As ’s Roy Amara (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara)famously states(http://isen.com/archives/011126.html)That is where we are today. People are overestimating how quickly level-5 autonomy will come andoverestimating how widespread level-4 autonomy will become in the near future. They see only thetechnical possibilities, not the resistance that will come when autonomous agents invade human spaces,be they too rude or overly deferential.Certainly this new way of driving will eventually come. It will creep up on us, finally reducing manualdriving to a recreation confined to specialized entertainment zones. The day of the robocar is inevitable,but that day will not come soon

The owners of a self-driving car might order itto behave in ways that benefit themselves but harm everyoneelse. For instance, a concertgoer might send one of his roboticcars to park near the event well before it takes place or, evenworse, to circle the area for hours, all in order to be in positionto take him home quickly after the event is ove

Jerk by Proxy:

Even in good weather, an intersection could vex a robotic car. Let’s say the car isstopped at a stop sign on a side street and identifies two people standing at thecorner. These folks might be about to cross, but then again, they could just bechatting. Or maybe it’s a parent and child waiting for the school bus. A humandriver would assess the situation effortlessly. How long should the driverless carwait? And won’t some such cars by standing at the side of the road and gesticulating as thoughthey’re about to jump off the curb? People don’t try that with human driversbecause there would be repercussions. Driverless cars, on the other hand,wouldn’t be allowed to try to retaliat

Consider the challenges posed by a snowyday: Cars will have to be able to perceive people walking along—or in—the street,and then they’ll have to make a decision.

Two questionsarise: If self-driving cars can’t handle such examples of human caprice, how willpeople feel about sharing space with these new aliens? And how much will theperformance of self-driving cars need to be reduced, or otherwise modified, toenable them to share the roads smoothly with cars that are driven entirely orprimarily by humans

engineers have a great deal of work ahead of them to make the cars safer, morecapable, and more foolproof and to convince regulators to allow them onto the roads.

Such cars will be pariahs, and their owners will act obnoxiously.

For instance, a self-driving car could not tell what any human driver could take in ata glance: The couple conversing animatedly near the curb [left]are not about to wander into traffic. If, however, one personturns away from the other and in the direction of the street, itmeans she’s about to cross [right].

27 Jul 2017 | 15:00 GMTThe Big Problem With Self-Driving Cars Is PeopleAndwe’llgooutofourwaytomaketheproblemworseBy Rodney Brooks(/image/MjkyOTE3Nw.jpeg)Illustration: Bryan Christie Design A purely interpretive problem thatself-driving cars cannot yet solve is that of making sense of theway people hold themselves and move.

It is often well worth thetrouble of trying to figure them outahead of time.

With the invasive way, you are affecting the experiment. You change the behaviour of people and you cannot trust the results,” he says.

Juan Rio, who specialises in analytics at telecoms consultancy Delta Partners, says there will always be a trade-off between the common good and civil liberties in a time of crisis but questioned the efficacy of governments forcing citizens into using apps, as they may rebel and stop using their phones.

Under pressure from privacy activists, the scientific community has created a body called the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing coalition in Switzerland, led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, to create standards for apps being developed that adhere to European laws around privacy. The GSM Association, the mobile telecoms trade body, has also published a blueprint for best practice in how data gathered through apps is handled. 

There must not be a hidden purpose or something I as a citizen don’t know,” she says. “The main thing is people entering such a system know what they are doing.

The European Commission is working on guidelines on the use of tracing apps. Vera Jourova, vice-president for values and transparency, says citizens must be able to give informed consent. 

In Singapore, the government has asked citizens to opt in to its system and European governments including Germany have stressed that the use of tracking and tracing apps must be done on a voluntary basis.“This is nowhere near the South Korean or Chinese or Israeli model where they have the power to track you, know you have the disease and who you know. We are nowhere near there,

Germany’s Robert Koch Institut has introduced an app, developed with Berlin digital health group Thryve,which links to fitness bands and smartwatches. It says the app will help it map the spread of Covid-19 by monitoring anonymised data for signs of infection including a user’s resting pulse, sleep and activity levels, which tend to alter significantly in the case of acute respiratory problems.

Many of these issues come to a head with the health apps which have been widely used in Asia and are gradually being introduced in Europe to track an individual’s health status. 

Governments and regulators should find a proper balance between privacy and public interest,”

The telecoms industry has had to tread a fine line on the use of data or face punitive action. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission last month fined the four largest industry players a combined $208m over the historic sale of location data to third parties without the explicit consent of users. 

However, he says there are apps that help citizens choose which data they share, leading to a more efficient tracking of the virus. “If people can decide themselves if they want to participate or not, then we have privacy-friendly alternatives. That’s a game changer.”

