About: Community Manager

A couple diplomatic tweets have caught quite a bit of attention lately. What do you think? Should governments be engaging in more clever and web-savvy ways, or have they gone too far? Have your say in the comments below.

Geography can be tough. Here’s a guide for Russian soldiers who keep getting lost & ‘accidentally’ entering #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/RF3H4IXGSp

— Canada at NATO (@CanadaNATO) August 27, 2014

Commemorating the 200th anniversary of burning the White House. Only sparklers this time! pic.twitter.com/QIDBQTBmmL

— British Embassy (@UKinUSA) August 24, 2014

UPDATED

The Russian Mission to NATO responded to the Canadian Tweet with their own map:

Helping our Canadian colleagues to catch up with contemporary geography of #Europe @CanadaNATO pic.twitter.com/MjzRxpFFfN

— Russians at NATO (@natomission_ru) August 28, 2014

ICYMI – This is how the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded when Russian forces entered southeastern Ukraine from Russia:

#UkraineUnderAttack #RussiaInvadedUkraine RT PLZ pic.twitter.com/KMM9ezqAfv

— MFA of Ukraine (@MFA_Ukraine) August 27, 2014

By Allen Brandt, Legal and Policy Fellow, Future of Privacy Forum

Government agencies, like many private organizations, use social media for a variety of purposes. At its most basic form, monitoring of social media gives the agency feedback on how your constituents feel your agency is performing its duties; if you are seeing many complaints and negative statements posted, it might give insight into how to improve services. Some governments, however, are using social media or website tools to track their citizens, with potentially harmful results.

With the continually-decreasing cost of data storage, it is now easier and cheaper to keep data than it is to systematically delete it, so you can now hold an ever-increasing history of your users, their interactions with your web and social media sites or other people, and using simple tools, the ability to identify and track the identities of these users, and the use of this history could be in conflict with local or international data privacy laws.

A major use of social media by governments around the world is to relay official announcements, press releases and statements in a consistent and coherent way. One government agency in India, taking a cue from the new Prime Minister, has mandated that every government department post both a tweet and a Facebook post, at least once every 15 days, regarding their agency’s welfare schemes or achievements. The use of social media, in addition to speed, has the advantage of lower costs, since your agency can get official announcements published to your constituents at essentially no cost.

Privacy Policy

Does your agency have an easy to find privacy policy, written in plain language? For U.S. Government sites, writing in clear language “that the public can understand and use” is now the standard, starting from the Plain Writing Act of 2010 and the Executive Orders that follow. For others, take the effort to have your websites and social media postings written for your audience. In many global organizations, that may mean insuring that your writing is to a 6^th or 8^th grade level. If you are unable to have your privacy policies rewritten into easy to understand language, consider adding an easy summary section to the beginning, where a user can get a one or two sentence description for each part with a link to the longer, more formal language, sometimes called a “layered privacy notice”, and are considered an industry best practice. This is especially important if your audience is multinational, such as USAID or the State Department in the US, or for your customs or immigration accounts.

Transparency

As a big advocate in transparency: do your public facing policies match the actual practices that your agency has in place? Doing this often eliminates constituent FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), and goes a long way towards your agency’s credibility, and the elimination, or at least minimization of your users’ surprises. One recommendation is to review your policies against actual practices on an annual basis. In the private sector, an organization failing to have their actual practices match their website statements could lead, in the US, to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) section 5 violation, commonly called an unfair or deceptive trade practice, in the UK, an Unfair Trading Regulation, and other countries are similar.

Data Collection

A privacy concern is the potential secondary uses of this collected data. First, it’s seemingly impossible to give proper notice to a social media or website user for future uses of their information that are not yet known at the time of collection. Mass collection of personal data, without consent by the individual or another legal basis, could be in violation of both EU and US data protection laws. And some secondary uses, especially those for the public good, would be generally seen as positive, such as using social media after a hurricane or natural disaster, when normal telephone or mobile service was overloaded or slow, if working at all. Of course, with the speed and available to all access of social media, rumors and false information can be just as easily transmitted. After Hurricane Sandy, FEMA published a rumor control website, giving people the real story on what was happening and ways to contact them via phone, website or mobile device. The First Responder website offers guidance, best practices and lessons learned from the use of government agency’s use of social media during times of disaster.

But care should be taken for secondary uses of data that might not be universally appreciated. While a user’s social media name might be personal data, as it is in the US under GSA guidelines or would be under most EU laws, removing the individual identifiers to use, share and analyze the data without the means of identifying any individual has many advantages, including the ability perform research and analysis without risk of identifying any user. Google shares anonymized data with the public for both flu and dengue trends, allowing health officials to better respond to outbreaks. Working with university and other researchers may give your agency additional options to remove individual identifiers from social media logs and allow you to use and analyze the data without the risk of potential disclosure.

Using anonymized Google data to help determine where the flu might be headed is one thing, but to track or potentially identify users who may be searching for information about a communicable or socially unacceptable disease, and the use of this information could lead to legal or labor issues, Privacy Act violations, Genetic Information Act issues, or other problems, should be something to be avoided.

Finally, care should be taken that uses of collected data do not profile individuals, or perform some algorithm that disadvantages any individual (the concept of algorithmic accountability or insuring that your data processing is fair, just non-discriminatory, and in conformance with society’s standards and norms), and the credibility of your agency may depend, in large part, on the public’s perception of how they are treated and if they feel that their person information is being protected.

