Is There a Right to Data Collection?

What's more socially harmful: politicians not knowing what sound bite will play well or voters being mislead by scurrilous misinformation?

New Hampshire is one state where legislators listened when voters complained about "push-polling" -- the practice of making campaign calls that masquerade as surveys or polls.  Perhaps the most infamous example is George Bush's campaign calling South Carolinians to ask what they think if John McCain were to have fathered an illegitimate black baby.

The gist of M. D. Shear's article, Law Has Polling Firms Leery of Work in New Hampshire" (NYT 1 March 2012) is that pollsters and political consultants are whining that "legitimate" operations are getting gun-shy about polling in New Hampshire for fear of being fined.  Actual surveys won't get done, they suggest, because poorly worded legislation creates too much illegitimate legal liability.

They do not take issue with what the law requires and some even call it well-intentioned. Paragraph 16a of section 664 of Title  53 of New Hampshire statutes requires those who administer push-polls to identify themselves as doing so on behalf of a candidate or issue. In other words, if that's what you are up to, you need to say so.

The problem, they say, is that the law is poorly written -- good intentions gone bad, they suggest.  So, what does the statute actually say?  Not so ambiguous, really.  It says if you call pretending to be taking a survey but really you are spreading information about opposition candidates then you are push-polling:

XVII. "Push-polling" means:

1. Calling voters on behalf of, in support of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office by telephone; and
2. Asking questions related to opposing candidates for public office which state, imply, or convey information about the candidates' character, status, or political stance or record; and
3. Conducting such calling in a manner which is likely to be construed by the voter to be a survey or poll to gather statistical data for entities or organizations which are acting independent of any particular political party, candidate, or interest group.

And so, the question arises: why aren't pollsters themselves taking steps to stamp out the practice?  One supposes the answer is that they still want to use it, even if the "good guys" would not stoop to the level of sleaziness that Bush and Lee Atwater practiced.

Interestingly, one of the objections that the pollsters raised was that "complying with the law by announcing the candidate sponsoring the poll would corrupt the data being gathered."  It's interesting because they don't think that constantly adjusting question wording and techniques that are technically push-polling even if they could stay inside the New Hampshire law would corrupt the data.

But this brings me to my real point.  As a practicing social scientist I am consistently disheartened and often angered at the abuse of survey research engaged in by political parties and organizations.   I receive "surveys" from the DNC, DCCC, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, MoveOn.org, etc. etc. that triply insult me:

• They are, in fact, often push-polls (if gentle ones) whose real purpose is to inform and incite not collect data.
• They are couched disingenuously in terms of providing me an opportunity for input, to have my voice heard.
• As research instruments they are almost always C- or worse, violating the most basic tenets of survey construction.

Perhaps I should just humor them and wink since we do both know what's really going on.  Sometimes the political actor in me is content to do so.  But at other times the information order pollution that they represent really gets to me.  These things corrupt the data of other legitimate research efforts. If the results are used, they amplify the error in the information order.  These things undermine social information trust.  They cheapen the very idea of opinion research.  Imagine a certain amount of what passes as clinical trials is really just PR for pharmaceutical companies.  Or imagine that the "high stakes testing" used to study the education system was really just a ploy to indoctrinate children.  Or that marine biologists were just sending a message to the mollusks they study.

As a consultant helping organizations do research I used to ask "are you trying to find out something or are you trying to show something?" To this we could add "or are you just putting on a show?"

There's something disturbing when an industry like political polling can't do better than suggest that the one state that has taken steps to address a real democracy-threatening practice within that industry is somehow "the problem."  A republican pollster whined that the law has “a harmful effect on legitimate survey research and message testing that really impairs our ability to do credible polling,” as if we should care.  It doesn't take a Ph.D. to see that a little ignorance on the part of politicians about attitudes in New Hampshire as the price for stopping a practice that corrupts public deliberation is a tradeoff well worth making.

Should Your Company Tell You Your Secrets

Nice sociology of info two-fer in Forbes article about Target being able to detect pregnancy based on purchases (see also "How Companies Learn Your Secrets"in NYT). The first connection is obvious: data mining lets company detect information "given off" by ordinary behavior. Second is the notification question. In the article the "story" is that Target outs young woman to her dad by sending targeted circular for maternity supplies.

So now we are in the situation where data mining companies have to interrogate their notification obligations just like doctors, lawyers, and spouses. I will work up an analysis in subsequent post. I anticipate insights about how corporate-ness of knower figures into the notification norm calculation.

Is Your Information Your Business?

The Business section is fast becoming the sociology of information section.

