UbiVault Blog

Digital citizenship is the ability to participate in society online, to promote social inclusion for individuals. It requires the melding of information stored in data lakes and made available to user defined communities.

Introduction

The Internet has created a universal, reliable and friction-free plumbing system for finding and exchanging information. This web of connections to people and data sources has reduced the cost of data access but is hampered by the challenge of bringing information to the user. Many resources exist as data lakes that require multiple touchpoints to make them useful. Whether the data is from commercial or governmental sources, the problem is the same.

Ambitna, a healthcare startup is taking the first challenge by providing the pharmaceutical industry representative candidates for cancer clinical trials. The second challenge is providing an information platform to support analysis for population determinants of health, not just in cancer. As part of their effort, the Ambitna technology focuses on how communities are formed to securely exchange information using the current evolution of the Internet – Peer to Peer (P2P).

Digital Citizen

What defines us is increasingly about what is “digitally collected” by firms and government agencies. Information collected has specific purposes with some common identifiers and for the most part, dissemination of the data operates independently from other venues. Ideally, this information creates a kaleidoscope of digital views of an individual. Some countries like Estonia, Poland and even Japan are working on digitizing all government records for their citizens, even providing for online voting.

But in countries like the US, UK, Germany and in Asia, the consolidation of data at the fingertips of a digital citizen is not yet realized. China may be the first example of the future of what entails a digital citizen and how they engage and are tracked. Part of the slow pace is due to nascent standards for data privacy, access rights and governance. Since the Internet is an untrusted resource, creating data profiles that a digital citizen can monitor, and control is a key focus among nations.

The dark side of digital citizenship is that it tends to favor individuals that have the means to use the digital highway, something that may not be economically feasible for poorer segments of the population, or minority segments that have limited access due to location or cost.

Jus algoritmi – the right of the algorithm – is a term created by John Cheney-Lippold to describe digital citizenship as produced by the surveillance state, whose primary intent is control through identification and categorization to make judgements, using software such as AI.

Algorithmic Citizenship is a form of citizenship which is not assigned at birth, or through complex legal documents, through data, constantly recalculated. As in a kaleidoscope, it creates many sub-citizenships, counting and re-weighing them over time. This is a ‘new algorithmic identity’.

Information as a Currency

By itself, data is not a useful medium. It requires refining or mining into something of value. Information is the extracted value. Today, the economic value of information drives online industries, advertising as the prime example. The goal is to quantify the “who-what-where-when-why” metrics that represent the value of the digital citizen. It impacts our economic status, like the FICO credit score. It determines access to government services such as pre-existing conditions in healthcare. It controls our visibility in social relationships.

Algorithmic identities are determined by non-human, computer enabled systems that are candidates for misuse and may be in conflict with the legal rights a citizen may have. But the direction is clear. Our rights to democratic governance, equal access to resources, representation and equal treatment, are becoming dependent on our digital profiles and who has access to them. More important, who owns this information and controls its distribution.

Information has explicit public or private rights. Your legal profiles generally are public as they provide a value to government and commercial uses. Marriage licenses, commercial licenses, educational degrees, drive licenses, real estate ownership are classic examples of public data. Some information is legislated as private even though it is used for multiple purposes. Your health record by law are considered private in that you have the right to the information, regardless of who created it. But when it comes to your electronic activities such as use of online services, rights become murky.

For instance, your physical location tracking using a mobile app such as Google’s MAPS enables you to navigate given where you want to go. This data persists long after you completed a journey. Does Google have the right to use it for other purposes without your consent? These are the new battlegrounds for privacy for the digital citizen.

Data Silos & Data Lakes

The wealth of information accessible through the Internet is staggering. In less than a quarter of a century, we have moved from paper communication and physical custody to a digital sea. Unfortunately, this is less than a uniform medium, but more of isolated data pools, guarded in silos by data custodians, or isolated in lakes that are difficult to navigate. This is dramatically evident in the healthcare industry. Doctor, clinical, hospital, pharma data on any individual are sprinkled across proprietary vendor systems that are yet to be standardized to reduce costs of information extraction and translation. Worse, the patient lacks portable access to their digital data. When changing plans, doctors or hospitals, so much of this data requires manual reinput.

Ambitna recognizes this challenge as the largest impediment to a digital health record in control of the citizen. This challenge parallels the privacy issue of granting access to a third party or even notifying the individual that information was passed between other parties. Through its platform operated as a secure P2P network of devices, cloud services and users, Ambitna provides an advanced solution for analytics that addresses the data silo and lake challenge.

Case Study

In its business model, the Ambitna platform delivers analytical mathematical objects from healthcare source data that stay in control of the data custodian, a hospital network, for example. These objects allow analysts to query the source data without access to the individual records. Because the object data is aggregated across all possible data attributes, there is no privacy issues for an individual patient or health subscriber. The data objects are portable, extremely small when compared to the source data, and are compliant with standard query access methods or statistical tools.

For cancer clinical trial management, the data objects are the target area for extracting candidates that match the inclusion and exclusion criteria for available trials. Through its Federated Data Network (FDN), Ambitna can join the objects across different data sources without resorting to building a combined object. For population determinants of health, Ambitna uses the same method as in clinical trials but creates data objects centered on specific use cases, not just for cancer. The FDN connects objects that share attributes to create navigable pathways between data lakes and silos. What’s more, the objects are SQL compliant making them compatible with statistical and machine learning software at a faster and computationally cost efficient alternative used today.

Conclusion

The digital citizen will become a major definer of who we are as humans and how we are treated by society. Our value to society will be measured by the information collected and managed by commerce and government. The rules and penalties for accessing this information are coming into place but at different speeds in countries.

The Internet is morphing into the third generation, Web 3.0 based on a decentralized P2P network. Defining rights of ownership of our digital profiles is a ongoing battle. Allowing citizens to benefit in a direct way for access will be driven by new software and distributed solutions such as blockchains.

Analytics – information extraction from data – requires new approaches to data access and management that today suffer from the explosive growth of data on the Internet. Ambitna commits to the security of data in motion and at rest, plus advanced analytic methods that protect data sources, as its focus.