Pandemic Thoughts… Part 2 (Individual Privacy vs. Evidence-Based Practice)

These thoughts come from a red-flag that was raised by some when our Premiere referenced a publicly available Google Mobility Document showing aggregated location data for different places.  The red flag people are raising comes from a general critique of the global surveillance machine that is “The Internet” and the erosion of our individual privacy.

This critique is also one of the commodification of data, something I have long thought and written about.  Data is valuable.  And in all reality, data rules the world (well actually the microscopic chemical message known as the Covid-19 virus rules the world right now, but I digress).

Companies like Google and Facebook are making buttloads of money from our valuable data.  Because they are collecting it and selling it to companies and governments, so that they can figure out new ways to sway our collective consumer behaviour.  Some would say they are exploiting our content and use *and* invading our privacy.

As a feminist data nerd, I am acutely aware of the tension between individual privacy and data collection.  Mostly because I have academic and professional experience with Research Ethics Boards so informed consent to participate in research is core to my own practices and values.

Companies like Google and Facebook don’t ask us to sign consent forms for the collection of our data.  They ask us to click on Terms and Conditions, and Privacy Policies that force us to consent to some level of data collection in order for us to use the service.  They would argue that in return for valuable data, they will make life more convenient and personalized for you, that is the fair exchange.

They may or may not be wrong in that.  I haven’t quite decided where I land in that debate.  I would have to see an economic breakdown of Profits/Usable data.  The current paradigm doesn’t really care about this debate though.  With the way things are governed now, the exploitation of our content and use is a fair exchange for the invasion of our privacy.

So back to McNeil and his use of valuable data, about his province, which has been collected, aggregated and distributed by Google as an effort to inform public policy and, assumingly, change our behaviour.

I am a huge fan of evidence-based policy.  I am also a huge fan of transparency… so I don’t have much of a problem with McNeil taking evidence made available to him, tell us where he got that evidence, and then tell us to do better.  We need to be told to do better.  All those people concerned with the fact that Google is spying on us, and not the fact that in the past week Nova Scotia hasn’t been doing all that great in staying home, are missing the point.  In a State of Global Emergency such as this, where we are being asked to collectively set aside our free will and *trust* them, is both terrifying and necessary at the same time.  It is my feeling that we have to think and act as a collective… and that those in power right now, whether we like it or not, are the ones with the resources to get us through this.

The larger problem of Google spying on us is definitely worth being critical of, but right now I believe we should be encouraging those in power to collect and use as much of our data as they want to communicate with us, help us understand and process what is happening right now, and find solutions to all the problems Covid-19 is causing.

You know those models they are using to predict the number of deaths and cases, well that’s a regression model, a technique also used in social statistics.  It’s actually used for all the prediction sciences – creating models of predictable outcomes, which in turn make up the basis of what we think we know about the world.  Regression models are only as good as the data that is input into them.

If social science is real (which is debatable, but the best method we have) with the type of data Google and Facebook collect, we could, not only use it during Covid-19 to help minimize the impacts on Nova Scotia, but also use it to understand, and potentially solve, many problems facing our province.

And that’s all I have the steam for today…

Twitter FAQ for Sociologists…

What is Twitter anyway?

Twitter is a social networking site where the main activity is sending out and receiving 140 character (max) information bursts (called Tweets or Chirps).  People sign-up for membership using an email address and choose a unique username.  After disclosing of a small amount of personal information you are given your own Twitter profile.

Every profile is one page, and consists of a photo (if the user chooses to upload one), a 140 character “About Me” blurb, and if you have entered it, where in the world you are.  Your profile is also a record of your Tweets, in the order in which they have been entered, with the most recent last.

Where you “friend” people on other social sites like Myspace and Facebook, the social part of Twitter emerges as you “follow” other people’s tweets, and as people follow yours.  Your Twitter “home” then, becomes the real-time sending and receiving of tweets between and among you and those that you are following.

If you use Facebook, think of it as the Status Update feature isolated and turned into a social networking site on its own.

What kinds of information are being sent and received over Twitter?