In "Twitter Is All in Good Fun, Until It Isn’t," David Carr writes about Roland Martin being sanctioned by CNN because of controversial Twitter posts.  On the Bits page, Nick Bolton's article "So Many Apologies, So Much Data Mining," tells of David Morin, head of the company that produces the social network app, Path ("The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love."), that got into hot water last week when a programmer in Singapore noticed it hijacked users' address books without asking. On page B3 we find a 14 inch article by T. Vega about new research from Pew about how news media websites fail to make optimal use of online advertising.

More on those in future posts.  Right next to the Pew article, J. Brustein's "Start-Ups Seek to Help Users Put a Price on Their Personal Data" profiles the startup "Personal" -- one of several that are trying to figure out how to let internet users capitalize on their personal data by locking it up in a virtual vault and selling access bit by bit.

This last one is of particular interest to me. Back in the early 90s I floated an idea that alarmed my social science colleagues: why not let study participants own their data? The idea was inspired by complaints that well-meaning researchers at Yale, where I was a graduate student at the time, routinely made their careers on the personal information they, or someone else, had collected from poor people in New Haven. The original source of that complaint was a community activist who had a more colorful way of describing the relationship between researcher and research subject.

The idea would be to tag data garnered in surveys and other forms of observation with an ID that could be matched with an escrow database (didn't really exist then, but now a part of "Software as a Service (Saas)"). When a researcher wanted to make use of data, she or he would include in the grant proposal some sort of data fee that would be delivered to the intermediary and then distributed as data royalties to the individuals the data concerned. The original researcher would still offer whatever enticements to participation (a bit like an advance for a book). The unique identifier held by the intermediary would allow data linking producing a valuable tool for research and an opportunity for research subjects to continue to collect royalties as their data was "covered" by new research projects just as a song writer does.

The most immediate objections were technical -- real but solvable, but then came the reasoned objections. This would make research more expensive! Perhaps, but another way to see this is that it would be a matter of more fully accounting for social costs and value, and for recognizing that researchers were taking advantage of latent value in their act of aggregation (similar to issues raised about Facebook recently). Another objection was that the purpose of the research was already to help these people. True enough. But why should they bear all the risk of that maybe working out, maybe not?

And so the conversation continued. I'm not sure I like the idea of converting personal information into monetary value; I think it sidesteps some important human/social/cultural considerations about privacy, intimacy, and the ways that information behavior is integral to our sense of self and and sense of relationships. But I do think it is critically important that we think carefully about the information order and how the value of information is created by surveillance and aggregation and how we want to think about what happens to the information we give, give up, and give off.

Related

• Business Insider. 2011. "Here's How Much A Unique Visitor Is Worth"
• Morey, Tim. 2011. "What's Your Personal Data Worth?" DesignMind blog. January 18, 2011
• Moody, Glyn. 2010. "'What "Nothing to Hide' is Hiding," on Open... blog 11 Jan 2010.
• Muffett, Alec. 2010. "Understanding Your Personal Information’s Value = The End of 'Nothing To Hide'" dropsafe blog 13 Jan 2010.
• Personal.com Blog
• Reger, Joe. 2005. "The Time Value of Personal Information," JoeReger.com blog 27 Dec 2005.

Prying Information Loose and Dealing with Loose Information

A sociology of information triptych this morning. Disclosure laws that fail to fulfill their manifest/intended function, the secret work of parsing public information, and the pending capacity to record everything all bear on the question of the relationship between states and information.

In a 21 Jan 2012 NYT article, "I Disclose ... Nothing," Elisabeth Rosenthal (@nytrosenthal) suggests that despite increasing disclosure mandates we may not, in fact, be more informed. Among the obviating forces are information overload, dearth of interpretive expertise, tendency of organizations to hide behind "you were told...", formal rules provide organizations with blueprint for how to play around with technicalities (as, she notes, Republican PACs have done, using name changes and re-registration to "reset" their disclosure obligation clocks), routinization (as in the melodic litanies of side-effects in drug adverts), and the simple fact that people are not in a position to act on information even it is abundantly available and unambiguous. On the other side, the article notes that there is a whole "industry" out there -- journalists, regulators, reporters who can data mine the disclosure information even if individuals cannot take advantage.

Rachel Martin's (@rachelnpr) piece on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, CIA Tracks Public Information For The Private Eye describes almost the mirror image of this: how intelligence agencies are building their infrastructure for trying to find patterns in and making sense of the gadzillions of bits of public information that just sits their for all to see. It's another case that hints at an impossibility theorem about "connecting the dots" a priori.

