Pro Publico Bono – Public Administration

From Vision to Practice

2023-03-08T12:33:00+01:00

European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) Giovanni Buttarelli’s posthumous manifesto, Privacy 2030: A New Vision for Europe, places data protection in a global context. Competition and data protection authorities within the EU cooperate and share information about their official inquiries. If properly enforced, the GDPR may be an effective tool of transparent data processing in the EU, and can serve as a model for the rest of the world. Enforcement is the duty of Member States’ DPAs, therefore, it may be worth analysing Buttarelli’s views in relation to the issues currently facing Hungarian data protection regulation. The paper critically presents Buttarelli’s main views, while discussing them in relation to Hungarian public administration through a specific legal case. As a result of the comparative analysis, it can be concluded that by enhancing the data protection culture and its administrative enforcement, our personal data can be better protected.

Editors’ Note: Introduction to the Thematic Issue on Responsible Artificial Intelligence and Platform Labour

2024-06-28T10:59:35+02:00

editorial

A Comprehensive Review and Evaluation of Deep Learning Methods in Social Sciences

2023-07-13T12:38:47+02:00

Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely used in social sciences and continues to evolve. Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful AI tool transforming the social sciences with valuable insights across many areas. Employing DL for modelling social sciences’ big data has led to significant discoveries and transformations. This study aims to systematically review and evaluate DL methods in the social sciences. Following PRISMA guideline, this study identifies fundamental DL methods applied to social science applications. We evaluated DL models using reported metrics and calculated a normalised reliability score for uniform assessment. Employing relief feature selection, we identified influential parameters affecting DL techniques’ reliability. Findings suggest that evaluation criteria significantly impact DL model effectiveness, while database and application type influence moderately. Identified limitations include inadequate reporting of evaluation criteria and model structure details hindering comprehensive assessment and informed policy development. In conclusion, this review underscores DL methods’ transformative role in the social sciences, emphasising the importance of explainability and responsibility.

Machine Learning in Smart Grids

2023-06-13T12:05:07+02:00

This article presents a state-of-the-art review of machine learning (ML) methods and applications used in smart grids to predict and optimise energy management. The article discusses the challenges facing smart grids, and how ML can help address them, using a new taxonomy to categorise ML models by method and domain. It describes the different ML techniques used in smart grids as well as examining various smart grid use cases, including demand response, energy forecasting, fault detection, and grid optimisation, and explores how ML can improve these cases. The article proposes a new taxonomy for categorising ML models and evaluates their performance based on accuracy, interpretability, and computational efficiency. Finally, it discusses some of the limitations and challenges of using ML in smart grid applications and attempts to predict future trends. Overall, the article highlights how ML can enable efficient and reliable smart grid systems.

Upside Down: Liability, Risk Allocation and Artificial Intelligence

2023-03-09T10:14:54+01:00

The dynamic evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools poses challenges to the existing liability concepts. This paper aims to examine some of the fields of tortious liability that are most affected by these developments to analyse whether the existing legal standards in civil liability can still be used, with slight reinterpretation, when approaching liability scenarios related to AI and ML, and whether fine tuning of the existing liability regimes is needed, or novel liability scenarios should be established. To answer this question, the paper begins by examining the nature of the regulation of AI and ML: whether it should be a regulatory regime neutral to technology or whether, instead, a sector specific approach is essential. The study considers the already existing legal authorities of the EU and the U.S. as starting points for the analysis, and briefly examines the interpretations municipal courts apply when deciding in AI and ML related tort cases.

A Legal Theory of Platform Law

2023-10-06T23:03:40+02:00

This paper discusses the recently emerging platform law from a jurisprudential point of view. After defining the platform as a general coordination mechanism, it deals with topics such as the rationale for regulation, its main goals, and its general characteristics. According to the study, the main argument for regulation is that the platform, as a coordination mechanism, tends to become unstable without intervention, or to become harmful from the point of view of society. Above all, it tends to abuse the asymmetric power situation that exists between the platform and its users. These conditions must be prevented from occurring, and platform users must be protected in certain situations. The study lists four features that characterise platform law: its ex ante regulatory nature, the predominance of technology regulation and self-regulation, and the extensive use of user protection tools, such as complaint mechanisms, protection of user accounts, and explainability obligations. This toolbox partly resembles the long-established methods of consumer protection, but it also differs from it in certain ways.

