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.
- Reading this article made me think about the Netflix show maniac and how they have an “ad buddy”. The ad buddy is a personal who follows you around and constantly advertises different products in exchange for you loaning out some money. So my question is, how do you think advertisements will advance in the future? Will it manifest into an even more personal method?
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”.
- Do you think this should be integrated into our school instead of iClickers? (Since some students use other people’s iclickers for them)
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.
- Are you okay with using your digital footprints being available to companies if it makes your life simpler/ easier?
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.
- Do you read the terms and conditions?
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.
- Do you think you could live without these apps/ websites and go completely off grid?
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).
- Do you think technology interferes or supplements a student? When do you think technology should be introduced inside the classroom?