The debate over these tools is still raging on. Last July, more than 100 civil rights and community-based organizations, including the ACLU and the NAACP, signed a statement urging against the use of risk assessment. At the same time, more and more jurisdictions and states, including California, have turned to them in a hail-Mary effort to fix their overburdened jails and prisons.

Data-driven risk assessment is a way to sanitize and legitimize oppressive systems, Marbre Stahly-Butts, executive director of Law for Black Lives, said onstage at the conference, which was hosted at the MIT Media Lab.

As we’ve covered before, machine-learning algorithms use statistics to find patterns in data. So if you feed it historical crime data, it will pick out the patterns associated with crime. But those patterns are statistical correlations—nowhere near the same as causations. If an algorithm found, for example, that low income was correlated with high recidivism, it would leave you none the wiser about whether low income actually caused crime. But this is precisely what risk assessment tools do: they turn correlative insights into causal scoring mechanisms.

Modern-day risk assessment tools are often driven by algorithms trained on historical crime data.

Risk assessment tools are designed to do one thing: take in the details of a defendant’s profile and spit out a recidivism score—a single number estimating the likelihood that he or she will reoffend. A judge then factors that score into a myriad of decisions that can determine what type of rehabilitation services particular defendants should receive, whether they should be held in jail before trial, and how severe their sentences should be. A low score paves the way for a kinder fate. A high score does precisely the opposite.

Researchers and civil rights advocates, for example, have repeatedly demonstrated that face recognition systems can fail spectacularly, particularly for dark-skinned individuals—even mistaking members of Congress for convicted criminals.

This is where the AI part of our story begins.

1 in 38 adult Americans was under some form of correctional supervision.

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. 

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. 

“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.”

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.

Some researchers are not convinced by the claim that such data sets are completely anonymous.

the best way to track the spread of the pandemic is to use heatmaps built on data of multiple phones which, if overlaid with medical data, can predict how the virus will spread and determine whether government measures are working.

European telecoms companies remain adamant that the information that has been provided to governments is anonymised and aggregated

Telefónica, Spain’s national carrier which owns networks across Latin America, has developed expertise working with companies like Facebook to use data to deal with natural disasters such as earthquakes. It also worked with Unicef and the University of Notre-Dame in 2017 to improve epidemiological models for predicting the spread of the Zika virus in Colombia. 

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 location data to track the disease has been applied in Italy, Spain, Norway and Belgium, with the UK, Portugal and Greece set to follow.In cities such as Madrid and Milan, telecoms operators have created heat maps that show how restrictions on movement are working and what effect the presence of police on the streets is having on behaviour. 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. 

“We trust Uber to know everywhere we go, we trust Gmail with everything we write. If we don’t trust the NHS with our health data then who do we trust?”

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. 

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.

Nic Fildes in London and Javier Espinoza in Brussels April 8 2020 Jump to comments section Print this page Be the first to know about every new Coronavirus story Get instant email alerts 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.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.“Diseases don’t respect national borders,” says Andy Tatem, an epidemiologist at Southampton who has worked with Vodafone in Africa. “Understanding how diseases and pathogens flow through populations using mobile phone data is vital.” Thierry Breton, European commissioner for the internal market, has called on telecoms operators to hand over aggregated location data, but said 'in no way are we going to track individuals © Olivier Hoslet/EPA-EFE 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.”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.  Mapping how populations move between locations has proved invaluable in tracking and responding to epidemics, including ebola in Uganda © Reuters 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. 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.

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. 

Nic Fildes in London and Javier Espinoza in Brussels April 8 2020 Jump to comments section Print this page Be the first to know about every new Coronavirus story Get instant email alerts 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.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.“Diseases don’t respect national borders,” says Andy Tatem, an epidemiologist at Southampton who has worked with Vodafone in Africa. “Understanding how diseases and pathogens flow through populations using mobile phone data is vital.” Thierry Breton, European commissioner for the internal market, has called on telecoms operators to hand over aggregated location data, but said 'in no way are we going to track individuals © Olivier Hoslet/EPA-EFE 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.”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. 

“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.”

meaning that customers’ individual identities will be scrubbed out.

Diseases don’t respect national borders,