Iran: how many rationing riots? Check your sources

I blogged about Iran's energy policy a while back, and noted that their fuel subsidy was likely to run into a wall of government deficits sometime soon. That happened this week, when the government announced gasoline rationing (note: a market price also rations things, by making people pay what the item is actually worth). The BBC has a nice Q&A on the rationing policy and rationale. The interesting part isn't the rationing, or even the widespread protests. It's more in the fact that the news stories vary A LOT in their selection of the number of gas stations that protesters supposedly burned.

Yesterday, it wasn't uncommon to see a news source cite 50 or 100 gas stations. This figure seems to originate with at least one Iranian resistance group, whose website cites "at least 50 stations burned." The Seattle Times still says "more than a dozen, while the venerable New York Times cites "at least two" gas stations. CNN confirms exactly two.

Why the discrepancy?

Clearly, some folks just head to the internet, and have no idea if their source is legitimate. But there's also not a lot of Americans who get foreign news from someone actually in a foreign locale. The Christian Science Monitor noted in February that the number of foreign correspondents by both television and newspaper news outlets has been dropping steadily, even as foreign affairs has become more important since 9/11. The original paper, from the Harvard Shorenstein Center, goes into more detail about the dearth of foreign news (pdf).

If we want good international news, we need good journalists overseas.

Data reuse endangers privacy

That data you give the Census bureau is private, right? It'll just be used in the aggregate to help assign congressional districts and distribute federal funds?

That's the theory, but electronic security columnist Bruce Schneier examines how data reuse (or repurposing) has led to significant violations of privacy.

The Census Bureau normally is prohibited by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals; the law exists to encourage people to answer census questions accurately and without fear. And while the Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily suspended that protection in order to locate Japanese-Americans, the Census Bureau had maintained that it only provided general information about neighborhoods.

New research proves they were lying.

The article notes that this is not just the past and how our data-hungry society can leave a lot of information available for unscrupulous use.

There are two bothersome issues about data reuse. First, we lose control of our data. In all of the examples [Amazon recommending books based on browsing habits, airlines saving your seat preferences], there is an implied agreement between the data collector and me: It gets the data in order to provide me with some sort of service. Once the data collector sells it to a broker, though, it's out of my hands. It might show up on some telemarketer's screen...This, of course, affects our willingness to give up personal data in the first place. The reason U.S. census data was declared off-limits for other uses was to placate Americans' fears and assure them that they could answer questions truthfully.

The second issue about data reuse is error rates. All data has errors, and different uses can tolerate different amounts of error...That's OK; if the database of ultra-affluent Americans of a particular ethnicity you just bought has a 10 percent error rate, you can factor that cost into your marketing campaign. But that same database, with that same error rate, might be useless for law enforcement purposes.

...An even more egregious example of error-rate problems occurred in 2000, when the Florida Division of Elections contracted with Database Technologies (since merged with ChoicePoint) to remove convicted felons from the voting rolls. The databases used were filled with errors and the matching procedures were sloppy, which resulted in thousands of disenfranchised voters -- mostly black -- and almost certainly changed a presidential election result.

Of course, not examples of data reuse are bad. Medical records in the aggregate provide valuable research material for doctors and medical scientists, allowing connections to be drawn between treatments, behaviors, and outcomes. But it's important that the laws around data secure it and that data collection systems don't retain information forever (e.g. Google's recent promise to expunge search records after 18 months).

The Luddite on the surplus of information

Wired Blogs has a great column by Tony Long called the Luddite, an old guy's look at modern technology. He has a nice piece this week on that ability of modern technology (like RSS feeds) to enhance the American tendency to tune out information we don't care to hear.

Update (a few minutes later): In a nice coincidence, another of Wired's bloggers is also discussing the vagaries of technology, but this time from the perspective that technology erases too many hurdles for people. An excerpt:

Did you know that it's possible to calculate a cosine even if you think "cosine" is a brand of nasal decongestant?