Category: ethics

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I notice a strong and persistent reluctance with Dutch civil servants to use the word citizen. Apparantly because the Dutch word ‘burger’ carries overtones of ‘kleinburgerlijk’, petty bourgeois, of bourgeoisie, and of the general disdain university students voice for ‘burgers’ (with ‘burger’ being bandied about as an insult amongst them, which gained national usage through the 1990’s Jiskefet satirical tv program). Many civil servants said to me they think the word citizen is ‘old fashioned’.

I find this not only an oddity, but also detrimental to public governance and potentially dangerous.
Not using the word citizen obscures how in the relationship to government citizens have basic human rights, specific constitutional rights, and some duties. A citizen has autonomy and a certain power vis-a-vis the government.
Not using the word citizen, easily obscures that power and those rights to civil servants.

I hear civil servants talk about

  • ‘customers’, usually in the context of providing public service
  • ‘clients’, often in the context of the social domain, reminiscent of how therapists talk
  • ‘inhabitants’, usually a hand-wavy acknowledgement that other people are involved, but in an abstracted, passive or even statistical way,
  • ‘users’, usually carried over from an IT related context
  • or worst case ‘residents’ as if you’re institutionalised.

In all these cases it creates either a distance to people or implies power assymmetries. It makes it easier to dehumanise people. The consequence is the creation of policies about people, but not with those people, because people are never perceived to be on equal footing. Policy gets done over people’s heads, done to them. Participatory processes are then easily reduced to a ritual, a checkbox to mark, something that is a pain and a drag without which your policy process would be so much more efficient. Clients, users and inhabitants are never equal to those who determine policies, whereas citizens would have to be met eye to eye. Acknowledging people as citizens would require curiosity about their needs, motives and actual experiences when developing policy.

Every civil servant I’ve worked with cares about good governance and public service, and individually they wouldn’t treat people as passive objects on which their policies operate, but collectively in their work context they do abstract people out of the equation. And their own choice of words contributes to that, makes it more likely to happen, I think.

In conversations with our public sector clients I always talk about citizens with emphasis. I often also introduce myself as citizen (not as consultant e.g.).

In our projects we always emphasize the need for civil servants to go outside, to check their data and documents against the reality outside, and as often as possible create conversations with real people, with citizens.

With the drive towards ‘data driven’ work, this is ever more essential. Data must be presumed to always describe only a sliver of reality, and to always do so badly on top of that. There is always a check against reality necessary when you want to start relying on data in policy decisions. Visit the places and the people represented in the data, do you recognise them? Do you have a sufficiently nuanced, detailed and rich view on an issue before making a decision? Do people’s stories validate the data, is their meaning incorporated?
Acknowledging people as citizens is also essential to being able to see and use government data publication as a policy instrument, meant to provide agency to people in the context of societal issues and as equal partners in addressing these issues.

Hight time for the public sector to use the word citizen routinely and meaningfully again.

This is very welcome news. The expansive and irritating ‘consent’ forms that IAB makes available to a wide range of sites is about to be judged in violation of the GDPR by the Belgian DPA.

Three years ago I mentioned here a French verdict that I read as meaning the end of IAB’s approach, but now it seems to be happening for real. Good to see the Timelex law firm involved in this. A decade ago I worked closely with them on European open data topics.

To be clear: AdTech is fundamentally non-compatible with the GDPR, and needs to die.

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Early last year I wrote about how I don’t track you here, but others might. Third party sites whose content I re-use here by embedding them have the ability to track you to a certain extent. Earlier I already stopped using Slideshare and Scribd completely as a consequence, self-hosting my slide decks from now on.

For photos and videos the story is slightly different. Where it’s not essential that a video can be viewed inside my posting, I simply link to it with a screenshot, thus avoiding that YouTube or Vimeo tracks you on my page. In other cases I still embed the video.

For images I have been using Flickr since 2005. Back then uploading images to my hosting account quickly depleted the available storage space, and Flickr always was a good way to avoid that. I have and am a paying customer of Flickr, even through the years it was also available for free. Flickr is my online third place storage of images (now over 26k), as well as the place where I share those images for others to freely re-use (under Creative Commons licenses).

Embedding my Flickr photos here provides them with the opportunity to track views to the embedded images. The 2005 scarcity in storage space on my web host package is no longer a concern, whereas reducing readers’ exposure to tracking in whatever shape has become more important.

So from the start of the summer vacation I have stopped using Flickr embeds, and all images are and will be hosted on my webserver. The images do link to their counterparts on Flickr. In the case of my own images to point to re-usable versions of the photo, and the rest of my images. In the case of other people’s images I re-use to point to the source and its author. As before I will keep using Flickr to store and share photos.

Over the almost two decades of blogging I’ve embedded hundreds of images from Flickr, and I haven’t replaced those yet. Over time I will. It will become part of my daily routine of checking old postings made on the same day as today.

It makes ‘I don’t track you (but others here might)’ tilt some more towards ‘I don’t track you’ period.

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The Irish Data Protection Authority (DPA), has issued a decision on a 2018 investigation into WhatsApps data processing. It concerned at first glance two aspects, one the uploading of WhatsApp user’s contact lists, and the retention of non-user (hashed) phone numbers, as well as the information exchange between WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook. WhatsApp argued they were not a data controller in this case, but their users were, and they were merely processing data, but that defense failed. (I think the language used by WhatsApp itself, the word ‘user’, gives away the actual locus of power quite clearly.)

The An Coimisiúm um Chosaint Sonraí, Irish Data Protection Commission, issued a fine of 225 million Euro’s. This seems right up there at the top of the potential fine range of 4% of global turnover in the last year (2020).

It is good to see the Irish DPA finally coming down with a decision. With enforcement of the GDPR starting mid 2018, a range of complaints and investigations landed on the Irish DPA’s plate, as several large tech companies maintain their EU presence in Ireland. The slow pace of the Irish DPA in handling these complaints has been itself a source of complaints. With this decision on the WhatsApp investigation there now finally is some visible movement.

Also see the earlier announcement concerning Amazon receiving a 746 million fine from the Luxembourg DPA.

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Open Street Map has the option to add the location, type and viewing angle of surveillance cameras.
Peter wrote about adding the cameras in his neighbourhood to the map, and says ‘we didn’t have to walk far‘ to add 47 cameras, including his own door bell. Cameras are added to Open Street Map but not shown in the usual map interfaces. The Open Street Map wiki does list a number of projects that render this information. These projects have different areas of focus and different selection criteria for information included it seems. One of them that seems most comprehensive is Surveillance Under Surveillance.

It shows about 3500 cameras listed in the Netherlands, surely a tiny fraction of the total.

And only a handful in my city, none in my neighbourhood. Again, a low number far from reality.

This reminds of a game that, I think Kars Alfrink and/or Alper Çuğun conceptualised, where you had to reach a destination in Amsterdam avoiding the views of the cameras along the way. It also reminds me how a former colleague had some basic camera detection device in his car years ago that became useless as surveillance cameras at private homes increased in numbers. It detected not just speeding camera signals, but also all those other cameras. At some point driving down a residential street, especially in more affluent neighbourhoods, the warning noises the device made were constant.

I’ll be on the lookout for cams in our area. There are I know two in our court yard (one on our frontdoor, not connected though, and one on a neighbour’s frontdoor).