Tag Archives: Rob Kitchin

From top: Garda checkpoint outside Bray, County Wicklow last week; Rob Kitchin, of the Department of Geography at Maynooth University

Yesterday afternoon.

The Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at NUI Galway, Ireland held its second web panel seminar in its Covid-19 Response series on Facebook.

Focusing on surveillance and social benefit, the panel included Mathieu d’Aquin, Director of Insight and the Data Science Institute at NUI Galway; Heike Felzmann, from the Department of Philosophy at NUI Galway; Rob Kitchin, of the Department of Geography at Maynooth University; Karlin Lillington, of The Irish Times; and Linnet Taylor, from the Department of Law at Tilburg University.

During Mr Kitchin’s contribution he spoke about the HSE’s proposed contact-tracing app – about which very little is known, other than it is reportedly to involve Bluetooth technology, while the HSE has previously said it won’t publish the app’s Data Protection Impact Assessment until the app is launched.

Mr Kitchin’s observations follow The Irish Times reporting yesterday that the HSE awarded Waterford company Nearform the contract to develop the app.

[Mr Kitchin has written a comprehensive blog post on the app, entitled Will CovidTracker Ireland work?]

During yesterday’s seminar, Mr Kitchin said:

“We’re going to give people advice about whether they should self-isolate or whether they need to go and get a test. So there’s going to be some form of decision-making based on these technologies or these technologies are going to be used to enforce that.

“Now there’s clear implications for this because you might be keeping frontline staff off of work unnecessarily, you might be denying other people making a living, or being able to socialise or do whatever right.

“So you’ve got to think about contact-tracing. There’s about 28 countries have already rolled out a contact-tracing app. There’s about 11 more which we know are in progress and they’re particularly, usually, using Bluetooth.

“Now the problem with Bluetooth is there’s a question as to whether it has sufficient resolution, you know, the two-metre thing. So, if I’m going to start getting positive contacts on people who are actually 10 metres away from me or 5 metres away from me?

“And also there’s going to be an issue around timeframe. So in the British app, it’s people being within 2 metres for 15 minutes or more. But, of course, I could have been passing somebody in a supermarket aisle who sneezed, right, and that’s the significant contact which I’m not…

“Also, it doesn’t pick up that I might get it off a surface, so I could pick up the thing off a surface and not off of meeting people.

“Now, there’s issues around the tech. There’s issues around representativeness. So, for example there’s only 28% of people in Ireland who [don’t] have a smartphone.

“There’s issues around data quality, reliability, issues around being able to dupe and spoof the data, issues around rules, sets of parameters, about deciding what decision is given to what people.

“And basically, there’s issues around the tech limitations, that’s going to lead to sizeable gaps and also a very large number of false positives. That’s just going to give a high signal-to-noise ratio.

“But we’re going to make decision based on that data. So there’s an ethics around, basing decisions around these kinds of technologies and these kinds of systems.”

Mr Kitchen added:

“Then there’s the issues around civil liberties and citizenship which seems to be getting a lot of commentary at the minute, particularly around privacy issues. This is a kind of an ethics of what does the tech do? And what are its implications?

“I’m not going to talk about the privacy thing because I think the privacy issue is a little bit of a red herring. There are issues there around privacy and about data security. I think they can be managed.

“I think the bigger thing issue is [inaudible] augmentality and around things like control creep and so on.

“So these are technologies designed to control our behaviour and control our movements. They’re about social and spatial sourcing. They’re about red-lining, and quarantining and so on. They’re about mass population profiling.

“They obviously work to normalise mass surveillance at scale and there’s a worry around notions of control creep. So, we put this technology in place and it starts to become normalised technology that becomes part of our everyday Government mentality going forward.

“So, we know this from 9/11. Technologies, the surveillance system rolled out after 9/11 are still with us. They were not rolled back.

“So anything we implement now could become long-term infrastructure and there’s clearly issues around that.

“And there’s a lot of questions around due process, around oversight, around redress, around rollback and so on.

“And then the last kind of issue I guess is around surveillance capitalism, around the ethics of what does the tech enable.

“So, effectively, what we’ve got here is State-sanctioned surveillance capitalism. We’re leveraging off this large, private infrastructure, mobile phone apps, app development and so on.

“And all of the kinds of civil liberties, kind of issues that we’ve been pushed, trying to push back on, we’re now normalising and embracing because it serves our purpose.

“So we’re basically embedding corporations into the process of governance and we’re sanctioning this type of surveillance capitalism.

“And we’re also obviously creating new market opportunities for these companies and potentially creating gateways into public health data and all kinds of State data.

“And as an element to which, the way in which these companies are engaging or are offering their services, it’s kind of a Covid-washing, if you like, of surveillance capitalism. And there are real questions there.”

Watch back in full above or here

Will CovidTracker Ireland work? (The Programmable City)

Meanwhile…

The Irish Times reports:

The Dutch government has abandoned its initial attempt to commission a Covid-19 contact tracing app after the final seven designs were dismissed as inadequate on privacy grounds.

