Spotify: random searches, shuffle your least favorite genre(s), play only one song on repeat forever
Tinder: fake your information/preferences, match with everyone!
Residual data that could be used against you: Google knowing how fast you drive, sexting, Grinder
Tinder:
Tinder constantly tracks your data and updates it dependent on your location, but you can’t actively change your own location. It does it for you.
Along with it tracking your location, you can link it to other social media platforms, like Instagram, Facebook, and Spotify. Also, any type of information you put on there is known like age, weight, height or your bio.
A way to obfuscate Tinder is just to make a fake Tinder logistics – like 2 truths and a lie.
Social Media platform : Instagram
The data you provide it : Likes
App extension : Likes random things and unlikes past liked posts in order to make explore page and ads more random and not catered to you.
Social Media platform : Snapchat
The data you provide it : Photo
App extension : Blurs background so people dont know the location
Social Media platform : Facebook
The data you provide it : Age + photo
App extension : AI generated profile pic and random age / info
(1)
This article is about the residual data of individuals gathered from facial recognition softwares planted on social media sites such as Facebook, and exploited to third party beneficiaries, discussing the potentials of cyber-warfare, militaristic regime control, and targeted political ads that could influence potential voters. Isn’t it too late to resist surveillance capitalism if the government already has enough data to annex these data’s and use them against us? These technologies have already come out and have been dissembled by many individuals who know how to un-mask and re-program data to replicate or alter its software. You cannot take back an invention once it has come out, making it harder to take off the market and regulate, and easier to get into the hands of positions of power and wealth.
(2)
I am not going to lie, this conference was a big run on sentence for me. Helen talked a lot about how data obfuscation is planted via privacy statements and agreements that are harder to discern and analyze for the average user. Data obfuscation hides behind contracts such as privacy agreements we sign before enlisting an app, sharing a location, buy a purchase on iTunes, etc etc. These incredibly long and dull contracts are hard to read for someone who is trying to download an app for a very temporary use, for example. I have began seeing these privacy agreements when I was young, but quickly became desensitized to them after trying to read one. I believe this type of data obfuscation is ethically okay in surveys, where you are agreeing to be deceived and the terms are easy to understand.
(3)
This article is about Chris Wiley, a gifted entrepreneur who had created an algorithm that determines a user of social medias’ preferences, and uses that information to target information at them that the algorithm finds relatable based on the information the user gives them(?). Wiley had no idea where it was going to go, and he has been trying to bring it out of the shadows for years. It is strange to think about, but a computer only holds as much information as it is given at the beginning by its creator, or so we believe given our technology today. While certain AI’s develop connections to their previous databases of knowledge, I think it is crazy but amazing to think about how some computers can analyze a persons personality better than a human can, perhaps. But this is a different usage of computer intelligence, and it plays on unknowing victims of the web. These “researchers” are using computer programming as proxies to gather personal data about people using methods such as data obfuscation within privacy agreements in order to prompt users into handing over their data. There is nothing academic in the way this data is being sold to third parties, some of which are military regimes, government programs, and unknown international companies. The potential for these vast amounts of personal data being spread to the wrong parties is almost inevitable if you own a phone or even any “smart” appliances or applications, even car GPS.
(4)
This article is about data of the personal locations of millions of people that is being integrated into new technological companies or apps, or collected from existing, and being easily accessible to even those closest to you trying to track your location routes and whereabouts. I think about how technology surveillance is getting more advanced every single day, and how apart from your employers or school being able to track you, this is also very concerning for victims of domestic abuse, or those with unstable home situations. Right now, having a phone on you is an extra security measure. It could save your life on the off chance, but it could also tip you off and make you a potential victim to those that might be wishing you harm. Technological surveillance could affect the individual and their relationship dynamics just as much as it could affect the relationship between them and their employer.
