COVID-19 is spatial: Ensuring that mobile Big Data is used for social good

by Age Poom, Olle Järv, Matthew Zook and Tuuli Toivonen

Big Data & Society 7(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720952088. First published: August 28, 2020

The mobility restrictions related to COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in the biggest disruption to individual mobilities in modern times. Hot spots, quarantine, closed borders, video-conferencing, social distancing and temporary closure of workplaces, schools, restaurants and recreational facilities are all profoundly about distance, separation, and space. Examining the geographical aspect of the pandemic is important in understanding its broad implications, including the broader societal impacts of containment policies. 

The avalanche of mobile Big Data – location and time-stamp data from mobile phone call records, operating system, social media or apps – makes it possible to study the spatial effects of the crisis with spatiotemporal detail even at national and global scales. Beyond health care objectives such as understanding how virus transmission is mediated by human mobility or evaluating adherence to restrictions, mobile Big Data also allows us to understand the changes in people’s daily interactions, mobilities and socio-spatial responses across population groups.

Our advocacy for the use of these data, however, is tempered both by our experiences in recent months with the serious limitations of using mobile Big Data and our unease with the power of these same data to track, surveil and discipline social behaviour at the scale of entire populations. 

Thus, we pose the question: How can we use mobile Big Data for social good, while also protecting society from social harm? Drawing on the Estonian and Finnish experiences during the early phases of COVID-19 pandemic, we highlight issues with quickly developed ad hoc data products as well as the “black box” solutions (Pasquale, 2015) offered by large platform companies that created “new digital divides” among researchers (boyd and Crawford, 2012).

We argue that these examples demonstrate a clear need to re-evaluate the public-private relationships with mobile Big Data and propose two strategic pathways forward.

First, we call for transparent and sound mobile Big Data products that provide relevant up-to-date longitudinal data on the mobility patterns of dynamic populations. To help increase their usefulness, data products should be transparent about their production methodology, and ensure easy access and stability. 

Second, there is also a need to develop trustworthy platforms for collaborative use of raw individual level data. Secured and privacy-respectful access to near real-time raw data is needed for developing and testing sound methodologies for the above-mentioned data products. This would help bridge the Big Data digital divide, enable scientific innovation, and offering needed flexibility in responding to unanticipated questions on changing locations and mobilities in case of crises. To be clear, we do not view this as simple to achieve, particularly as we weigh what kind of institution might best fill this role, or how is “social good” defined and operationalized in practice. But addressing these issues via public debates and academic discourses will leave us better prepared for the next crisis.

Summing up,

• We need harmonized and representative data about human mobility for better crisis preparedness and social good in general;
• Methodological transparency about mobile Big Data products are vital for open societies and capacity building;
• Access to mobile Big Data to develop feasible methodologies and baseline knowledge for public decision-making is needed before the next crisis occurs;
• Recognizing the fundamental spatiality of the current COVID-19 crisis and crises more generally is the most relevant of all.

Mobile Big Data can help us to better understand and address the important spatial dimensions of COVID-19 pandemic and every other social phenomenon. The challenge is doing so responsibly (Zook et al., 2017) and not normalizing a lack of spatial privacy.

References

boyd, d, Crawford, K (2012) Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society 15(5): 662–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878

Pasquale, F (2015) The Black Box Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Zook, M, Barocas, S, boyd, d, et al. (2017) Ten simple rules for responsible big data research. PLOS Computational Biology 13(3): e1005399. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005399

Keywords: mobile Big Data, mobility, COVID-19, spatial data infrastructure, social good, mobile phone data, social media data, privacy

Data Politics: The Birth of Sensory Power

by Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert

Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, and Evelyn Ruppert recently published an edited collection, Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights (2019, Routledge). Building on a commentary first published in Big Data & Society, the book explores how data has acquired the capacity to reconfigure relations between states, subjects, and citizens. Fourteen chapters consider how data and politics are now inseparable as data is not only shaping social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, the book argues that understanding the conditions of possibility of data is necessary in order to intervene in and shape data politics.

We concluded our chapter entitled ‘Data’s empire: postcolonial data politics’ with the suggestion that Michel Foucault’s trilogy ‒ sovereign, disciplinary, and regulatory ‒ regimes of power is now joined by a fourth regime in the history of the present. We note that Foucault did not understand these regimes of power as supplanting but augmenting each other. That’s why he designated rather broad and shifting historical periods to identify their origins or birth: sovereign power roughly in the 16th and 18th centuries, disciplinary power in the 17th to 18th centuries, and regulatory (or biopower) in the 19th century.

The birth of regulatory power is of greatest interest to us as it relates to the development of knowledge about the species-body through the statistical sciences. Ian Hacking more precisely identified the 1820s and 1840s as the period when the idea of population was invented and statistical sciences were born as a regime of knowledge-power that regulated the relationship between the species-body (population) and individual body. Foucault broadly called this ‘biopolitics’ and inspired an important body of thought and work. His influence on the specific development of the history of statistics has been crucial and we have learned much from a pioneering body of subsequent scholarship.

Our starting point for the volume and the chapter is the need to place recent developments in data politics in relation to Foucault’s trilogy of regimes of knowledge-power. Gilles Deleuze already gestured toward this in his much-discussed ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (1990) but it remained a suggestive if not early proposition.

We argue that to develop that proposition requires understanding the emergence of new data gathering, mining and analytic technologies. From web platforms, mobile phones, sensors, drones, satellites and wearables to devices that make up the Internet of Things, digital technologies and the data they generate are connected to the emergence of new regimes of knowledge-power especially during the last forty years. We provide a preliminary version of this proposition and conclude that perhaps the period between the 1980s and 2020s constitutes the birth of a new knowledge-power regime. We state that although we are confident about our claim, we are yet unable to name this regime.

With work we have done since writing the chapter we are now tempted to name the new knowledge-power regime as the birth of sensory power>. The reasons for this are given in the chapter. We know this is an ambitious claim that will require further work on our part. But we hope it will also inspire readers to respond to both the chapter and our subsequent proposition that sensory power is a fourth regime in the history of the present.