…Just a week ago, nine IT experts who had been part of the government’s assessment panel for the initial 63 proposed apps signed an open letter saying they were withdrawing because the criteria were unclear, the process was flawed, and user anonymity was not necessarily assured.

Netherlands abandons initial plan to develop Covid-19 tracing app (The Irish Times)

Moore Institute (Facebook)

Previously: The CovidTracker Ireland App And You

Boarded up homes on Connaught St, Phibsboro earlier this year

You may recall how the Census 2016 figures which showed 183,312 vacant houses in Ireland – excluding vacant holiday homes.

And how Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said last week that:

“…the numbers [of houses] that are really vacant are actually much smaller than any of the figures show.”

And the Irish Times reporting last week:

“… the real number of unoccupied houses and apartments might only be a tiny fraction of that, if the results of an investigation carried out by Fingal County Council are replicated elsewhere.

“Its study, which involved council officials visiting houses listed as vacant, found that only a very small number of houses in the north county Dublin authority area (perhaps only 50 or 60) were genuinely unoccupied, compared with the 3,000 figure stated for Fingal in the official census returns.”

Rob Kitchin, on his Ireland After Nama blog, has looked at this story, acknowledging he couldn’t locate the Fingal County Council report or press release.

Mr Kitchin is a Professor of Human Geography and Director of the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis at the National University of Maynooth

He writes:

“What is reported in the IT is:

‘The council initially conducted a desktop exercise on the 3,000 supposedly vacant properties. When commercial properties, as well as those in construction or in the planning process, were eliminated the figure fell to 361 properties.’  They then visited 74 of the 361 homes to check on occupancy, though it’s not stated how those 74 were sampled. 

Of those 74 visited, they discovered that only 13 were actually vacant. In other words, rather than having a vacancy rate of 5% (as reported in the 2016 census – 4,944 vacant units + 289 holiday homes), they have a rate of about 1% – far below what might be an expected base vacancy level of 6% (there are always some units vacant due to selling, gaps between renting, working temporarily elsewhere, people in healthcare, etc.). 

I have no doubt in the 18 months since the census in April 2016 properties that were vacant will have been occupied, however it seems unlikely that vacancy is so far below base vacancy, which is what the IT piece seems to be suggesting.

“In terms of method it is unlikely that the CSO shared the individual addresses of vacant properties as identified in the census with Fingal.

“But if they were working from census data then it does not include commercial properties, nor properties under-construction, or in the planning process, or derelict.

“So removing those properties from census counts would make no sense – they were never counted by the CSO. Indeed, in a rebuttal story in the Irish Times, the CSO stand over their data and method – which is to send enumerators to every property in the country, to visit upwards of ten times if they fail to get an answer, and to talk to neighbours to try and ascertain the use status.

“…In my view, there needs to be a branch-and-root review of property data in Ireland.

“This needs to start with asking the question: what data do we need to generate to best understand planning, housing, commercial property, infrastructure need, etc?

“…With good quality data that people trust we might avoid different agencies producing wildly estimates of some element of housing or commercial property, such as vacancy rates, and we would greatly aid our planning and economic development.

“However, if we carry on as we are, we’re going to continue to fly half-blind and only have a partial or flawed understanding of present conditions and we are going to replicate mistakes of the past.”

We still need better property data (Rob Kitchin, Ireland After Nama)

Thanks Mel Reynolds

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Construction 2020 document (top) and Professor of Geography at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Rob Kitchin (above).

The Government launched its Construction 2020 Strategy for Ireland today which specifically sets out to “create 60,000 construction jobs” by 2020.

Professor of Geography at NUI Maynooth, Rob Kitchin, has blogged his reaction to the strategy on Ireland After NAMA.

From his piece, he writes:

The question is whether these action points are going to address the various problems and issues. At present, this is difficult to tell, because a lot of what the document sets out is a roadmap for finding solutions rather than providing solutions. At one level this is good – we need well thought out solutions. At another level it isn’t so great because we should have done the strategising a few years ago and now we’re trying to play catch-up whilst various forms of crises continue to play out around us – mortgage arrears, social housing waiting lists, rising prices, weak supply in some areas, oversupply in others, etc.
…
The strategy sets out then a roadmap for getting to actionable initiatives, rather than setting up many new initiatives. It does not set out many concrete actions but rather proposes a roadmap for dealing with construction and property issues. There are proposals for lots of task forces and reviews, some tinkering with existing legislation but no radical overhaul, but not a lot of new concrete, strongly cash-backed initiatives – schemes mentioned in the strategy are all relative small sums of money or restate existing public capital expenditure plans (which are a fraction of pre-crash levels).

What would have I liked to have seen? I would have preferred something a bit more holistic, rather than trying to frame a whole bunch of stuff as a coodinated plan.

Construction 2020 Strategy for Ireland (Rob Kitchin, Ireland After NAMA)

Read the strategy here

Previously: Meanwhile, In Abbotstown

Rob Kitchin