International, Host Country, and Domestic Laws

Remember that all data that your agency collects in your home country, and under many foreign laws, could be subject to eDiscovery or the ability of citizens to request that your agency produce for inspection, the information that you hold on an individual. The data that you collect or use for analysis have privacy impacts, often subject to various and often conflicting legal and use rules, conflicts between intelligence gathering and the internal agency’s policies, and requests for secondary uses.

Ask your agency’s privacy office and general counsel for guidance, or other agencies, to learn what they are doing and create your own policies and procedures that work for you, and help educate your agency’s management on these issues and how to navigate them.

ABOUT ALLEN BRANDT

Allen Brandt is an attorney who has merged his technical skills with delivering practical data protection and privacy advice, bringing more than 20 years of experience in the technology and information industries. He also served as a panelist at the Digital Diplomacy Coalition’s “Digital Diplomacy and Proactive Monitoring: Challenges to Solutions” event with the Open Technology Institute and Future Tense at the New America Foundation in Washington DC.

Headed to SXSWi this week? Check out some of these digital diplomacy sessions.

Crowdsourcing Diplomacy

March 9 at 11:00AM
This panel will illustrate how the State Dept is leveraging its social media network to address humanitarian crises.

Presenters:

• Hilary Brandt, Director, Office of Innovative Engagement, US Department of State
• Joshua Campbell, GIS Architect, Humanitarian Information Unit, US Department of State

“Open Source” Foreign Policy in the Digital Age

March 9 at 12:30PM
How are governments, NGOs, and international business leaders leveraging social/digital tools to build partnerships across boundaries, cultures, disciplines, and sectors? This panel organized by The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy brings together multidisciplinary expert experience from NATO, USAID and the US Department of State to examine the opportunities and challenges of “Open Source” problem solving in this turbulent 21st century.

Presenters:

• Farah Pandith, Special Representative to Muslim Communities, US Department of State
• James Stavridis, Dean, The Fletcher School The Fletcher School at Tufts University
• Joshua Haynes, Senior Development Technologist & Media Adviser, USAID
• Spencer Ackerman, US National Security Editor, The Guardian

7 Ways to Engage with the US State Department

March 11 at 9:30AM
The talk will include details on 7 mechanisms created to enable more engagement between the State Department and US startups and the innovations they hold, as a way to demonstrate some new avenues for entrepreneurs to consider, earlier in their maturation phases, as to potential uses for their products and services.

Presenters:

• Rebecca Taylor, Venture Principal at Shell Technology Ventures and Entrepreneur-In-Residence at the US Department of State

The New Digital Age

March 7 at 12:30PM
Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen tackle some of the most interesting questions about our future: how will technology change privacy and security, war and intervention, diplomacy, revolution and terrorism? How will technology improve our lives? What new disruptions can we expect?

Presenters:

• Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google
• Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, Google

Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World

March 9 at 3:30PM
The war for winning dominance over social networks and using that dominance to advantage is already underway. James Carafano presents an extremely timely analysis of the techno-future of information and the impact of social networking via the Internet.

Presenters:

• James Carafano, VP, Foreign & Defense Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation

How Data Is Changing International Development

March 8 at 12:45PM
The Aid industry historically shares financial capital to build roads, or human capital to respond to a crisis, but now there is a new source of value. We can now share the rich value of information capital to the technologists that are blossoming in the developing world.

Presenters:

• Nathaniel Manning, Director of Business Operations, Ushahidi

The World Bank & Innovation: Striking Poverty

March 10 at 1:15PM
José-Manuel Bassat from the World Bank Institute will detail how they are listening, discovering, and creating change by engaging the community in conversation through a variety of channels. Discover how the World Bank is “Striking Poverty” by investing in technology and innovations to help citizens around the world become better informed, governments become more transparent, and those in poverty become more engaged in decisions that affect their lives.

Presenters:

• José-Manuel Bassat, Senior Communications Advisor, World Bank Institute

The Future of Government-Citizen Interaction

March 10 at 5:00PM
The concepts of collaboration and location-based services have become popular not only with wikis, social media, and advertising, but are also changing a notoriously strenuous process: interaction between local governments and citizens. Governments can clarify their procedures and encourage citizen input through platforms that support communication, location-based responses, and fast, widespread distribution of information. Citizens can more effectively create change in their communities by offering ideas and discussing issues with their local government and with each other. PublicStuff, for example, utilizes users’ locations and input to pinpoint issues, facilitate review, and ensure resolution. The goal is to transform a previously isolated experience into a collaborative exchange of information and ideas that lead to change in our communities.

Presenters:

• Surya Yalamanchili, CEO, PublicStuff

SXSW Social Good Hub

March 10 at 9:00AM 
Multiple events bringing together digital creatives, entrepreneurs, filmmakers and other SXSW attendees focused on social change.

The Digital Diplomacy Coalition (DDC) has been named by Yeni Diplomasi as the “Professional Group of the Year” in their Digital Diplomacy Review 2013.

Yeni Diplomasi is an Istanbul, Turkey-based platform for the advocacy, research, training, consulting, and publication of digital diplomacy issues.

In addition, the DDC’s Digital Diplomacy Open House was named the “Professional Event of the Year” and ourDigital Diplomacy +SocialGood Forum with the United Nations Foundation has been named “Conference of the Year.” Our LinkedIn Group was also awarded “LinkedIn Group of the Year”.

View Yeni Diplomasi’s full Digital Diplomacy Review 2013 report here ›