Despite promising access, Facebook’s “clear history” tool is MIA for most of the United States, with no clear release date.

The recording from the MyData & A New Governance Forum session at IGF 2019 in Berlin is now available.

Declaration on joining forces to boost sustainable digital transformation in cities and communities in the EU: We, decision makers at all levels of government together with organisations and networks of cities and communities of all sizes1, believe that strong cooperation through multi-level governance in the EU and co-creation with citizens are key to our mission of turning our cities and communities into smart and sustainable places where people enjoy living and working.

We conducted tens of community interviews in the past half a year with the main goal to understand the MyData community better. We’ve now finalised with the analysis, and results are available at https://mydata-global.org/understanding-community-2019.

Commerce in some data is, and should be, limited by the law because some data embody values and interests (in particular, human dignity) that may be detrimentally affected by trade. In this article, drawing on the Roman law principles regarding res extra commercium, we investigate the example of personal data as regulated under the EU Charter and the GDPR. We observe that transactions in personal data are not forbidden but subject to what we call a dynamically limited alienability rule. This rule is based on two dynamic variables: the nature of data and the legal basis for commercially trading such data (at primary or secondary level).

Currently, the MyData Global Meetup account has 12 groups with 1,144 members and held 46 events in 2019. The overall cost for this was EUR 1,317. Costwise this is not much but there is a discussion to switch to alternatives (allevents.in, eventbrite.com, or attending.io) because of low attendance despite high sign-ups. It is planned to take a decision in the next Community call on Wed Dec 18, 2019.

My colleague Camille Nebeker at UCSD specializes in ethics with digital health – she's developed a checklist for “safe and responsible digital health research” - it's private but you can request a copy.

This is a great piece of reporting on what we've all known all along with voice activated devices. This time calling the contractors involved in listening to conversations.