‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower
This article is about Christopher Wylie. He brought big data and social media to information operations and used it on the US electorate. This idea made Cambridge Analytica and helped Donald Trump’s election campaign. It also explains how Cambridge Analytica acquired data from SCL and Facebook and eventually made this political message-targeting tool. I wonder if the same thing like the 2016 election online media manipulation will ever happen again?
Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy
Absolutely love this headline/title. This is a project about privacy- they track millions of people’s smartphone and their data files (Love how they called this kind of act Tiny Brothers). All these data visualized maps indicate that we have zero privacy with our phone tracking us 24/7. Among all kinds of data, location data is the most powerful one.
I wonder if it’s even possible to go completely off the grid? Even if we do, we can still be tracked by the people around us who still use their phones right?
Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands
More and more schools have started to use surveillance technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health, like the app SpotterEDU and Degree Analytics. “These administrators have made a justification for surveilling a student population because it serves their interests, in terms of the scholarships that come out of their budget, the reputation of their programs, the statistics for the school.”
Does collecting all the data really benefits the students’ performance at school? (does it make the learning process more enjoyable or not?) To be honest I think college is the time where we shouldn’t need anymore tight supervision. Too much of surveillance technology on campus ruined the opportunities for us to take control of our lives.
A Clear Case for Resisting Student Trackin
This article is backing up the previous Washington Post news. She thinks that though the data from SpotterEDU would be helpful- but aren’t worth the social cost. Not only did it take away the opportunity for students to be independent, but the data also creates a more unequal environment for disadvantaged groups. I know we don’t have such technology here at UIUC yet, but is this going to be a trend in the US?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
“The information we provided is the least important part of the information they collected about us.” Professor Zuboff pointed out the companies that collect data are using them to analyze human behaviors. Based on these behavior surplus, companies can predict our personality, emotion, or even sexual orientation. All these companies that sell users’ data to third-party companies take no responsibilities of what the third-party companies will do with our data. Like Pokemon GO and Google Earth saturate us in their enjoyable services, so that we wouldn’t even notice how much data they took from us. At the end of the day, we are controlled by the technology instead of the other way around. Do we ever have the chance to regain control of our data?
Mapping Interventions
Helen Nissenbaum created TrackmeNot which send fake queries to the search engines and browsers. She also introduced Cryptogram, a program you can encrypt your images so that Facebook wouldn’t see your images. She mentioned the word obfuscation- the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language. This strategy has been used in military services, orb weaving spider, Heather Dewey’s project, and Ben’s project!! Her team created AdNauseam because they worried about target online advertising, which highlight the surveillance and creation of profiles. I personally find Advault very intriguing. I’ve been using many ad blocking softwares and I always questions their capabilities- do they actually work?