Gathering Of Personal Data Research Articles

Personal Data Privacy vs Public Interest

Governments around the world have gathered masses of personal information on their citizens as part of the fight against the Covid pandemic. Citizens, willingly for the most part, yielded such data in order to protect the public good and safety of society. Focusing on personal data gathering, processing and protection for public good, the authors consider how far citizens are willing to accept that their personal data can be collected by governments during a public health crisis. The situation in Europe and in China shall be compared, showing how the “public interest” during Covid-19 was understood very differently in different jurisdictions.

User behaviour models to forecast electricity consumption of residential customers based on smart metering data

This paper presents a novel approach to forecast day-ahead electricity consumption for residential households where highly irregular human behaviour plays a significant role. The methodology requires data from fiscal smart meters, which makes it applicable to real scenarios where personal data gathering is not feasible. These data are rarely complete; therefore, a robust combination of machine-learning techniques is used to handle missing data and outliers. The novelty of this method relies on identifying and predicting user electricity consumption behaviour as a procedure to improve the forecasting of the overall electricity consumption of each individual customer. The methodology uses Gaussian mixture clustering to identify behaviour clusters and an eXtreme Gradient Boosting classification (XGBoost) model to predict the day-ahead behaviour pattern. This predicted user behaviour cluster is fed into an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to enable an improved capturing of the highly unpredictable user conduct for the forecast of electricity consumption. A novel metric, namely the Euclidean Distance-based Accuracy (EDA), is finally proposed to enable a more thorough evaluation of time series classification algorithms. The whole development is tested over 500 residential users placed in a southeastern region of Spain. The results showed that, when the novel approach was used, the MAPEd and NRMSEd were reduced by 7% and 9% respectively, increasing to a 20% and 17% respective reduction for the best cases according to EDA. This methodology sets the basis for massive user-centred analyses, very profitable to any electricity company.

Trust and Reputation in the Sharing Economy: Toward a Peer-to-Peer Ethics

The sharing economy and peer-to-peer business relationships using information technology has become moreimportant in today’s world. For the sharing economy to work, however, trust and reputation are cruciallyimportant. I argue that the gathering of personal data needs to be accompanied by safeguards providing aguarantee of privacy rights. This argument will be based on a sketch of a theory called ‘peer-to-peer ethics.’Basically, the idea is that what constitutes the ground for normativity is something that is agreed upon byeveryone involved. In short, what is considered to be ‘good’ is whatever contributes to bringing about thedesired goal of the community. This is a very familiar and ancient view on normative concepts, but, as I argue,one that deserves to be taken seriously especially as we enter into an intricately globalized world of ethicswhere worldviews clash with one another.

The influence of market orientation on Exploration and Exploitation innovation strategies ans organizational performance

Objetivo: O presente estudo buscou verificar a influência da orientação para o mercado (OM) na estratégias de inovação de exploitation e exploration e também no desempenho organizacional.Method: A pesquisa foi realizada com proprietários e gestores de empresas da indústria de alimentos no Brasil, por meio de um questionário online e coleta de dados pessoalmente. A amostra final consistiu de 112 empresas do sul e sudeste brasileiro. Os dados foram inicialmente analisados com as estatísticas descritivas com auxílio do software SPSS. Posteriormente, foi aplicada a modelagem de equações estruturais no teste de hipóteses.Relevance: Apesar dos recentes desenvolvimentos na literatura sobre os temas de orientação para o mercado, estratégias de inovação de exploitation e exploration, duas lacunas teóricas foram identificadas no estudo proposto: (1) quanto a OM contribui para estratégias de inovação de exploitation e exploration, e (2) quanto a OM contribui para o desempenho organizacional quando as empresas utilizam as estratégias de inovação exploitativas e explorativas. Results: Os resultados deste estudo indicam que empresas orientadas ao mercado podem atingir ambas as estratégias de inovação (exploitation e exploration). Outro achado indica que empresas orientadas ao mercado podem potencializar o desempenho organizacional ao desenvolver estratégias de inovação de exploration e estratégias de inovação de exploitation.Theoretical contributions: A compreensão de quanto o conhecimento de mercado, advindo da OM, pode contribuir para as estratégias de inovação de produtos, tecnologia e capacidades além das existentes e as inovações incrementais. Além de quanto estas relações podem promover o desempenho organizacional, que pode auxiliar no entendimento de quanto as empresas orientadas ao mercado precisam investir recursos em estratégias de inovação.

Editorial of the Special Issue on Quantified Self and Personal Informatics

In recent years, we witnessed the spreading of a plethora of wearable and mobile technologies allowing for a continuous and “transparent” gathering of personal data [...]

