Locatum

As Richard Pope attests in his recent blog there is some pretty boring-to-the-ordinary-person aspects to the whole transparency, tracking and contact tracing narrative. To an extent we appear to be becoming desensitised to the who and the how, the centralised/decentralised, the open/proprietary, the technology choices and how inclusive or otherwise they might be, and to the notion of privacy. On this last point language plays a key role. You'd hope this was clear language on the back of a truck in Sri Lanka The Coronavirus (Safeguards) Bill 2020 proposes protections for 'digital interventions'. Though the ambition is understandable and the intent and brevity admirable its reliance on the same language, in relation to privacy, GDPR, anonymisation, digital exclusion, sharing, containment, research and time merits some exploration: Digital exclusion is highest in those communities most at risk notably the poorest and the elderly, sub-sections of whom are at the fo...

Back in the day I did an MSc in Applied Remote Sensing - yay - and for a while, working with Landsat and SPOT data to devive new insights and present information in then new ways, it seemed a potent tool, but then the music kind of died. GIS was the new kid on the block, funding of satellite borne sensors went soft, internet bandwidths (then) and imagery didn't work too well together. Today, we seem to have come full circle, and while 'remote sensing' sounds unfamiliar, the world of EO is seriously 'hot'. Among the major change agents has been the post 9/11 requirement to find out more about 'stuff' often a long way from 'home' and Moore's Law across the capacity of the related tools and technologies (storage, bandwidth, processing, compression etc). Depending on how you classify 'flocks' of micro/nano satellites there are c.1000 live image collection sensors in orbit, providing daily coverage (or at least the potential for) the entir...

Not that we're quiet at the moment but something must be in the air - so, like buses, another post! courtesy (c) MediaBuzz 2017 Steve Wilson has managed to capture in this post , on a specific case to do with health care data, arguably amongst the most sensitive of personal data, a sense that 'we' have lost or are losing (what limited) control we might have had, over our data, over who collects it, on whose behalf they collect, how they analyse and process it - in particular what other data they "join"* [see below] it to, on whose behalf that is in turn done, who that is sold or supplied to. * join - a short-hand here for the vast array of, to many, unfathomable ways in which 0s and 1s from X data set are ingested, validated/verified, analysed, combined, associated or otherwise linked, directly or indirectly, using techniques and methods in and from data science, statistics, information science, physics, geography, operations research et al with many other d...