(5)
This article is about how colleges use technologies such as tracker “social credit” apps to monitor students whereabouts, attendance, and habits. Feeling like you’re being watched or monitored at all times, psychological effects could suggest that students are being “infantilized where they’re expected to grow into adults”. This reminds me of that one episode of Black Mirror, where everyone’s lives was based on a “social credit” system, and you were kicked out of society once you reached a certain rating below average to the standard. Apart from that, labeling a student as doing below average and monitoring them more than “average” students does more to lower their self-esteem than to boost it. If you are already in a vulnerable position, and someone comes to your dorm to say that they have been watching you in the state that you’ve been in for the last however many weeks or months, thats a terrifying thought for someone who might be going through something traumatic or depressive. They are already flagged as being “below average”, while they themselves may not already be thinking too highly of their own selves. This categorization and monitoring would only go to reaffirm their worst thoughts, never dispel them. Why not give them more accessible resources around campus and change the very culture instead of trying to micromanage and turn everyone into a “mono crop” (if you’re in the midwest aha).
(6)
This article talks about how the tracking of students and teachers on “social credit apps” is inherently flawed, because the data being extracted is based on society, which is inherently unequal. This makes a lot of sense, and is even harder to think about when I think about data being valued more over a persons own recollection or opinion. In the other article, a student lamented over the fact that faculty did not believe him when he said his app wasn’t working, and that he had in fact been present and early in class, when the monitoring app for his institution had claimed he had not been. I do not want to live in a society where the physical presence of data is deemed as the more tangible truth over a person beliefs and truths.
Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (video documentary, 50m)
I’m familiar with Zuboff’s work. I’ve actually read a lot into her writings on The Information Panopticon and The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus. Big companies explain that they’re using the data that you give them to improve their services- which is true, but they also use that data to analyze and profile their users to recognize their behaviors and essentially exploit their users for their data. We are so ingrained with the idea of convenience that we feel that giving up this data is worth the exchange.
Helen Nissenbaum – Mapping Interventions – Digital Democracies Conference (talk, 30m)
This felt a lot more positive than the rest because she actually poses solutions for what seems like a neverending uphill battle with our privacy concerns. Things like TrackMeNot and Cryptogram are both really useful tools that can be used to protect your privacy and encrypt your data from websites. AdNauseum also seemed pretty interesting. I use AdBlockPlus which is similar except for certain sites like Youtube (in an effort to support the YouTubers who create this content for me).
Carole Cadwalladr – ’I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’ (Guardian)
I’ve heard of the whole Cambridge Analytical thing but I never really took a deeper look into it. The whole idea of taking data from MILLIONS of profiles in an attempt to target political ads in order to rig the election is horrifying and dystopian. To think that the ads that we receive are targeted based on everything we do online and offline. The surveillance being used on online netizens is astonishingly invasive and what makes it worse is that it’s invisible.
Stuart A Thompson and Charlie Warzel – One Nation, Tracked (NY Times)
A quote that really captivated me was the idea or “describing location data as anonymous is a completely false claim”. Who else would go to your address and your work at the exact times that you do? We are constantly being tracked and although users may have “consented” to this, how likely is it that the privacy policy that they read made it clear that this was happening? It also makes a really important point that I hadn’t thought about… Victims of abuse and people in the LGBT Community. The idea that this information could be bought and sold makes it even scarier for those who are possible targets in danger.
Drew Harwell – Colleges are turning phones into surveillance machines (Washington Post)
I really hate this idea of attendance tracking. If you’re in class, you’re in class. Why should phone surveillance be involved? Even for iClickers, I remember once when I had left it in my dorm as I was leaving. When I told the professor about the situation they responded by saying I would be marked as absent if I didn’t have the iClicker with me. It baffled me that the idea of me physically being in the classroom and participating, that I would be marked down for not carrying in the device that indicates whether or not I was present in class. A quote that I loved from Erin Rose Glass, librarian at UCSD “We’re reinforcing this sense of powerlessness … when we could be asking harder questions, like: Why are we creating institutions where students don’t want to show up?” We are growing into adults. We should not be monitored and grow up with the idea that being surveilled is a common practice. We have our own independent, private lives.
