Patient Brokering

This is civic tech: In UrbanOmnibus.net, BetaNYC’s Noel Hidalgo and Emily Goldman explain the work of the group’s Civic Innovation Lab, which is producing tools, trainings and services for the city’s community boards.

The board of the Sunlight Foundation has laid out a six-point plan for auditing the organization’s history in light of the Huffington Post story on Clay Johnson, its one-time Labs director. It is inviting former staff, contractors and people in the broader civic tech community who want to be interviewed and hopes to have the process done by mid-June. As former senior advisers to Sunlight, Andrew Rasiej and I will both be participating in speaking to the board.

At the Center for Civic Innovation in Atlanta, they’re talking about the challenges in doing real community engagement at an event tomorrow.

What sharing economy? Doug Schifter, the veteran livery cab driver who killed himself in his car at the gate to New York City Hall this past February, was driven to despair by the flood of cars brought in by Uber and other ride-hailing services, Jessica Bruder reports in a powerful portrait in New York magazine. And, as she notes, he is not the only taxi driver in New York to take their life in recent months.

Media matters: In the New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes about Big Data and advertising. Gee, it’s been a while since anyone talked much about “Big Data.” He also discovers the term “surveillance capitalism.” God, to be a New Yorker writer.

Life in Facebookistan: Private addiction support groups on Facebook are riddled with predatory businesses that prey on people in need, Cat Ferguson reports for The Verge. For example, the group Affected by Addiction, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has praised on his own page, and which has 70,000 members, works with paid marketers for treatment centers helping them find people to pitch. Facebook apparently thinks that this is a good thing, providing a “sustainable business model” to cover the costs of managing a big online community page. Welcome to the ethically dubious world of “patient brokering” and “rehab marketers.” Addiction treatment is a largely unregulated industry. And as Ferguson writes, “Facebook, by making desperation so easily searchable, has exacerbated the worst qualities the treatment industry.”

Some guy named Sifry writes for The New Republic about whether we can “Escape From Facebookistan,” noting that it was Democrats who led the privatization of the Internet and showing that alternatives to Facebook, like FrontPorchForum, SeeClickFix, OurCommonPlace, PlaceSpeak and Neighborland show that it is possible to build a digital public sphere that doesn’t foster filter bubbles, polarization, and misinformation.

Everyone wants to direct: Former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have signed up with Netflix, to potentially work on scripted and unscripted series, as well as docu-series, documentaries and features, Daniel Holloway reports for Variety.

It’s worth noting that Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos, who announced the deal, has a strong connection to the Obamas, as Holloway points out: his wife Nicole Avant was ambassador to the Bahamas during their administration. Continuing the fine bipartisan tradition of giving such plum posts to big donors, Sarandos and Avant bundled at least $800,000 to Obama in 2008 and $500,000 in 2012. They help get him elected, she gets an ambassadorship, they get to direct, it’s all good, right?

Speaking of plutocracy, should tech zillionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with their space companies be the only ones allowed to imagine futures that we might want? S.A. Applin asks a good question in Motherboard.

Privacy, shmivacy: Natasha Singer and Prashant Rao of the New York Times asked five major tech companies to give them their personal data holdings, and the results—which show the difference between relative tough and lax privacy rules in the US and the UK, are enlightening to say the least.

Tech and politics: In Ireland, the apps being used by two large anti-abortion groups that are trying to stop the repeal of the country’s constitutional amendment banning abortion have a huge privacy hole, allowing the data collected to be shared with other campaign groups or clients of the conservative tech vendor that built the tools, Laura Silver reports for BuzzFeed. The vendor, Political Science Media, counts the NRA, the Trump presidential campaign and the RNC among its American clients.

Attend: Danielle Tomson and I have posted a ton more detail on all the terrific speakers and program that we’ve been developing for Personal Democracy Forum 2018. Get your tickets now and save!

Your moment of zen: Chinese social media users on Weibo noticed something very interesting about a photo of a group of Chinese trade representatives meeting recently with a group of American lawmakers, Raymond Zhong reports for The New York Times.