IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019 - 86

Americans could be uniquely recognized using only
three bits of information: zip code, birth date, and sex.
The datasets being released today are anonymized by
applying ad hoc de-identification methods. Therefore,
the possibility of re-identification depends heavily on
the advancement of re-identification methods and availability of the auxiliary datasets to an adversary. Thus,
the chances of privacy breaches in the future are essentially uncertain.

The all-important consideration to
be accounted for is how the collection
of data may affect a person's
well-being and dignity.
The all-important consideration to be accounted for is
how the collection of data may affect a person's wellbeing and dignity, and to ensure that basic human rights
and human freedom are not impinged upon. We should
work actively to minimize potential risks related to the
release of private confidential information, and the malicious use of data (potentially by unauthorized agents).

Quality Of Statistics - Numbers are Soft,
and Incentives Matter
Data is not simply information that is harvested from an
objective context. It should be an institutionally, culturally, and socially shaped product. Collecting good quality data for development is in practice very costly as we
need resources and manpower for data collection,
maintenance, and monitoring [22]. For instance, the
aggregate statistic for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in
many sub-Saharan African countries is often measured
approximately since most African countries are simply
unable to collect all the information needed to calculate
GDP accurately and changes are approximately inferred
from rainfall figures or population growth [21]. The use
of this data can lead to distorted or misleading policy
decisions by development agencies and governments
and can contribute to the underestimation of GDP and
bewildering fallouts such as the following:
1) In November 2010, Ghana's Statistics Service announced an estimated GDP that was off from its true
value, resulting in an upward adjustment of a whopping 60%, which was enough to change Ghana's
status from a low-income country to a lower middleincome country [23];

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2) Similar adjustments were made in Nigeria in April 2014
where the rise was almost 90%, which caused the
total GDP of sub-Saharan Africa to rise by 20% [21].
But where did these overnight growth spurts come
from? And what to say about the fate of the analysis and
policies of the various policymakers and development
professionals that were based on the previous miscalculated data - and the cost of this misplaced analysis?
The official statistics are often missing, incomplete,
dated, or unreliable. Given such concerns, researchers
have argued that the numbers cannot be taken at face
value for development data from a place like Africa,
resulting in what has been called "Africa's statistical
tragedy" [21].

Pitfalls of Self-Monitoring of States
In the modern world, almost every government tightly
controls what kind of information is disseminated
about the state. An important aspect of the self-monitoring of states is that it often becomes a farce because
people cannot keep their own score. The official statistics measured by the government must be accepted
with a pinch of salt since governments are spinning
these numbers in ways that project the country's progress positively since the legitimacy of the state depends
on the popular understanding of the country's progress. The anthropologist James Scott in his book "Seeing Like a State" [41] describes the ways in which
governments, in their fetish for quantification and data,
end up making people's lives miserable rather than better. As development projects initiated by the states are
aimed at improving human lives, an appropriate measure for the development must be how much effort is
expended on minimizing the risks associated with data
collection and analysis.

Human Systems Have Complex Loops
with Predictions Being Self-Fulfilling
Human social systems are complex adaptive systems
with multi-loop nonlinear feedback in which actions performed for some purpose can lead to quite different
unexpected and unintended consequences. We will
use two examples to illustrate the 1) unintended
consequences and 2) self-fulfilling nature of interventions in complex social systems.
For our first example, consider the Cobra effect as an
example of an incident in which an intervention crafted
to ameliorate a problem actually aggravated it by producing some unintended consequences. During the British colonial rule of India, the government devised a
bounty system for combating the rise of venomous
cobras. The system worked successfully initially and lots
of snakes were killed for the reward but entrepreneurs

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