Jenny Davis – A clear case for resisting student tracking (Cyborgology)
I had a vague idea that students on the school wifi were being tracked but only on the websites we view. I never thought it went much further than that but clearly I haven’t thought about the idea of that a lot. It’s interesting to think that students could be monitored for “attendance” and “mental health issues” as if schools really care about the mental well being of students. If that’s what they are concerned about, maybe they should improve their health programs rather than find a way to control the students that they hope to teach. The aggregate data could also provide a distorted idea of what the student is actually like. As mentioned, if the student has a full-time job and they miss class, or if the movements of a minority differ from the movements of what they consider the “average”, it can be hard to judge between right and wrong.
Question: Convincing a group of people to take action on privacy is already hard enough to do. How would we convince a mass to adopt privacy applications that would allow people to take better control of their data?
Digital Democracies
This video lecture talks about online databases that collect and mine people’s data, and the possible measures that people can take in order to protect their digital privacy. Helen Nissenbaum talks first talks about achieving this privacy through crypto, which is hiding the message, but then diverges into a similar yet different method: obfuscation. She describes obfuscation as introducing more noise in order to create misleading and false data to distract the people who gather the data. These data gathers usually work in the advertising industry and in search engines.
A Clear Case for Resisting Student Tracking
This news article talks about how universities are monitoring students through mobile applications, wifi, and bluetooth. While they do talk about the possible benefits of such methods of monitoring, such as preventing and identifying students with possible mental illnesses, they also talk about the possible inequality and discrimination that may surface due to “overlaying data systems into social systems”.
I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool
This news article talks about mining people’s facebook and online information in order to curate a psychological and political online profile. They also state that personality traits could be a precursor to political behavior. Targeting people based on their user profile with a political agenda is something that is emerging because of our advancement of technology. This also reminds me of how NSA defines potential terrorists by monitoring suspicious activities.
One Nation , Tracked
The article talks about how it is legal for companies in the US to collect and sell your data. Most of us don’t even read the terms and conditions before clicking accept, and we would most likely click it anyways because we have become so technology dependent. The article talks about how these applications secretly track our location while running in the background. This reminds me of how some applications that don’t require location based services asks permission for my location.
Surveillance Capitalism
This video talks about the behavioral srplus, which takes collected data that used to be considered (additional, useless data) and targets certain groups with similar characteristics and prosperities. We believe that the tradeoff between our data (that we think is somewhat not as important) with the services that the companies provide are worth it. The video also talks about how only a little of our data is used to improve the services, while a lot of the data are sold for businesses. One of the more surprising facts that I learned was how uploading our photos on facebook could be correlated to helping facial recognition software for regimes. The fact that these data manipulation are happening secretly and without us knowing is very frightening. The video talks about how Pokemon go secretly lures people into business without the users knowing it.
Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
This article talks about how colleges are utilizing applications and networks to track students’ location and the frequency of those visits (utilized for attendance). The article states that these methods, although they can be beneficial, takes away the organic process of learning. I feel like this is true because Freshman year, I would go to one of my giant lectures and see people come to class, sleep, and only wake up when the iclicker question came up and then left. The purpose of education could be misdefined due to all the technological interferences (such as laptops in classrooms).
Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (video documentary, 50m)
The video stated that social media downright bamboozles all of us all of the time. That’s definitely what social media does, with facebook being a lead bully in that arena. We’re so entertained that we aren’t noticing (or caring) what else is going on.
Why do we feel that we can’t exist without facebook, or other social media platforms for that matter? It wasn’t long ago that we did that very thing, so what’s stopping us from doing it again? We acknowledge the mental, social, and physical effects of social media, including mass surveillance, yet we can’t seem to put the devices down. Why?
Another thing that struck me was how companies are altering their business practices in order to get in the game of surveillance capitalism. It’s strange to think that a successful auto company would get in the business of consumer data collecting. This adds to my fear that our personal data is worth a lot more than we think it is.
Helen Nissenbaum – Mapping Interventions – Digital Democracies Conference (talk, 30m)
The techniques shown are very clever ways for people to use “bad” technology against itself. We’ve been trying to fight against being tracked an monitored, but it seems like a futile effort at times. By reversing the attack strategies to include producing overwhelming and confusing amounts of data, we are able to strip away the barrage of curated psychological attacks.