Gothic Trouble: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Globalized Order

The article explores the way American author Cormac McCarthy uses the Gothic genre in his novel The Road as a means to address what has been called “our globalized order,” in particular the way it has turned human beings into consuming or consumed entities. Some dimensions of this globalized order indeed involve the reintroduction of slavery through human trafficking, unprecedented greed and labor capitalism, surveillance and personal data gathering. Hannah Arendt notes in The Origin of Totalitarianism that the disasters of the twentieth century had proved that a globalized order might “produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.” The artist’s task is to find the right language and images to address the breaking of the world. French philosopher J. P. Dupuy, for example, has argued that the financial world is a way to contain (contenir) the violence of competition, placing it into acceptable (symbolic) forms away from primal physical competition. McCarthy’s graphic use of Gothic tropes—including cannibalism, the wild forest, the haunted house, the chase, the conflict between light and darkness, the blurring of boundaries between different categories—creates a shock. The article also addresses the larger question of the impact of globalization on Gothic literature, and the impact of Gothic literature on real world matters as it contributes to and reflects upon and challenges global regimes of economic, social and economic power. In other words, what is the cultural work that the Gothic does in the present?

Exploring the economic value of personal information from firms’ financial statements

Currently personal data gathering in online markets is done on a far larger scale and much cheaper and faster than ever before. Within this scenario, a number of highly relevant companies for whom personal data is the key factor of production have emerged. However, up to now, the corresponding economic analysis has been restricted primarily to a qualitative perspective linked to privacy issues. Precisely, this paper seeks to shed light on the quantitative perspective, approximating the value of personal information for those companies that base their business model on this new type of asset. In the absence of any systematic research or methodology on the subject, an ad hoc procedure is developed in this paper. It starts with the examination of the accounts of a number of key players in online markets. This inspection first aims to determine whether the value of personal information databases is somehow reflected in the firms’ books, and second to define performance measures able to capture this value. After discussing the strengths and weaknesses of possible approaches, the method that performs best under several criteria (revenue per data record) is selected. From here, an estimation of the net present value of personal data is derived, as well as a slight digression into regional differences in the economic value of personal information.

For and against

As 'e-tailing' and social media services get to know more and more about our behaviour patterns, we ask two experts whether the gathering of personal data is an invasion of our privacy.

Digital Dossiers and the Dissipation of Fourth Amendment Privacy

In this article, Professor Solove examines the increasing information flow from the private sector to the government, especially in light of the response to September 11, 2001. In today's Information Age, private sector entities are gathering an unprecedented amount of personal information about individuals, and the data is increasingly being accessed by government law enforcement officials. This government information gathering takes place outside the bounds of the Fourth Amendment, since the Supreme Court held in Smith v. Maryland and United States v. Miller that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to records held by third parties. Law enforcement officials can, with little restriction or judicial oversight, assemble what amounts to a digital dossier about a person by obtaining the personal details aggregated by various banks, businesses, websites, employers, ISPs, and other entities. On the other hand, access to information held by third parties is often critical to effective law enforcement. In light of the growing amount of personal data held by the private sector in the Information Age, to what extent should the government be restricted in its gathering of personal data from the private sector? In the void left by the Fourth Amendment, a series of statutes regulate government access to third party records, but this regime is woefully inadequate and ineffective. Reversing Smith and Miller will not work; the problem is far too complicated. Professor Solove explains why these solutions fail, and he proposes a new and far-reaching solution.

Workplace surveillance: an overview

This article attempts to review the proliferation of research findings about surveillance in the workplace and the issues surrounding it. It establishes a number of points of departure when considering the issue of workplace surveillance, before reviewing some of the more critical issues. First, it establishes that organizations and surveillance go hand in hand; and that workplace surveillance can take social and technological forms. Personal data gathering, Internet and email monitoring, location tracking, biometrics and covert surveillance are all areas of development. There is also evidence that groups of employees are appropriating information and communication technologies to stare back at their employers, exposing unsavoury practices and organizing collectively, prompting new thinking about resistance. Organizations watch employees primarily to protect their assets, although the nature and intensity of surveillance says much about how a company views its employees. Workplace surveillance has consequences for employees, affecting employee well-being, work culture, productivity, creativity and motivation. If no alternative can be found, managerial attention to task design, supervisory processes, employees’ expectations about monitoring, and an appraisal of the company's operating environment can mediate its downsides. It is argued that in many ways the normality of workplace surveillance, and the prevalence of arguments about how to ‘do it better’, make it difficult to radicalize. As part of what is seen as ‘good’ management practice, it can confer benefits on the employee if conducted in a humane, balanced way, and is considered on a case-by-case–organization-by-organization–basis. However, the introduction of broader debates around information use, rights, power and social structure highlights how surveillance in the workplace may serve to perpetuate existing inequalities and create new ones.