Public Digital #58: The farce of self-regulation plus good news from the US

Hello, hola, salut. 👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾

What a damp mess. It does not inspire much confidence that Facebook can – or should – regulate itself.

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Ways of working

▪️ Big Bets newsletter – compiled by Alice Newton-Rex, Director of Product at Whatsapp – looks at how reasonably established companies build and launch new products. She chats to Public Digital’s Tom Loosemore about BBC iPlayer here.

State of technology

💔 Dan Kaminsky has died. We owe so much of our digital safety to him. In 2008, he found a way that thieves could manipulate Domain Name System traffic so that a person typing the website for a bank would instead be redirected to an impostor site that could steal their security details. This thoughtful obituary in The New York Times talks of his motivation for doing the right thing over financial gain, his remarkable intelligence, and his fierce mother, Trudy Maurer.

😵 Big Brother is the tale most often linked with institutions collecting data but back in 2001, law professor Daniel Solove wrote Computer databases and metaphors for information privacy which draws links between Kafka’s The Trial. Interesting and still frighteningly relevant – “a court has apparently scrutinized a man’s life and assembled a dossier on him… but the court is clandestine, and court records are inaccessible.” Thanks for unearthing, Jennifer Pahlka.

🇮🇳 From unethical data collection, to inaccurate collection. Quartz India reports that “India’s statistical machinery has been deliberately weakened to protect various governments’ false claims and image.” Scroll.in speaks to 3 experts who explain the consequences of data gaps for India’s pandemic response. Watch the interview, or read the interview.

🌏 Interesting to see how development organisation Spark Blue is linking the digital and climate agendas. Here’s an invite to join a ‘multi-stakeholder community of change makers and practitioners that seek to collaborate in accelerating a digital planet for sustainability.’

Digital government

🇺🇸 Lots of change at the top in the US Federal Government, where Joe Biden has made federal IT modernisation and cyber security top priorities, with a lot of $$ behind it. 💰

👋 We have been following the work of Robin Carnahan for some time (including the brilliant guides to de-risking government IT projects published with 18F), so we're delighted to see her nominated as administrator of the General Services Administration.

🔥 Clare Martorana has been appointed as Chief Information Officer for the United States. A former USDS lead in the Department of Veteran Affairs, she brings strong credentials in delivering citizen-centred services. First priority? Administering the $1 billion Technology Modernization Fund. Impressive progress so far, with an interesting approach to distributing the funds.

🏆 Meanwhile we say goodbye to Matt Cutts, who has continued to deliver better digital services for those who need them in his 4+ year stint at the top of USDS. Thank you Matt. 💪💻🇺🇸 His successor has not yet been named.

🇨🇦 Permanent funding for the Canadian Digital Service (CDS) has been confirmed. Compare these tweets about funding in 2017 and 2021 by Ryan Androsoff, now Director of Digital Leadership at Institute on Governance. Nothing like a pandemic to highlight the value of investing in digital teams. Read more about the CDS team’s good work.

🇲🇽 Last month, Mexico passed a law that requires citizens registering SIM cards to provide biometric data – speculated to be fingerprints and iris scans. Companies now have 2 years to collect the data and make it accessible to the government and those who refuse will lose access to their phone lines. Creepy and draconian but not the only country to do this.

🇺🇸 What happened when the US Government tried to make the immigration system digital is a great write-up of a string of bad decisions which “assumed a process that was different from how government colleagues actually did the work.” Reminds me of our own Anna Hirschfeld’s 7 reflections on California’s report into its unemployment benefits system.

🇫🇷 As Etalab, which develops and manages the french open data platform data.gouv.fr, celebrates its 10-year anniversary, Director Laure Lucchesi looks back on the last decade of opening up public data.

🇧🇷 Gov.br, the website for the Federal Government of Brazil, now has 100 million registered users. Back in January, this report said 3,900 of Brazil’s services for citizens (63%) were available online through a single login. However, more than 20 million households in Brazil are still digitally excluded.

News from Public Digital

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