I wonder how effective these efforts are at covering ourselves from being tracked. Are these tools really effective, or are they more of a nuisance for everyone?
Carole Cadwalladr – ’I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’ (Guardian)
I feel badly for Christopher Wylie because he was so young when he was working with Cambridge Analytica. It’s so easy to be manipulated into his position by people who were twice his age and had that much more life experience. While I definitely agree that this whole thing is a disgusting act of greed, I keep thinking back to the “start” of the internet, or at least when it started becoming mainstream. The #1 rule was don’t put anything on the internet that you wouldn’t want everyone to see. So, all the data being plastered all over facebook is essentially fair game. Now, yes, mining that data and using it for malicious causes isn’t good, in fact it’s downright bad. However, it’s almost like a *facepalm*. Google isn’t stealing your search history, you’re giving it to them. Algorithms aren’t stealing anything, they are simply taking what you give them. Stop feeding the monster.
Stuart A Thompson and Charlie Warzel – One Nation, Tracked (NY Times)
It’s pretty scary to think about how much we’re being tracked, and also how easy it would be for someone to figure out who we were without having much more than location data. If a device pings at your house overnight every night, chances are that device is yours. People are creatures of habit, and by studying the movement and behavior patterns through cell phone data points, we can learn a staggering amount about people. Furthermore, we could identify times, places, and conditions in which it would be easy to manipulate those same people, be it by psychological manipulation through curated advertising or more devious and physical ways of harm.
What are some strategies that we could implement to overcome being tracked?
Drew Harwell – Colleges are turning phones into surveillance machines (Washington Post)
On one hand, I see the benefits of having student surveillance on campuses, but that’s a very small hand. I mostly abolish the thought. While it is good that we could potentially avert crises or even help a student become a little better, it seems that it’s at the cost of human interaction. When the devices fail, the people even believe the devices over the other people. It’s ridiculous.
We can clearly see that devices and digitally tracking people is only creating a lack of real interaction and socialization. What are some non-digital ways that we could help students reach their goals and stay healthy?
Jenny Davis – A clear case for resisting student tracking (Cyborgology)
As a parent who has struggled with a (sometimes) defiant teen, I can see the benefits of having a tracker. I’ve looked at getting one for my son, but ultimately decided that would only lead to deception and a lack of trust (not to mention all of that data potentially being sent out to who-knows-where). I also began to think about how I would feel if someone, or a job, put a tracker on me for whatever reason. I would lose my sense of self, and I’d probably go crazy. Sure, I’m not out being delinquent or robbing banks or anything I need to hide like that, but having my privacy is important to me. What’s equally important is having free will to basically do what I want. Sometimes there are repercussions, but there are also rewards. People, just like plants, grow best when they have room to spread. Surveillance and obtrusive monitoring doesn’t allow people to grow and learn, and is counter-intuitive in a learning environment.
If you were paying $100,000 for your child’s college education, would you be for or against student tracking and surveillance? What if your child was performing poorly and/or skipping classes?
NY Times – One Nation, Tracked:
We all know we’re all being tracked, even if we try to deny it or just shove it to the back of our minds, it’s happening and they are watching us. This article is all about that, and basically we’ve all consented to be tracked as well, which is the really messed up part.
Two researchers, we’re able to gain access to tracking data from an unspecified company. The article then shows and uncovers various patterns and graphics of people’s location in an area based on tracking from their smartphones. Again, surprise surprise, we’re being tracked and it wasn’t so hard to get the information of hundreds or thousands of people’s everyday movements. But I guess what really shocked me about this is how easy and accessible it is to get people’s tracking information. Yes, of course, the researchers who wrote the article had to put a lot of effort into getting it, but still, in a sense, it was easily accessible. The piece was gripping for me because although I know I’m being tracked, I’ve never known by who and to think that it’s smaller businesses makes me think, of what importance is my location to them? I’m no one in a high-power position or for that matter just one of the millions of people of un-interest to a larger audience. And yet I sit back and think about why these companies are tracking me, while I can pull up my phone and look at an app – Find My… – and actively see the multitude of friends I track.
This then made me think about these questions: How can I stop being tracked? Is it possible?
