/PASQUALE

Mettre fin au trafic des données personnelles, par Frank Pasquale (Le Monde diplomatique, mai 2018)
►https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/05/PASQUALE/58653

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Au-delà de la responsabilisation des entreprises de collecte, comme le prévoit la nouvelle réglementation européenne, les législateurs devraient aussi prohiber la divulgation de certaines informations, sauf dérogation. Par exemple, beaucoup d’États américains ont interdit aux employeurs de demander à leurs actuels ou potentiels employés le mot de passe pour accéder à leurs comptes de réseaux sociaux. Mais la concurrence peut pousser certains candidats à les communiquer eux-mêmes. Ceux qui se soucient de la protection de leur vie privée pourraient ainsi se retrouver lésés, même s’ils ne font qu’exercer leurs droits, parce qu’un employeur privilégierait les autres. Tant que l’utilisation d’informations sensibles ne sera pas interdite et sérieusement contrôlée, nul ne sera à l’abri d’un avenir sans vie privée.

La collecte des données ne représente que la première étape du processus qui conduit à ruiner la vie privée. Une fois que les entreprises les ont rassemblées, elles les analysent et en tirent corrélations et inductions. Par exemple, la sociologue Mary Ebeling a rempli quelques formulaires au début d’une grossesse qui s’est terminée en fausse couche. Alors qu’elle était encore sous le choc, des sociétés de marketing lui vantaient des produits pour bébé. Elle avait été classée comme mère dans d’innombrables bases de données numériques. Elle a tiré un livre de cette expérience, sans toutefois parvenir à comprendre tout le processus à l’origine de ces publicités qui l’ont hantée pendant des années (5). D’autres algorithmes fondent notre réputation d’emprunteur, d’étudiant, de propriétaire ou d’employé. Beaucoup de sociétés de prêt utilisent maintenant des informations de manière inédite, afin de proposer leurs services aux consommateurs et aux petites entreprises. Dans cette société de notations, les gens ignorent comment leur demande de crédit a été examinée.

Barcelona is leading the fightback against smart city surveillance
▻https://www.wired.co.uk/article/barcelona-decidim-ada-colau-francesca-bria-decode

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(…) The low-hanging fruit was procurement: it now bakes these considerations into its contracts with tech companies. “We are introducing clauses into contracts, like data sovereignty and public ownership of data,” says Bria. “For example, now we have a big contract with Vodafone, and every month Vodafone has to give machine readable data to city hall. Before, that didn’t happen. They just took all the data and used it for their own benefit.”

But city hall is going further, creating technological tools that mean citizens themselves can control the data they produce in the city and choose precisely who they share it with. This is Project DECODE (DEcentralised Citizen-owned Data Ecosystems). DECODE aims to develop and test an open source, distributed and privacy-aware technology architecture for decentralised data governance and identity management. It will effectively invert the current situation where people know little about the operators of the services they are registered with, while the services know everything about them. Instead, “citizens can decide what kind of data they want to keep private, what data they want to share, with whom, on what basis, and to do what,” says Bria. “This is a new social pact — a new deal on data.”

It’s a technical challenge, and one they are still working on. The tools are being put to the test in two pilots in Barcelona. The first focuses on the internet of things. City hall is giving residents sensors to place in their neighbourhoods. These sensors are directly integrated into the city’s sensor network, Sentilo, and gather data on air quality and noise pollution to influence city-level decisions. This pilot addresses the technical challenge of collating and storing a stream of citizen-sourced data, while giving those citizens complete control over what information is shared. The idea is that citizens could go out their way to collect useful data to improve public services — a very modern form of volunteering.

The second pilot relates to Decidim. When people use it, they see a dashboard of their data, aggregated and blended from a range of sources, from sensor noise levels, to healthcare data and administrative open data. From that dashboard, they can control the use of that information for specific purposes — such as informing policy proposals. Ultimately, they envisage citizens managing their data flows through an app, with a “DECODE wallet that manages people’s decryption keys, with an interface that lets you select that you want to give your transport data to the city, because you know that they can improve public transport with it—but you don’t want to give that kind of private data to an insurance company or an advertiser,” Bria explains.

The pilots will run into 2019, before potentially scaling citywide. Bria is convinced that the city is the right level of government for this experimentation. “There is a crisis of trust. Governments need to reshape their relationships with citizens, and cities are closer to the citizens. Cities also run data-intensive, algorithmic processes: transport, public housing, healthcare, education. This is the level at which a lot of services are run, and so cities can experiment with alternatives. It’s the same reason why there was the smart city boom — cities have this capacity.”

Barcelona is not alone in this. DECODE is an EU-funded project and sits neatly alongside the incoming General Data Protection Regulation (#RGPD), which will update regulation for internet companies. Together, they’re a kind of one-two for the data-driven internet economy. Barcelona also leads a network of rebel cities, “Fearless Cities”, that is adopting its tools and practices. They hosted the first conference last year, bringing together more than 180 cities from 40 countries and five continents. They are watching as Barcelona leads the way with its experiments in open democracy and data protection. Everything Barcelona has developed is open source, and all the code is posted on Github. They want these ideas to spread.

Le genre de mesures préconisées dans cet article de Frank Pasquale dans le @mdiplo du mois ►https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/05/PASQUALE/58653