Digital Tools User Groups as a Digital Divide Among Finnish Employees

2023-03-13T14:13:22+01:00

Based on Statistics Finland’s Quality of Work Life Survey 2018, this paper seeks how Finnish employees’ use of digital tools differs from each other, what sociodemographic and work contextrelated factors these differences are connected to, and how differences in usage are reflected in the effects of digitalisation on employees’ work. The research identified five user groups. Nearly half of the employees are classified as Skilled Users, which are typically of a young age. Challenges for other groups include deficiencies in digital skills, problems in learning to use digital tools, routine-like usage, low learning demands at work, and a high workload and learning pressure arising from intensive use of digital tools. The results support the sequential and compound digital exclusion arguments derived from previous literature, but do not fully support the stratification argument. The paper shows that among employees there are digital divides of various types. Narrowing these gaps requires different policies and customised solutions.

Right Before Your Eyes, Yet Unnoticed

2023-03-16T13:57:01+01:00

This paper focuses on the increasing prominence of digital labour platforms in the labour markets of Southeast Europe, and compares the supply of online labour from nine selected countries: Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Digital labour platforms, as an innovative business model, play an important role in today’s labour markets by linking the demand and supply of digital work. Southeast Europe is no exception to this trend, and has become an important supplier of online labour. With the impact of the Covid–19 pandemic, this and other new forms of employment further increased both globally and in Southeast Europe. Despite this trend, online labour often remains invisible and under the radar of national policymakers and regulators, as well as national statistical agencies, due to the globalised nature of online platforms. This paper aims to shed light on the development of online labour in the countries studied, based on publicly available data collected through Gigmetar, a web scraping tool designed to monitor trends on the number, gender, incomes, and occupations of online workers. The paper compares online labour from nine countries active on the most significant general digital labour platforms (Upwork, Freelancer, and Guru) from February 2022 to October 2022. The criteria for the comparison include occupations, gender and income. The analysis is based on the data of approximately 80% of the total number of active digital workers on the platforms under investigation.
The paper points out the similarities and differences in online labour between the countries of Southeast Europe. For example, the number of online workers increased in all the countries, with creative services and multimedia and software development comprising the most dominant occupations in each country. Moreover, men are more commonly represented in these digital markets than women.

The Consequences of Visibility and Opaqueness for Platform Workers

2023-09-14T09:32:02+02:00

Digital technologies can considerably increase the visibility of people’s behaviours and activities, and therefore researchers should pay more attention to visibility and opaqueness in organisations. This paper focuses on visibility in terms of the information given or mediated to workers. The aim of this paper is to examine consequences of visibility for workers who carry out work tasks through digital labour platforms. The research will focus on how visibility or opaqueness in practice promotes or hinders workers’ capacity to act and to make informed choices in their work. The visibility paradoxes of connectivity, performance and transparency are used as methodical lenses.
The same platform operations can have both empowering and marginalising consequences for workers. While labour platforms continuously improve visibility to workers, they may also hide, inadvertently or intentionally, key information.

Consent and Resistance

2023-08-18T13:18:56+02:00

This research examines the work organisation of the Foodpanda food delivery firm and the experiences of the bicycle couriers who work for it, particularly their attitudes to the algorithmic management of their work. The focus of the inquiry is the gamification of work, both from-above and from-below. Gamification from-above is constructed by the management. Taking part in the games can be a source of pride and satisfaction, but also of addiction and self-exploitation. Gamification from-below includes all kinds of “games” that the couriers initiate. These can be different strategies to earn more money, save energy or sabotage the labour process. The study shows the connection between games and the formation of consent and resistance among the couriers. The analysis differentiates between the games of making do and making out. Games of making do usually bring about consent, as they stay within the boundaries set by the management. In contrast, making out goes against managerial interest and gives agency to the couriers, thus it has the potential to foster resistance.

Body and Mind

2023-03-13T15:51:40+01:00

Cycling food couriers in Hungary tend to normalise and justify for themselves the precarious gig working conditions as a sports activity. To understand the blurring between sport and work, I carried out participant observation, conducted semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis. I worked as a bicycle courier in Budapest in July and August 2021. The successful boom of the cycling-based food delivery platforms depends on the extraction of bodily resources. Food delivery companies create new frontiers as they frame labour as challenging cardio activity. The riders embrace the idea that they get paid for training their body, which activity is otherwise expensive and tiring. The workers utilise their knowledge from their past sporting activities about nutrition and pain relief to increase their workload. Sporting rivalry and boasting of results are active features of the courier community. Although my interviewees proudly claimed themselves entrepreneurs, the body experiences reveal the cleavage between gig wage labour and idealised entrepreneurship. The pain and dangers of urban cycling work highlight the unequal relationship and make couriers critical of the company.