Changing populations practice questions.

Humanitarian agencies register displaced people biometrically, and UNHCR's population registration systems have held records for millions of individuals since the late 2010s. Which implication of such a database do human rights organisations raise most often?

• Data gathered for aid could later reach the state a person fled
• Biometric records cannot be updated when the size of a family changes
• Assistance can be collected only at the camp where a person registered
• Registration takes longer to complete than a paper-based process does

Answer: Data gathered for aid could later reach the state a person fled

The impact is faster, less duplicated distribution of aid; the implication is that a durable and highly identifying record now exists about people whose safety may depend on not being identified. Function creep is a governance risk rather than a technical fault of the database.

In May 2020 the company behind a planned smart district on Toronto's Quayside waterfront withdrew from the project after three years of public argument. Which objection was central to the opposition it faced?

• The proposed buildings were taller than the city's zoning rules allowed
• Data would be collected in public space with no agreed governance
• The district would have been served by a single internet provider
• The company declined to employ construction workers living in the city

Answer: Data would be collected in public space with no agreed governance

In public space nobody can decline to be sensed, so consent — the usual justification for collecting personal data — is unavailable and the question becomes who governs the data instead. The dispute was about the missing institution, not about the sensors.

A national statistical office replaces door-to-door enumeration with an online census form supplemented by administrative registers. Which population is most at risk of being undercounted?

• Households that received the paper reminder letter first
• Residents whose address has not changed for many years
• People with no fixed address and no administrative record
• Owners of a second home who are counted in two different districts

Answer: People with no fixed address and no administrative record

A census built on registers inherits the coverage of those registers, so people who are missing from them — those in informal housing, undocumented migrants, people without a fixed address — become statistically invisible. Because budgets and seats are allocated per head, an undercount is a distributional effect rather than a technical detail.

A municipality replaces some of its home visits to older residents with a telecare package: a pendant alarm, door sensors and a nightly report to a call centre. Which statement identifies an implication rather than an impact?

• Response times to a fall shorten from hours to minutes for those residents who choose to wear the pendant during the day and at night
• The company that came with a home visit is lost, and for some residents it was the only conversation of the day
• The number of home visits made by the municipality each week falls
• The call centre receives a nightly status report from every household in the scheme

Answer: The company that came with a home visit is lost, and for some residents it was the only conversation of the day

The other three are the measured effects the scheme was designed to produce; the implication is that a service justified on safety also carried social contact that nothing in the new arrangement provides. Efficiency gains in care routinely remove a function nobody had written down.

A city has grown mainly by informal settlement, and whole districts have no street names or house numbers, so ambulances, deliveries and utility connections cannot be directed to a household. The city adopts a digital addressing scheme that gives every small square of ground a short code. What does the scheme change?

• Residents obtain legal title to the land on which their homes are built
• The settlements are brought inside the city's planning boundary and onto its tax register
• Places become referable, so services can be sent without a street ever being named
• The city obtains an accurate count of how many people live in each district

Answer: Places become referable, so services can be sent without a street ever being named

Addressing solves reference and nothing else: it does not confer tenure, incorporate a settlement or count anybody, which is why it can be adopted quickly and why claims made for it are often too large. The implication is that whoever operates the coding system now runs critical public infrastructure.

A district offers a telecare package to any resident over 75 who asks for one, and every alarm raised is passed straight to the ambulance service. After a year, participating households made 22 per cent fewer emergency calls than non-participating households of the same age, and the district concludes that the package prevents emergencies. Which weakness in that reasoning is most serious?

• The two groups were compared in the same year rather than in successive years.
• Emergency calls should have been counted per resident rather than per household.
• A difference of 22 per cent is too small to be reported in health statistics.
• Residents who ask for the package may differ from those who do not.

Answer: Residents who ask for the package may differ from those who do not.

Nobody assigned the package: residents selected themselves into it, and those who ask for an alarm may be healthier, better supported or more confident. A difference between self-selected groups cannot be read as an effect of the intervention.