Can mobile data help fight Ebola?

Earlier this month I had the privilege of attending the World Economic Forum’s 2014 Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai.

I’m involved with the Global Agenda Council on Data-Driven Development, and we’ve been tasked with looking at the policy challenges around using data in the sphere of international development. We’re focusing on three areas: data/identity, ethics and governance. Those three elements are creating complex and dynamic challenges that are limiting the flow of data needed to achieve sustainable development.

One example of how this is playing out in a real-world scenario is the negotiation to access mobile data to battle Ebola in West Africa.

The Ebola outbreak has highlighted how mobile phone records could help us understand the spread of epidemics – and the challenges associated with doing so. In general, African countries are not data-rich environments, but for every 100 inhabitants, there are 89 mobile phones. The metadata in call records maintained by mobile phone operators – who called whom, at what time and from where – offers a rich source of data that can be used to track, among other things, importation routes for infectious disease, patterns of migration or economic transactions. But efforts to share this data in the fight against Ebola have run into roadblocks.

Now let’s first put this into context – mobile data alone will not stop the outbreak. It’s not even on most people’s list of priorities (more protective gear and more trained medical personnel are far higher priorities). But mobile data could be useful and should be leveraged, especially as those involved in the response effort have so far struggled to get any data that gives a clear picture of what’s happening. Also, the data is already collected and sitting in the servers of local mobile operators, which makes it all the more frustrating that it is not being used.

A Brookings paper we co-authored looks at some of the obstacles to using mobile data in the fight against Ebola, epidemic diseases, and a range of other development contexts. Our work, which was part of the Big Data@MIT initiative, looked at various cases of big data use to consider the privacy issues involved and how technology and other tools could address them.

We examined two use cases of mobile phone data for development, both of which were quite distinct from a regulatory and privacy perspective. One, modeled on previous research, involved the use of location metadata to model the spread of infectious diseases (e.g. malaria or Ebola) within and among countries. The second case considered the use of mobile phone data to define subgroups based on specific traits and behaviours, and then micro-target outreach for interventions. We also considered limited circumstances where the data might be used to identify specific individuals and contact them directly in case of emergency.

These case studies showed that, despite the promise, regulatory barriers and privacy challenges prevent us from being able to use mobile phone metadata to its full potential. More specifically, our analysis showed that there is lack of commonly accepted practices for sharing mobile phone data in privacy-conscientious ways. It also revealed an uncertain and country-specific regulatory landscape for data sharing, especially for cross-border data sharing.

Our research also revealed that for policy-makers or mobile carriers looking for clarity, there is a lack of documentation and guidance to help them. We therefore made some concrete suggestions on how exactly data should be anonymized for various contexts. We are considering a follow-on piece that would provide an expanded version of the framework.

Our article also makes several broad recommendations to facilitate the use of mobile phone metadata for humanitarian purposes in ways that protect against the misuse of information:

1. Companies, NGOs, researchers, privacy experts and governments need to establish best practices for privacy-conscientious metadata sharing in different development contexts – a wider and higher level discussion of the kind our MIT working group conducted. This would help carriers and policy-makers strike the right balance between privacy and utility in the use of metadata, and make it easier and less risky for carriers to support humanitarian efforts and research, and for researchers and NGOs to use metadata appropriately.

2. The best practices must take into account that there are no perfect ways to de-identify data – and probably never will be. There will always be some risk that must be balanced against the public good that can be achieved. Much more research in computational privacy is needed. But widespread adoption of existing techniques as standards could enable the sharing of data in a privacy-conscientious way.

3. Standards, practices and legal regulation should address and incorporate trust mechanisms for humanitarian sharing of data in a more nuanced way. It is also important to identify trusted third parties and systems to manage datasets, enable detailed audits, and control the use of data. This would make is easier to share the data, but would protect against risks.

4. Governments must adopt laws and rules that simplify the collection and use of mobile phone metadata for the purposes of research and the public good. They should also seek to harmonize laws on the sharing of metadata, with common identifiers across national borders. Clear and consistent rules will help, but only if they take a pragmatic and privacy-conscientious approach to anonymization, cross-border transfers, and novel uses of data in public health emergencies and other valuable research.

Our council will take up some of these issues over the coming year. I believe we can make solid progress in realizing IT’s potential to help address these critical problems.

Authors: Jake Kendall is a senior programme officer in innovation and research financial services for the poor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Cameron Kerry is a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab; Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is a senior PhD student in computational privacy at the MIT Media lab.

Image: A woman uses a mobile phone before taking a HIV/AIDS test at a mobile testing unit in Ndeeba, a suburb in Uganda’s capital Kampala May 16, 2014. REUTERS/Edward Echwalu