The substance of the information bursts fall in a number of different categories:

• Mundane events (what I’m eating for breakfast or whether I’m going to get a bath or a shower)
• Personal news (where I’m going to have a beer or whether or not my best friend is pregnant)
• Making Plans with Followers (let’s go have a beer together to talk about our friend who is pregnant)
• Interesting Internet Finds (external links to articles, blogs, YouTube videos, pictures)
• Self-promotion (external links to your own blogs, YouTube videos, pictures, website, creative work)
• Citizen journalism (coverage and promotion of the local community events and news)
• Mediated journalism (external links to, interaction with and commentary on mainstream news)
• Commercial (purely service or product driven information with the intention of promotion)

Who uses Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking site predominantly used by individuals who are high-level communicators and organzations/businesses who want to reach those communicators.   Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is a good lens through which to view Twitter users.  He talks about the Connectors, the Mavens and the Salesmen as being the three types of individuals which start and spread what he calls “social epidemics.”

Connectors are individuals who know lots of people and who use those connections to their advantage.  Connectors are people who have invested in social, cultural and identity capital and who can convert those intangible resources into pretty much whatever they decide to.

Mavens are the senders and receivers of information.  They are the people who always have the pulse on the good deals and breaking stories of the day.  Mavens are the trendsetters and the people who you turn to to find out about this thing or that.  Citizen Journalists are types of Mavens, often scooping the mainstream media in reporting “from the ground”

Salesmen are the persuaders of society.  They are the people who dedicate a great deal of their lives to selling people on their ideas.

These three types of people form the Golden Triangle of trends. “Mavens are the databanks.  They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it… Salesmen [have] the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced.”  (p.70, The Tipping Point).

But there is a fourth type of Twitter user, which I will call Leachers.  Leachers are passive Twitter users who do not tweet themselves, but who set up profiles simply to follow users and extract information from them for whatever purposes they may have.  For the most part Leachers exploit Twitter and the information being provided to them from the Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.  They only use half of the application.  They take information without giving anything in return.

How Many People Use Twitter?

According to Mashable, In April 2009, it was estimated that 7.4% of adult Internet users had a Twitter account.  That’s about 12.1 million people.  How many of these are active Twitter accounts with real people behind them is probably considerably less, but this is a problem with measuring any social metrics on social networking sites.

What about Twitter Penetration into Real Life?

Typically, when patterns of technology penetration are reported and analysed, they are done so in terms of number of users, which was answered in the above statistics.  However, the type of penetration discussed here has more to do with how this virtual platform influences and penetrates the everyday life of its users.

Because of the simplicity of the platform it makes it extremely friendly for use on any mobile phone with web capability.  Whereas Facebook there are multiple pages and multiple possibilities for surfing, the Twitter feed is the only screen you need to use the site.  Twitter mobile is fully functional, because it has such a simple function.

One of the concerns with this, of course, is that heavy Twitter users will often exhibit behaviours consistent with work-a-holics, or information addicts.  Non-users will often complain that their friends who have embedded Twitter into their daily lives are missing out on the here and now, and they hate having to compete for the attention of users.

Twitter penetration has also surpassed the personal and infiltrated the institutional.  Institutions, which have been the traditional gatekeepers and disseminators of public information are jumping in the tree for their own purposes.  Politicians, libraries, universities, governments, police, celebrities, the media, corporations – all the institutions who have things to say to people – are  chirping their way into the collective consciousness of the Tweeps (or Twits if you prefer) who would find that information useful.

Why has Institutionalized Media Become so Obsessed with Twitter?

Because Twitter is a social networking site which attracts the Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen; the mainstream media has become increasingly interested in hopping on board this social epidemic.  It has gotten to the point where many mainstream media outlets are using Twitter as a source for their stories, which perpetuates it’s perceived value by the users because it can create a direct line from them to the mass media.  The Trending Topics feature (a keyword top 10 of what people are tweeting about) assists the media in keeping the pulse on what the Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen are talking about (it should be noted that this is also why market research firms are so interested in Twitter).

