With COP26 taking place this week, governments, companies, and individuals are discussing how we can all reduce our carbon emissions. The task is monumental, and technology has an important role to play – both in reducing its own carbon footprint and in helping the wider world track and reduce their emissions. This blog post gives a few examples from MyData Global’s supporting companies and organisations that are helping people improve their sustainability.

FinEst Centre for Smart Cities is an Estonian-Finnish collaboration and MyData was part of a 2020 challenge. It has now been shortlisted as one of five project to move forward: Citizen Data Roaming.

23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki wants to make drugs using insights from millions of customer DNA samples, and doesn't think that should bother anyone. First 23andMe plans to sell tastemakers on their mail-in spit kits as a way to learn sort-of-interesting things about their DNA makeup, such as its likely ancestral origins and the chance it would lead to certain health conditions. Eventually the compnay will able to lower prices enough to make the kits broadly accessible, allowing 23andMe to build a database big enough to identify new links between diseases and particular genes. Later, this research would fuel the creation of drugs the company could tailor to different genetic profiles. 23andMe would become a new kind of health-care business, sitting somewhere between a Big Pharma lab, a Big Tech company, and a trusted neighborhood doctor.

Uneven vaccine coverage and a relaxation of preventive measures have brought Europe to a "critical point" in the pandemic, the World Health Organization has said, with cases again at near-record levels and 500,000 more deaths forecast by February.

Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The New Urban Mobility Alliance (NUMO), North American Bikeshare & Scootershare Association (NABSA), and Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) announced the launch of the Privacy Principles for Mobility Data to help guide the mobility ecosystem in the responsible use of data and the protection of individual privacy.

For all the discussion of the societal value of having organizations provide access to their data, there’s been little discussion of the business case on why to make data available for reuse. The Open Data Policy Lab addresses these questions with its “9R Framework,” a method for describing and identifying the business case for data reuse for the public good.

Goldman Sachs released this report with the purpose of providing a thorough, balanced and objective examination of the digital asset ecosystem. Such an undertaking was not easy: The technology underlying blockchains is revolutionary, complex and rapidly evolving. The industry uses new jargon. There is a significant amount of misinformation and disinformation.