And finally, in another NPR story, "Technological Innovations Help Dictators See All" Rachel Martin interviews John Villasenor about his paper, "Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments" on the idea that data storage has become so inexpensive that there is no reason for governments (they focus on authoritarian ones, but no reason to limit it) not to collect everything (even if, as the first two stories remind us, they may currently lack the capacity to do anything with it). I if surveillance uptake and data rot will prove to be competing tendencies.


The first piece suggests research questions: what are the variables that determine whether disclosure is "useful"? what features of disclosure rules generate cynical work-arounds? if "more is not always better," what is? can we better theorize the relationship between "knowing," open-ness, transparency, disclosure and democracy than we have so far?

The second piece really cries out for an essay capturing the irony of how the information pajamas get turned inside out with the spy agency trying to see what's in front of everyone (we are reminded in a perverse sort of way of Poe's "The Purloined Letter"). Perhaps we'll no longer associate going "under cover" with the CIA.

And the alarm suggested in the third piece is yet another entry under what I (and maybe others) have called the informational inversion -- when the generation, acquisition, and storage of information dominates by orders of magnitude our capacity to do anything with it.

Journalism and Research Again

Lots of Twitter and blog activity in response to NYT article about Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff research paper on effects of teachers on students' lives.

No small amount of the commentary is about how when journalists pick "interesting" bits out of research reports to construct a "story" they often create big distortions in the social knowledge-base.

So what can reporters do when trying to explain the significance of new research, without getting trapped by a poorly-supported sound bite?

Sherman Dorn has an excellent post on the case, "When reporters use (s)extrapolation as sound bites," that ends with some advice:

1. "If a claim could be removed from the paper without affecting the other parts, it is more likely to be a poorly-justified (s)implification/(s)extrapolation than something that connects tightly with the rest of the paper."
2. "If a claim is several orders of magnitude larger than the data used for the paper (e.g., taking data on a few schools or a district to make claims about state policy or lifetime income), don’t just reprint it. Give readers a way to understand the likelihood of that claim being unjustified (s)extrapolation."
3. "More generally, if a claim sounds like something from Freakonomics, hunt for a researcher who has a critical view before putting it in a story."

See also Matthew Di Carlo on ShankerBlog, Bruce Baker on SchoolFinance 101, and Cedar Reiner on Cedar's Digest

New Book on Data Journalism

Simon Rogers has a new book called Facts are Sacred: The power of data coming out as a part of the Guardian Shorts series with a Kindle Edition available now from Amazon.UK and in January from Amazon in the US.

I was turned on to this project when I stumbled across this excellent collaborative project visualizing the spread of rumor via Twitter during last summer's London riots.

For the last hour or so I've been having that "I should have written this book" feeling -- not a pleasant feeling, but a recommendation to be sure. A nice feature of the book is that it blends boosterism and manifesto with how to and reportage on best practices. That brings it in as a book that won't be perfect for anyone, but has something for each of it's several potential audiences.

Google Knol into the Dustbin of E-history

After 15 weeks of non-stop work, a moment for thinking about something other than classes and budgets came available today. Recently, while googling about, I became re-acquainted with the idea of a "knol" -- a unit of knowledge -- and the associated web service that Google has run these last number of years. And the fact that it is going away. Or rather it is evolving: into something called Annotum which describes itself this way:

Develop a simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles
Deliver an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles

The google knol thing has been around since 2007. The initial beta announcement described the thithis way

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.

I remember, now, encountering it back in the day -- I may even have written some knols -- but it didn't stay on the radar screen for long. It was portrayed at the time as an alternative to Wikipedia -- with it's distinguishing characteristic being "authorship" :

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good (googleblog, 2008).

The divergence between Wikipedia's modus operandi and that of Knol (now Annotum) provides a nice case study jumping off point for thinking aboutf how we are figuring out the relationship between crowd sourcing and authorship, peer production, open source, intellectual authority, and how platform as institution feeds into how we think about content legitimacy.

Wikipedia harvests (harnesses, makes possible the emergence or realization) of a potentiality that, in a sense, has always been there, but represents a completely new mode of knowledge aggregation and access.  A project like Knol or Annotatum, on the other hand, is about removing the friction from existing processes in a way that makes more of what's already done happen more easily.

Both approaches thumb their nose at property-based organizational middle-men as the arbiter of intellectual legitimacy, but exploring the contrast between them is instructive.

I am, of course, not the first to think about this.  One knol author suggested that the real point of contrast is "Wikipedia does not allow the visionary or individualistic type of knowledge to be developed, because Wikipedia does not allow original content." And if you google "knol vs. wikipedia" you'll find lots of others -- my initial, quick and dirty assessment is that most are boosters for one or the other approach but I'm guessing there will be some grist for the mill for the chapter in The Sociology of Information where I'll talk about the social organization of information aggregation.

Bottom line: I'm back on the job.