I feel as though as a society we give up our privacy for the luxury of our smartphones…
Cyborgology – A Clear Case for Resisting Student Tracking:
This article is all about SpotterEDU which is an app created for universities to track their students, by means of attendance. Although, the app is only made to track attendance to classes there are very obvious downfalls to tracking students. It’ll show disparities in who’s doing what work and for how long, which creates unrealistic standards that students would have to be held accountable to. Students are not the only ones who could be tracked but faculty would be held accountable for tracking as well… again still creating unrealistic standards of how to manage time…
It’s kind of shocking to think that a university could have access to a student location, yet not even student but everyone who is an active participant in a university system. We all know we’re being tracked but I’d honestly never suspect my university was watching me THAT closely…
Washington Post – College are Turning Phones into Surveillance Machines:
Re: The Cyborgology website, this article also focusses on SpotterEDU and explores its advantages and disadvantages through multiple viewpoints and personal perspectives. Again, universities are tracking their students as they feel it’d be a benefit to overall student academic habits but what the real use of tracking students?
Immediately looking at this piece, I resonate with the argument of not tracking students because infantilizes students when being in college is our freedom to grow. I relate to this because my father is constantly tracking my whereabouts on an app called Life360. For me, it doesn’t really matter, 1. I know he’s not actively watching me every day and 2. Even if he was, he’s 3 hours away and the places I go have no significance to him. But it the principle of things, why does he feel the need to track me in the first place? Safety? If safety was the answer, what good does it do anyway? He’s not here.
Taking a step back, I think tracking is all about control. That’s the whole point of this SpottedEDU app is so professors can have the control to see who’s coming to their class and not and thus execute repercussions for those who don’t.
But in the end, I think, who cares about all this control? If they don’t come to your class, the student is the one suffering and losing the money, not the teacher…
I also am thinking about the flaws within this system. It’s highly based that students are going to lectures and libraries as their main basis of being a student, but especially on the UIUC campus there are thousands of students all in different majors all doing different things. As an art student, I don’t need to go to the library to study, so how does tracking that sort of activity affect me? Or even benefit the so-called beneficial data collection for the university?
My real questions about this article is: why do universities feel it’s important to have these tracking systems put in place? What is the real benefit? Why is it so important to know and to micromanage student movement? But answering these questions beyond just thinking that it can boost the universities’ academic status, what is the real root for the need for this system? – the best example I found of this in the text was said by Erin Glass: “Why are we creating institutions where students don’t want to show up?”
Guardian – Steve Bannon:
Cambridge Analytica is a company that has used certain Facebook user data sets to manipulate or to suede opinion in political movements like the US election. The article focusses on a spotlight of Christopher Wylie who is now 28, but has been successful in heavily developing the data and at such a young age working with many high ups in position to do the work done by Cambridge Analytica. There are lots of legal issues going on with this data collection. They basically had millions of Facebook user’s personal data in order to find trends and make connections between people’s personalities to see who they would vote for. For me, this is again another example of a breach of privacy, Facebook + other companies say our data is safe, but here it is, once again, being easily accessed by big companies and used to manipulate an outcome.
I knew Facebook was bad… but this makes me question how easily my information is accessible to everyone…
Surveillance Capitalism:
They are watching us. My biggest take away from this video was that the information we give sites or just put on the internet is the least important information we give. They look at the trends, moods, location or clues in what we put out in order to target our needs without even knowing we have the need. Just like the example with the pregnant lady, how the internet knew she was pregnant before she did just because she changed to a less scented shampoo. I’ve never looked at the scope of how my activity, and not the personal information I give, is more important. Again, they are watching us but I never knew to this scope. It’s kind of like when you say you need something and then about two minutes later there is an ad related to whatever you said. It knew before you did, and that’s a scary broader concept to think about.
Slight tangent: but kind of like the Matrix? How all the robots evolved to know more than us and then harvested humans to sustain their robots habits a.k.a creating the Matrix. If our technology is so advanced that it can predict our needs before we do, is this a look into a possibility of having the reality of the Matrix?
