Opinion: The 2009 vs. 2019 profile picture trend may or may not have been a data collection ruse to train its facial recognition algorithm. But we can't afford to blithely play along.
Tag: surveillance capitalism
👓 I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone | Motherboard
T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.
📑 India’s Tighter E-Commerce Rules Frustrate Amazon and Walmart Plans | Wall Street Journal
With Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Facebook Inc. and its WhatsApp messaging service used by hundreds of millions of Indians, India is examining methods China has used to protect domestic startups and take control of citizens’ data. ❧
Governments owning citizens’ data directly?? Why not have the government empower citizens to own their own data?
👓 Friction-Free Racism by Chris Gilliard | Real Life
Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination
Facebook’s use of “ethnic affinity” as a proxy for race is a prime example. The platform’s interface does not offer users a way to self-identify according to race, but advertisers can nonetheless target people based on Facebook’s ascription of an “affinity” along racial lines. In other words. race is deployed as an externally assigned category for purposes of commercial exploitation and social control, not part of self-generated identity for reasons of personal expression. The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both. ❧
October 15, 2018 at 09:34PM
👓 Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking | Future Releases | Mozilla
Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely opaque to users and experts alike, only to be revealed piecemeal by major data breaches. In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.
👓 The Information on School Websites Is Not as Safe as You Think | New York Times
Some tracking scripts may be harmless. But others are designed to recognize I.P. addresses and embed cookies that collect information prized by advertisers.
The idiotic places we end up seeing surveillance capitalism just kills me.
Administrators: But they were give us the technology for free…
Really? Why not try pooling small pieces of resources within states to make these things you want and protect your charges? I know you think your budget is small, but it shouldn’t be this expensive.
👓 Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags | Locus Magazine
For 20 years, privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about commercial online surveillance, the way that companies gather deep dossiers on us to help marketers target us with ads. This pitch…
👓 Logs populi or, Thanks, Netflix! | Vicki Boykis
Tech is already cynical about data collection, but the public is just starting to understand its implications.
👓 Google will permanently disable a control on its new $50 speaker after the gadget listened in on some users | Business Insider
Google Home Mini is losing the ability to use it by touching the button on the top, after a reviewer raised concerns that it was recording without his consent.
👓 Don’t Sell Your Soul or Students to an Edtech Brand | Rafranz Davis | Medium
There are plenty of reasons why teachers join ambassador programs. For some, this is how they gain access to potentially great tools that…
EFF’s full-page Wired ad: Dear tech, delete your logs before it’s too late | Boing Boing
EFF has run a full-page ad in this month's Wired, addressed to the technology industry, under the banner "Your threat model just changed," warning them that the incoming administration has vowed to spy on and deport millions of their fellow Americans on the basis of religion and race, and that they are in grave risk of having their services conscripted to help with this effort. (Trump is also an avowed opponent of net neutrality)