In this way, the mainstream media co-opts Twitter as a form of unpaid journalism.  The Twitter user becomes a Prosumer (from George Ritzer) – the Producer and the Consumer of “news” mediated by the mainstream media.

Why is Twitter Such a Valuable Social Tool?

Many of the social benefits of Twitter can be found in the literature around social networking sites in general.  Feelings of connectivity can lead to stronger social cohesion within cultural and geographic communities.  Because the majority of content on Twitter is user-generated, the information does not have to pass through the same vetting processes.  There are still vetting processes though, but they emerge in the form of social consensus as to what information is valid, or worth repeating (or in this case, retweeting).

Some, like Silicone Valley ex-pat Andrew Keen, are concerned with these processes of user-generated forms of culture, lamenting the death of the expert as a dangerous evolution of western civilization.  But this concern only holds water if you fundamentally believe that culture should be guarded and distributed through institutionalized gatekeepers: mainstream media, academics, admen, studied artists and record companies to name a few.

A local example of the social value of Twitter can be seen upon recollection of the Spryfield fires.  Those Haligonians who were using Twitter at the time were sending and recieving information about the state of the fires much faster than any local media outlet was.  It was the efficient delivery of important information which was personalized and unvetted, therefore it contained an inherent unmeasurable value to it which is often absent in reporting from the anchor desk.

A global example of the social value of Twitter emphasizes democratization, and information which has circumvented the institution.  This example is actually playing out as I type this, in the highly contested Iranian election.  Where state controlled media is finding it difficult to control the message and the information coming out of the country.  Even their attempts to block Internet traffic has failed, as global activists are facilitating external communication by tweeting proxy server addresses for those who might not be able to otherwise connect to the Internet.

Is Twitter for Me?

Well, the only way to find that out is by going on and trying it.  Chances are that if you consider yourself to be either a Connector, a Maven or a Salesman, Twitter would definitely be worth checking out.  Unless you are a celebrity, or have many friends and connections to people already using Twitter, it takes a while to collect a following, and really understand how it works.  Ultimately, people will follow you if you are tweeting things that are relevant to them (another benefit of Twitter is the positive identity/idea reinforcement as more and more people start following you).

It is important to remember that the thing that makes Twitter so valuable and meaningful for people is the interactive aspect of it.  The more you use it, and interact with it, the more you understand it’s value.

I think, though, overall with Twitter, we need to rethink the whole media paradigm.  The old “Medium is the message” adage becomes flipped to think about  “the Message as the Medium”, with the “viewers” flipping to the “users” and where “content” matters more than “form”.

Do you have more sociologically related questions about Twitter? Post them in the comments here or tweet me @charlenegagnon

Academic Crime-Fighting

My Facebook feed, Twitter and email were abuzz yesterday because of the story printed in the Herald about crime in Halifax,  fueled by newly released crime stats.  A great topic for an hot election summer.

There was confusion with how the statistics were being interpreted, some interpreting the stats as saying the crime in Halifax had increased, others as it had decreased.

But before we address what the statistics may mean, let’s first understand what the numbers represent.

The “Crime Rate”

The crime rate is based on the number of police-reported crimes.  These are called “actual incidents”, the number of cases that are put through the criminal justice system in a year.  The crime rate is calculated out of every 100,000 people, so the formula for calculating the crime rate is number of actual incidents/population.

It is important to note what the crime rate does not represent.  The crime rate does not represent the amount of criminal behaviour occurring in a community,  it does not represent the amount of victim-reported crime in a community, and it does not represent the amount of cases which result in a guilty charge.

What it does represent is the number of incidents that happen for every 100,000 people, which are actually assigned a file number, and processed by the Police Department at some level.

The Crime Severity Index

The Crime Severity Index is a quantitative expression of the severity of crime occurring in a community.

Quantitatively, severity is expressed through a process of statistical weighting, using proven models to assign numerical values to offenses making them more or less severe in the calculation of the index.  Stats Canada calls them “seriousness weights”  which “are derived from actual sentences handed down by courts in all provinces and territories. More serious crimes are assigned higher weights, less serious offences lower weights.”

