses supplied by literatures on third-party liability and governance. Second, this chapter considers the relationship between sociotechnical change and understandings of citizenship. The ways that people think, form beliefs, and interact with one another are centrally relevant to the sorts of citizens that they become. The gradual embedding of networked information technologies into the practice of everyday life therefore has important implications for both the meaning and the practice of citizenship in the emerging networked information society. If design decisions are neither merely technical nor presumptively private, then they should be subject to more careful scrutiny with regard to the kind of citizen they produce. In particular, policy-makers cannot avoid engaging with the particular values that are encoded

Eavesdropping Whilst You're Shopping: Balancing Personalisation and Privacy in Connected Retail Spaces

Physical retailers, who once led the way in tracking with loyalty cards and `reverse appends', now lag behind online competitors. Yet we might be seeing these tables turn, as many increasingly deploy technologies ranging from simple sensors to advanced emotion detection systems, even enabling them to tailor prices and shopping experiences on a per-customer basis. Here, we examine these in-store tracking technologies in the retail context, and evaluate them from both technical and regulatory standpoints. We first introduce the relevant technologies in context, before considering privacy impacts, the current remedies individuals might seek through technology and the law, and those remedies' limitations. To illustrate challenging tensions in this space we consider the feasibility of technical and legal approaches to both a) the recent `Go' store concept from Amazon which requires fine-grained, multi-modal tracking to function as a shop, and b) current challenges in opting in or out of increasingly pervasive passive Wi-Fi tracking. The `Go' store presents significant challenges with its legality in Europe significantly unclear and unilateral, technical measures to avoid biometric tracking likely ineffective. In the case of MAC addresses, we see a difficult-to-reconcile clash between privacy-as-confidentiality and privacy-as-control, and suggest a technical framework which might help balance the two. Significant challenges exist when seeking to balance personalisation with privacy, and researchers must work together, including across the boundaries of preferred privacy definitions, to come up with solutions that draw on both technology and the legal frameworks to provide effective and proportionate protection. Retailers, simultaneously, must ensure that their tracking is not just legal, but worthy of the trust of concerned data subjects.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the PETRAS/IoTUK/IET Living in the Internet of Things Conference, London, United Kingdom, 28-29 March 201