Tinius Digest October

The commission proposes the Norwegian government consider a ban on targeted advertising. The proposition is controversial, with strong support from the Norwegian Data Protection Authority and Norwegian Consumer Council—while the Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association finds the proposal a threat against ads revenue financing journalism.

To secure a conform regulation and practice for the use of personal data, the commission proposes establishing a new advisory body that will have a comprehensive overview of personal data usage in Norway.

The commission proposes stricter penalties for breaches of the Personal Protection Act. Furthermore, the commission also proposes a ban on the usage of remote biometric identification in public spaces, including the use of facial recognition technology.

The commission proposes instructing The Government Pension Fund Global to impose privacy requirements in all companies they invest in. The fund has investments in over 9,000 companies in 70 countries worth more than 12.4 trillion NOK (1.2 trillion euros).

To strengthen the trust in the government, the commission proposes greater transparency about the authorities’ use of personal data and technology to fight crime. They also suggest creating a committee that can assess the privacy consequences of the police’s methods.

97 percent consume news often or occasionally. The younger the children, the lower the news consumption. Among 17-18-year-olds, pretty much everyone consumes news (99 percent).

Social media and television are the most common channels for news consumption for 9-18-year-olds: 89 percent get news often or occasionally via television, while 88 percent get news from social media.

The social media platforms with the highest proportion of news consumption among 9-18-year-olds are Snapchat (66%), TikTok (65%) and YouTube (62%). For primary school children, YouTube and TikTok are the most used for news consumption. 

Family plays an essential role in children’s and youths’ news consumption. 93 percent of 9-18-year-olds get news from their parents, 91 percent from friends and 87 percent from teachers/school.

Other challenges with accessibility are that some digital services do not meet the requirements for universal design, which means that young people with disabilities cannot participate in school and/or use public services.

Four percent of secondary and upper secondary school youths do not have access to a school PC or tablet. An additional four percent do not have access to a PC at home.

Lack of availability is also a barrier to participation, whether the services are not user-friendly or some young people are not allowed to use public services because they do not have access to BankID. 

Bullying and hate speech, negative social control and/or parents’ lack of prerequisites to support and guide young people digitally are also factors that can prevent young people from participating.

A lack of digital competence may hinder youth participation. Some parents are hostile to all things digital or lack basic knowledge of digital functions and tools.

Parents, siblings, boyfriends, extended family and other carers can exercise negative social control, which can prevent young people from being able to be social online and use digital services on an equal basis with their peers. This includes overprotective parents that monitor their children online, checking logs and location—and in some instances to provide passwords and access to their accounts online.

Living conditions and living conditions also determine whether young people can use public services and live an everyday youth life digitally.

Social media, in general, and Facebook, have changed how voluntary organizations communicate with their stakeholders. By offering low-cost tools for communication and coordination, social media platforms such as Facebook may constitute a substitute for coordination utilizing hierarchical organization.

Suppose one looks at the factors influencing the adoption of Facebook. In that case, the only discriminant factor explaining its non-adoption is the organization’s size, measured in terms of operating costs.

Usually, the organizational barriers to adopting social media are lack of expertise and resources, inappropriateness for the target population, and internal institutional policies. In Norway, most of these barriers, especially those related to resources and capacity, are no longer at work, given the pervasiveness of Facebook.

The main challenge for voluntary organizations is no longer the adoption of these means of communication but the battle for attention and reach.

Attempts to remove information regarding gender and race from AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable features rather than a broader aspect. 

Outsourcing diversity work to AI-powered hiring tools may unintentionally implant cultures of inequality and discrimination by failing to address the systemic problems within organizations. 

Recruitment AI tools are trying to produce the ‘ideal candidate’, identified through constructing associations between words and people’s bodies. This may discriminate potentially more valuable and useful candidates for an organization.

AI hiring tools’ supposedly neutral assessment of candidates’ traits misrepresent the need for change. Specifically, the historical demands in the job market are hardwired in AI-powered hiring tools, thus maintaining the historical legacy instead of a neutral assessment of the candidates.

By deploying a specific recommender system, the companies also choose to induce specific internal states and attitudes regarding the available content.

Systems trained via long-horizon optimization will have direct incentives to manipulate users—e.g., shift their preferences so they are easier to satisfy.

The researchers argue that recommender systems need system designers that consecutively evaluate the system preferences and estimate the shifts the system may induce. This will make them capable of implementing necessary changes to the systems.