To get an idea of how crimes are hierarchically organized for “seriousness”, click here.

The overall Crime Severity Index is also broken up into a Violent Crime Severity Index and a Non-Violent Crime Severity Index; applying the same process of weighting to those categorized as violent and non-violent crimes.

So now that it is clear just what we are talking about when we are looking at the numbers… let’s look at the overall numbers for Halifax.

• There were 29,373 police-reported incidents, and 8,389 of those incidents were put through to the court
• The police-reported crime rate in Halifax was 7199.26 offenses for every 100,000 people
• There was a 10.3% decreased in the police-reported crime rate between 2010 and 2011
• There was a 9% decrease in the Crime Severity Index for Halifax between 2010 and 2011

You’ll notice that all of these numbers indicate that police-reported crime in Halifax is actually decreasing.  So why then did the Herald headline scream that violent crime was up in the city?

Well aside from the fact that the Herald has a tendency to use hyperbole, particularly where the reporting of crime is involved, there was a 6% increase in the Violent Crime Severity Index for Halifax between 2010 and 2011… which means the seriousness of violent crimes in the city is up by 6%.  But this does not mean that more instances of violent crime are occurring.

We can find this out if we dig a little deeper into the data.  In 2011 there were 5,566 police-reported violent incidents making the violent crime rate in Halifax 1,364.22 offenses for every 100,000 people.  This was actually an 11.67% decrease in the police-reported violent crime rate between 2010 and 2011.

And digging even further into the data, we can see indications of what is driving the increase in the Violent Crime Index:  the rate of attempted murder was up by 11.03%, the rate of assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm was up by 13.53%; the rate of aggravated sexual assault was up by 48.54%; the homicide rate in Halifax was up by a whopping 62.04%;  and the rate of “other” violent violations was up by a 69.76%.

In the Non-Violent Crimes category, there was a 15.97% decrease in the Non-Violent Crime Severity Index for Halifax between 2010 and 2011, and the rates of property crime and other criminal code violations were down by 12.86% and 3.53% respectively.

Where we see significant decreases in the rates of non-violent crimes is in the rates of prostitution, with a decrease of 39.06%; rates of possession of stolen property decreased by 58.37%; and rates of break and enters decreasing by 23.97%.

The property and criminal code categories do have some areas of increased incidents: the rate of car theft is up by 2.23%;  and the rate of counterfeiting incidents is up by 85.68% (which pales in comparison to the 294.10% reported between 2009 and 2010).

On the drug front, there were 1606 police-report drug related incidents in Halifax in 2011, which was a 4.36% increase in the rate of drug crimes.  The rate of pot possession was up by 12.92%, but the rate of trafficking, production and distribution of pot was down by 19.10%. Further, possession of heroin and other controlled substances was up by 5.22% but the rate of trafficking, production and distribution was down by 18.75%.

So, to summarize this little picture of 2011 crime in Halifax I leave you with the following conclusion: Halifax is a safe city, despite the increase in the Violent Crime Severity Index and the screaming headlines, the city is seeing decreases in the # of actual incidents for many types of crimes.  I say this with the caveat that there are not huge discrepancies between police report incidents and victim reported incidents… but until we start aggregating victim-reported data, whether that discrepancy exists is unknowable.  It is also important to remember that the amount of incidents that result in charges is significantly smaller than the number of incidents themselves.  So, some of the incidents would have been cleared through Alternative Measures like Adult Diversion or Restorative Justice, or the charges dropped.  And finally, the fact that rates of drug possession are up, but rates of drug trafficking are down is disheartening.  Since trafficking is said to be fueling the violent crime in this city, it seems to me that targeting users is the wrong way to approach the problem.

In the very near future, the CCPA-NS will be releasing an Alternative Municipal Budget, which I have contributed to along the dimensions of public safety and policing.  Stay tuned for more exciting academic crime-fighting adventures… because really, when it comes to crime, understanding what you are dealing with is the first step to coordinating a strategic and effective response.