Austrian data privacy activist Max Schrems warns citizens should be careful of the rights they are giving away at a time of global panic. “I am worried that we will accept state surveillance during the health crisis but that it will then take years in court to get rid of it.”

Some researchers are not convinced by the claim that such data sets are completely anonymous. A 2019 study by researchers at Imperial College London and Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain revealed there is a way to re-identify 99.98 per cent of individuals with just 15 demographic characteristics using location data. Other studies have come to similar conclusions that individuals can be identified based on aggregate data sets with relative ease. Spain’s far-right Vox party has urged people to turn off their mobile data, reflecting the anger over government intrusion on their privacy.

Latvia, for example, has exercised its right to be exempted from certain obligations in the European Convention of Human Rights, which grants citizens privacy and data protection rights. Slovakia passed a law last month to use telecoms data to ensure people abide by quarantine laws.

Still, assurances from officials and industry executives have done little to appease anxiety that privacy rights could be brushed aside as governments seek to use tools of mass surveillance in their efforts to combat the virus. The concerns about political use of data have been aggravated by the fact that the European Commission wants the telecoms companies to provide the actual aggregated data, not just access to insights from that information. 

uch as whether someone has coronavirus and has shared that on social media or searched on Google for symptoms, is not legally accessible under GDPR by a telecoms provider. 

European telecoms companies remain adamant that the information that has been provided to governments is anonymised and aggregated. That means it cannot be traced to any specific individual or phone. The process of scrubbing the data usually takes between 24 and 48 hours before it is available in data sets that can then be used by governments.

We have seen how aggregated data can check the spread of disease in Africa. We’re now using the same insights to understand and combat the spread of Covid-19 in Europe,

Telecoms companies in Spain were able to show that the movement of people in one city dropped 90 per cent during the first week of the lockdown and a further 60 per cent of the remainder in the second week, while in Italy the lockdown was largely ignored for the first week, with between 800,000 and 1m people still travelling in and out of Milan. In Belgium, the data showed that long distance trips of more than 40km dropped 95 per cent after confinement measures were introduced. Belgians are spending 80 per cent of their time within their home postal area, with mobility down 54 per cent. The data can show if large numbers of people in cities have fled for their second homes, as was the case in France. 

The use of technology should end as soon as the health of the people is guaranteed.

he says it is a tricky balance to strike between using technology to help tackle health crises and safeguarding privacy. 

In South Korea, which is seen as a benchmark of how to control infectious diseases, the authorities can require telecoms companies to hand over the mobile phone data of people with confirmed infections to track their location. The data has enabled the rapid deployment of a notification system alerting Koreans to the movements of all potentially contagious people in their neighbourhoods or buildings.China and Israel have also used personal telecoms data to trace coronavirus patients and their contacts. Governments around the world are creating apps to gather more personal data, such as who is sick and with whom they have been in contact.Even the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which was adopted in 2018, has a clause allowing exceptions for cases that are in the public interest. 

The debate over the use of location data sets could be a forerunner to a broader discussion about civil liberties and surveillance in Europe and the US as governments put in place plans to lift at least parts of the lockdowns. The strategies for reopening an economy before a vaccine is developed could involve monitoring the contacts of newly infected people, which will raise questions about how much curtailment of privacy societies are prepared to take. 

But the use of such data to track the virus has triggered fears of growing surveillance, including questions about how the data might be used once the crisis is over and whether such data sets are ever truly anonymous

anonymised

With much of Europe at a standstill as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, politicians want the telecoms operators to provide similar data from smartphones. Thierry Breton, the former chief executive of France Telecom who is now the European commissioner for the internal market, has called on operators to hand over aggregated location data to track how the virus is spreading and to identify spots where help is most needed.Both politicians and the industry insist that the data sets will be “anonymised”, meaning that customers’ individual identities will be scrubbed out. Mr Breton told the Financial Times: “In no way are we going to track individuals. That’s absolutely not the case. We are talking about fully anonymised, aggregated data to anticipate the development of the pandemic.”

Understanding how diseases and pathogens flow through populations using mobile phone data is vital.”

Working together with researchers at Southampton university, Vodafone began compiling sets of location data from mobile phones in the areas where cases of the disease had been recorded. Mapping how populations move between locations has proved invaluable in tracking and responding to epidemics. The Zanzibar project has been replicated by academics across the continent to monitor other deadly diseases, including Ebola in west Africa.

When the World Health Organization launched a 2007 initiative to eliminate malaria on Zanzibar, it turned to an unusual source to track the spread of the disease between the island and mainland Africa: mobile phones sold by Tanzania’s telecoms groups including Vodafone, the UK mobile operator.