But back to the video, Shoshana Zuboff speaks entirely of surveillance capitalism how we engage with it, how it engages with us and what all this has to do for our future (THE MATRIX ???). In a general sense, she explains that surveillance capitalism boils down to IT and data companies using people’s data to target and surveillance them. In most cases, people aren’t even aware how their data is being used and what will happen to the information we put out there.
This video and the way I’ve reacted to it is also a call for action. Knowing what we know about how our information and personal data is being used, it’s time to wake up. And, for me, I’m thinking about how we need to create action so extremes like the Matrix don’t happen.
Mapping Interventions:
Helen Nissenbaum speaks on the creation and use of TrackMeNot. It’s created to send fake queries to web browsers as to oppose the data tracking of an individual based on the information they put on the web. TrackMeNot is all based on obfuscation, which is meant to create misleading data to diminish data aggregations.
This was the last source I looked at out of all the content and with the overwhelming information I’ve taken in about how we are being tracked, thinking of obfuscation or escaping tracking is something that has really pressed my thoughts. Thinking on Adblocking and securing private data, I think about why these things needed to be created in the first place. To relate back to one of the previous sources about tracking students, why is it that people find our useless internet data so important? Yes, I understand it contribution to our capitalist society, but I’m thinking of why in a broader sense…
After Thought:
After looking at all this content an overall general thought I had was just, how much does government, companies or just data people know about me? I’ve thought about how everything I put on the internet is forever and that my information is probably stored somewhere, but I never knew it was to this degree.
I literally changed my banking password last night to prevent people from hijacking my information…
‘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?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (video documentary, 50m)
I enjoyed this documentary a lot. It is very current and had lots of ideas that I’m sure we will discuss this semester. One interesting fact that stuck out to me most was how cars my be free someday because the tracking systems will be so profitable that the service of driving a car will be free like some Google services. Another thing I found interesting was about Pokemon Go. First off, didn’t know Google started it. And secondly, I found the comparison of “click through” vs “foot fall” very interesting. Playing Pokemon Go you would never think that this is involved with profits of business’s like McDonalds and Starbucks.
Mapping Interventions – Digital Democracies Conference (talk, 30m)
Technology as it is today would be much different if some of these digital ideas were popular when tech companies started to become so powerful. One of the interesting softwares that was mentioned was Cryptogram. This didn’t allow Facebook to analyze your photos when they were uploaded. This could have prevented facial recognition to be as advanced as it is today. Shoutout Go Rando!
’I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’ (Guardian)
This article gave good first person insight on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I had never actually read anything about somebody telling there experiences first hand. I think Wylie is a very interesting individual, who is smart and really didn’t plan on changing his life forever due to this scandal. My favorite quote was when he said “I just think if I’d taken literally any other job, Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t exist.” It’s crazy to think that just a few ideas from individuals can change the entirety of an election
One Nation, Tracked (NY Times)
Everyone is aware that we are getting tracked. When it comes to shopping, location, and what you search for it is known that with our phones we are giving permission to companies to know every aspect of our life. But the thing is, most people don’t care, or don’t think deeply into it because they’re so content with their smartphones. I think articles like this with graphics that visualize how you are being tracked, help shed light onto this. Looking at this kind of information (and honestly… taking this class) help inform individuals what they are really giving up when they allow other companies to access their information.
Colleges are turning phones into surveillance machines (Washington Post)
I think there can be many different avenues where location tracking can be beneficial to a student, or for the university. But you have to take it with a grain of salt. When it was mentioned in this article that location tracking can be used to see if somebody is going to the library enough that is where you can say that this technology is going too far. What if you study at home? What if you study in a room at your dorm? There are too many things to take into consideration to make this type of technology credible.
A clear case for resisting student tracking (Cyborgology)
Student tracking can easily be taken out of hand. There is a spectrum of personality traits, and how students go about there experience at a university. Some of these ideas of intense student tracking with enhance inequality and expose it. “There is a fine line between mechanisms of support and mechanisms of control.” I agree that some of these systems can help prevent issues before they start, but a majority of what these systems will do is each onto how the system thinks we should live and promote that. This can hinder change, and the uniqueness of people on college campuses.