ARTEFACTS: How do we want to deal with the future of our one and only planet?

The European Commission’s Science and Knowledge Service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC), decided to try working hand-in-hand with leading European science centres and museums. Behind this decision was the idea that the JRC could better support EU Institutions in engaging with the European public. The fact that European Union policies are firmly based on scientific evidence is a strong message which the JRC is uniquely able to illustrate. Such a collaboration would not only provide a platform to explain the benefits of EU policies to our daily lives but also provide an opportunity for European citizens to engage by taking a more active part in the EU policy making process for the future. A PILOT PROGRAMME To test the idea, the JRC launched an experimental programme to work with science museums: a perfect partner for three compelling reasons. Firstly, they attract a large and growing number of visitors. Leading science museums in Europe have typically 500 000 visitors per year. Furthermore, they are based in large European cities and attract local visitors as well as tourists from across Europe and beyond. The second reason for working with museums is that they have mastered the art of how to communicate key elements of sophisticated arguments across to the public and making complex topics of public interest readily accessible. That is a high-value added skill and a crucial part of the valorisation of public-funded research, never to be underestimated. Finally museums are, at present, undergoing something of a renaissance. Museums today are vibrant environments offering new techniques and technologies to both inform and entertain, and attract visitors of all demographics.JRC.H.2-Knowledge Management Methodologies, Communities and Disseminatio

Collecting personal data for smart COVID-19 tracing: how to motivate people and not scare them off

South Korea and Singapore, unlike many other countries, have recorded a slow increase in the number of cases of COVID-19 infection and a relatively low number of fatalities. Both these countries have not only carried out large numbers of tests, but have also used the information gained through them to trace the spread of the infection as quickly as possible, with the help of individual interviews, medical records, mobile phone data, credit card transaction data and CCTV recordings. Those who had come into contact with the chain of infection were then placed into strict quarantine. This substantially limited the spread of the infection and enabled softer restrictive measures to be taken across the remainder of the population, with a lesser impact on the economy. This strategy would now be possible in the Czech Republic, too. It would, however, require specific rules to be adopted, the principles of which are explained in this study. Each country only has one chance to implement them properly. Residents should be offered incentives to motivate them to cooperate by providing true and complete information, but these should not simultaneously provide undesirable motivations. Efforts to force people to provide detailed personalized data for the purpose of contact tracing and tracking the spread of the infection can, in fact, lead people to hide symptoms of illness or to hide the fact that they have recently been in contact with someone. It is thus necessary to find a compromise between the direct effectiveness of an imposed order and its negative side effects. Collecting data for the purposes of tracking the spread of an infection poses a greater problem in Europe than in East Asian countries, because in Europe there is less of a tradition of the local community enforcing the law for itself and there is greater mistrust of the state. Strong data protection is therefore crucial for the tracking strategy to succeed at all. Even a relatively low level of unwillingness among residents to cooperate in providing data, let alone a broader culture of non-cooperation and “cunning avoidance”, would mean the tracking system did not function sufficiently well. Data collected from residents for the purpose of tracking the spread of infection should be stored separate from other personal data in the state’s possession, beyond the reach of enforcement officials, tax investigators, the justice system or researchers, with the exception of those working directly on fighting the infection. The periods during which data are to be collected and retained should be clearly limited. Poorly established incentives for people to reveal personal information for the purposes of tracking the infection open the door to further contagion and result in huge economic damage, harm to people’s health and the loss of human lives.\

The gap of in-person teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic: estimation of invisible economic losses

Studies of the impact of school closures and school absences as well as impact studies already carried out abroad into the Covid-19 pandemic period all show, that the gap in in-person teaching caused by the pandemic will have a substantial negative impact on pupils' educational outcomes and will increase educational inequalities. The loss of learning will very likely lower the future earnings of current pupils and students for decades of their productive life

Using Bluetooth technology for COVID-19 contact tracing

The coronavirus is transmitted indiscriminately through proximity, which makes tracing infections difficult. Bluetooth tracing apps can reliably record transmission possibilities even when the participants do not know each other and do not remember the interaction. This can be done with a high degree of privacy. A well-designed app provides a similar level of privacy to not using an app at all. Decentralized data storage means that the privacy and security of the system is highly resilient against exploitation by any powerful actor (such as a government). A disadvantage of protecting privacy through decentralization is that tracing apps need to be taken up by the population one person at a time. Their use cannot be checked remotely and hence cannot be effectively mandated by governments or health authorities. A very high degree of take-up is necessary to make them an effective weapon against the virus. The eRouška app by COVID19cz follows these principles and offers a very high degree of privacy protection. Specifically, it does not collect any data except the phone numbers of non-infected users, and only collects anonymized meeting data (and no location or other metadata) of infected users – this data is only available to a hygienist after voluntary data transmission by the user. No data is transmitted to the server without explicit user agreement

AN INFORMATIONAL THEORY OF PRIVACY

Privacy of consumers or citizens is often seen as an inefficient information asymmetry. We challenge this view by showing that privacy can increase welfare in an informational sense. It can also improve information aggregation and prevent inefficient statistical discrimination. We show how and when the different informational effects of privacy line up to make privacy efficient or even Pareto-optimal. Our theory can be applied to decide who should have which information and how privacy and information disclosure should be regulated. We discuss applications to online privacy, credit decisions and transparency in government

An informational theory of privacy

We develop a theory that explains how and when privacy can increase welfare. Without privacy, some individuals misrepresent their preferences, because they will otherwise be statistically discriminated against. This "chilling effect" hurts them individually, and impairs information aggregation. The information gain from infringing privacy (e.g. by electronic surveillance) can be much smaller than expected ceteris paribus. Overall, privacy is essential for any mechanism of information aggregation, such as markets or a democratic society. It is also redistributive: Like free speech, privacy benefits some and hurts others

Regime change games with an active defender

We analyze a regime change game in which an active defender can invest in costly, unobservable defenses. We show that if there are sufficiently many potential attackers, the game has a unique Nash equilibrium in which the defender chooses to have almost no defenses and attacks almost never occur. This provides a new perspective on coordination problems and the necessity of refinements in regime change games. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved