SecurityLah - the Asian Cyber Security Show

Ep 3. Data Transparency & COVID-19 (MY) Part 1/3

February 08, 2021 SecurityLah Season 1 Episode 3
SecurityLah - the Asian Cyber Security Show
Ep 3. Data Transparency & COVID-19 (MY) Part 1/3
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Malaysia took drastic steps to combat COVID-19, which resulted in the declaration of emergency. We look at the aspect of data transparency and how it affects the initiatives of battling the COVID-19 pandemic. 

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

data, numbers, journalism, people, resident, information, trends, situation, reports, person, building, statistics, cases, management, malaysia, pandemic, question, stories, years, sanitized

 

00:25

Welcome to security law podcast.

 

00:36

I am i de la Raza, I am the special reports editor Mr. Keeney, I've been in this role for about two years. But prior to that, I've been with malaysiakini in total. Right now, about 11 years. So I started as general just reported. And then now I'm doing special reports, which is generally anything that's not breaking news or within the 24 hour news cycle. I went back to school a couple of years ago, or three years ago, because I realized that whatever training I got 10 years before that was not enough to do journalism today, to the journalists need to know how to code to understand data to understand technology. So I went back to school to do to add to learn that and then when I came back, I, we, I started working with this team in Malaysia kini called the Kenya newsletter, which uses technology or experiments with technology to do different types of journalism or different ways of doing journalism. I'm not actually formally part of the news lab, I, the way they put it is that they support my work. So sometimes, my work requires different ways of presenting the data or presenting the story. So I will work with a company slap on that. That's me in a nutshell. Awesome.

 

02:12

So what do you think about the current COVID 19 situation that's affecting Malaysia and also Asia in general.

 

02:23

I mean, I don't think I'm gonna say anything that is very different from what anyone else is thinking. It's, it's a really, really difficult situation, especially now. And for journalists, it has been a really harrowing year for us. In Malaysia, especially because we have had to cover this pandemic, as well as political upheaval at the same time. So it's been a really difficult year. For. For others. Obviously, this pandemic is something that is beyond health. Lots of people have lost their livelihoods in this situation. So I know that this is something that the government keeps saying that we have to balance life and lives and livelihood. But I don't think anyone has actually found the right balance for that yet.

 

03:12

Reason for this particular episode of the podcast, basically, is to find out about the situation on the ground, I'm sure you have a lot of stories and maybe many tear jerking ones as well. And we want to look into the role of data. When it comes to especially contact tracing data, maybe there's other kinds of data as well, besides the ones that is provided by my sujeto apps, to that is like painting, the scenario or, or, or feeding the statistic feeding, feeding the statistics, which the Malaysian public is seeing every day, and which also kind of like plays an influence on their, their emotions and their moods and things like that. For example, my mom, she worked forward without fail, she wants to know the number of new cases every day. I myself personally, I do better the number of new cases is 100 or 400,000. I will still do what I do, which is like follow the guidelines and you know, do what I can to keep myself safe and so on and so forth. What what do you see the role of other statistics statistics that is being shared every day? S?

 

04:33

In my question, I don't really see that right now. But at least for the since March, quite a lot of my day is spent on maintaining the COVID-19 tracker that the Canadian US Lab has put together. So this tracker is like a dashboard essentially, which has all your daily stats that you get for your door every day. How many new cases all these other things as well as locations of cases which we get from public information, okay, so either your building management makes announcements or shops or even residents or contact us to say, my family member has, has had COVID, can you please put my look my house on the back, just so that my neighbors would know. So these sort of information is really to help people to get a grasp of the what is the situation in a larger scale. So instead of just having information piecemeal, everywhere, everything is in one place. So the idea initially, when we started, it was really because of that, because we were running around everywhere trying to get information. Some of the is in this Java 10 comes out and Facebook page, some of it is in the press statement of the Slovak Government or whatever. So we want to put everything in place to make it easier for people.

 

06:01

Okay, that's great. It sounds as though there's like many sources where this information is coming on coming from. Since you're okay, so there's there's more than just the official announcements from DG, who, when he announces the statistics is does it correlate? Or does it correlate with the numbers that you see?

 

06:24

Yes. I'm not saying that. These numbers are not official numbers they are but it's, in a way quite decentralized the way KKM handles this pandemic, or even any sort of outbreak, the Jabatan kesihatan degree has a lot of autonomy. So they do they release their data themselves. So this data is the one that's collated by the CPRC. Center for Preparedness in crisis. I don't know, I don't remember what it stands for. Yeah. Anyways, the data and this data was it's the one that makes up the press statements. But of course, it's very detailed. So not everything goes in there. But as someone who is just like an everyday person, I don't the national stats does not? How do I say that's not tell the story for me, I need to know, how bad is my state? Do I need to prepare for lockdown in my state, for example. So or even a lockdown in my district. So this information is not really given out in the daily press statements. So you have to go check on social media or the your respective Japan psionically and then try to scout for that chart or anything else? So

 

07:48

okay, maybe I've been very spoiled, because I get a lot of my updated information from WhatsApp messages and things like that. So

 

07:58

how do you know it's vary from people send you messages,

 

08:02

okay, when when he shows a picture of the map, and then visit with boxes, and statistics for for each state. I think it's so sad.

 

08:12

It gives you this, say, and it gives you the district, it doesn't give you the Mukim. So McLean, you have to go look for the theater degree. Okay, what we did for most parts of the year was actually to collect everything in one place. But up to generate 10, we retired the Mukim numbers, because we just didn't have the resources to do it anymore. We're hoping that we'll get more resources that we can revive it.

 

08:35

May I know, how do you get the McCain statistics?

 

08:39

Like what you hear so far, make sure you never miss a show by clicking the subscribe button. Now. This podcast is made possible by listeners like you. Thank you for your support. Now back to the show.

 

08:56

It's actually published by the Java thinkers yet and I agree, but they are published in jpg format. So most of them are not machine readable because the tables are kind of a bit fancy. So we have to manually input them. We've tried all sorts of different ways to make machines read it. But know that we've made too much too many mistakes. With the time spent preparing that for the machine to read it is exactly the same amount of time spent to manually input those things,

 

09:29

it law, the various sources of data that you have. Now, I understand that you and your team, perhaps you would take an intersection sectional analysis that is done on the data. Is that right? would or would your team do something like that?

 

09:47

Well, we record the data on this massive spreadsheet and then the militia key team has access to that and then occasionally they will come up with kind of data journalism stories, analyzing that data and understanding the trends that will happen. On the dashboard, we will have your your basic charts like will provide you your analysis on this be had this chart core called patients in treatment, which basically compares how many patients are in treatment and how many beds are available to show you the capacity. But unfortunately, recently, because of the health ministry's decision to let some people stay at home, and some people come to hospital, so and they don't really publish the numbers for that it's in how many people at home, how many are in hospitals. So we can't really say if we are at capacity or over capacity in terms of beds. But basically, the point is, all this information is charted. So instead of seeing your one number every day and having to see Well, how was it before yesterday, whatever. So you can just look at the dashboard and see a trend from January 25 of last year.

 

11:09

Okay, yeah, I was just going to ask, do you see from the analysis that you have done over a long period of time? Do you see any random occurrences of trends which deviates from a normal one, that means something that happens because of a situation or aspect that caused an outburst? But not really representative trend of the development of COVID-19 situation in the country?

 

11:35

I don't know whether I'm answering your question correctly. But I would say that if you look at the the trend of cases, it's very apparent that some were in September, things started to pick up really quickly and moving up exponentially. I think we all know that. That's the sub election. So before that, you can see that the line is really relatively flat, it doesn't it goes up a little bit, it goes down later. You know, it's there's nothing really massive until September when things just get really out of hand.

 

12:14

Okay, as of now, there are two things which are sticking out for me. Right, because you mentioned like building management, authorities, they contact you. And, and also, you mentioned data journalism, I think I heard that. So my first question would be for now would be what's data journalism? And what was the what is the objective of data journalism, if I heard correctly? The second one? The second question, which I have for now would be, is it actually okay for building management to disclose about infected persons in their premises? Could that be how do they do so in a way that doesn't violate that person's privacy? Can be a way to do that.

 

13:02

I will show you how they actually do it. So I'll take the second question first. Basically, what they do is they release a notice to residents, it's very, very, very rare occasion where the building management actually sends us the notice, in the notice, especially for residents to say that resident of block A, for example, has tested positive on this day, this person has been taken hospital or this person is still in quarantine. And we are sanitizing the common areas of this block. So you wouldn't exactly know which because most condominiums will have what 20 floors or so, and each floor would have 10 houses. So you wouldn't know although there have been some notices, which actually identify which unit. And I only hope that the get consent from the resident first, most of the time is a resident, so contact the management office saying that I've been infected, please announce this to the other residents. For when we log it and our page, we don't include the unit numbers. Of course, we just go down even at most the Level Level seven or block a for example. The unit numbers definitely, you know, there have been instances where overzealous I guess building management have not only revealed unit numbers, but also names and IC numbers, which is really ideal. I don't know how that came to be. I know there were disputes in that.

 

14:43

Do you see any kind of backlash when that happened?

 

14:47

So absolutely. When that happens, the pole affected or upset, but you also see other people in the residents not appreciating this law. They don't need the infant Ha, why do you need information? Because I see numbers and whatnot. Okay, you only need to know if the building has been sanitized? Is it safe for me to use the left? Things like that?

 

15:10

What about the surrounding community? Do they? I mean, are there reports of like the community around the infected person? Actually, I don't know, boycotting them, because I have. I have heard reports about this not not necessarily in Malaysia, but in other countries.

 

15:27

Well, actually, there was this, one of the residents associations actually contact us directly was this housing area in Rwanda, they will have in quite a quite localized outbreak, something like 60 cases or something in their small time. And they were not happy that kick em wasn't actually taking much action. They felt that they could have done a lot more or even they wanted the government to lock out their area, because they felt that it was dangerous, and more and more people were getting infected. In that case, they actually told to us that even grabbed drivers, once the news came out, grab drivers they want to come and deliver. But they were okay with that. Because obviously, they came to us with the news and they wanted it to be publicized. So there is that situation as well.

 

16:20

Responsible, very responsible citizens. Yes. Yeah.

 

16:23

Amazing. So, you want me to take the first question now? Or shall we continue with this?

 

16:30

With the first question, if you can do journalism that updates profs turn data journalism is

 

16:37

essentially journalism using data. I mean, it's not even anything new, lots of journalism uses data. The difference is that now we have a whole discipline and people actually specialized in just doing data journalism. So you would, we will be looking at large numbers of large data sheets, for example, and then looking for trends and understanding if there are things that need to be reported about these trends. And then the data journalism reports are usually not just about the numbers. They are, of course, supported by expert analysis and things like that. So it really is about focusing on trends within numbers on issues that are important.

 

17:32

So and also, just now, you mentioned that a lot of information, but also available on various social media platform. Do you have any principles the general public should have when they're reading all these different stories that are being shared, so that they will know when they are reading what's reliable, besides going to the official channels, and then also not falling prey to and be part of the dissemination of misinformation,

 

18:03

which scheffers How we verify information that comes through on social media, just for our locations, log. We never take information coming off the show social media, unless it comes out from the management of that place, or a resident of that place, and we can verify that that person is a resident. It's just noticed, on posting on social media, we make it a point to call up the building to ask whether this is verified or not. But of course, if you're a person just consuming information on social media, you wouldn't necessarily want to call each person, every building management that you see. So my advice has always been for, at least with with my family members who keep coming to me with notices and whatnot, is the easiest thing you could do is just Google it. Because if it's some, if it's something quite big and concerning is likely to have been reported by the news already. So you would already find it in a legitimate organization, it's not there yet, then you might want to have a bit more suspicion that it might not be true. You can also go look for like we do look for the actual source of the information. So for example, there are lots of kind of content farms right now we just do screenshots and share. So you can try to Google specific phrases from that screenshot, or you can go to the account that allegedly shared this first to actually see where they actually occurred. So those we, if it's something that's really quite hard to say, if it's something that's quite inflammatory, usually or sensational or makes you feel sad or angry It's very important to check first because those are the kinds of red flags for fake information.

 

20:09

Okay, ideally, you're the best person to ask this now, because you're like, practically working, you're right in the middle of so much data, you're working with it, making sense of it, you're analyzing it, and then you're, you have to present it in a way that the Malaysian public can understand and make use of. Right. So, like, but do you feel in your opinion, there is the right level of transparency.

 

20:41

Thanks for joining us this week on security lab. Make sure to visit our website at security lab dot Asia, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Spotify, or via RSS, so you'll never miss a show.

Aidila Razak and the Kini News Lab