How the business of technology works

Research¶

• Social Cooling and Talk
• Mathwashing
• Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life
• Gambling With Our Futures: Big Data, Global Finance and Digital Life
  • Rebel Geeks - Give Us Back Our Data
• The Disparate Impact of Surveillance (with a focus on the history of surveillance and racism)

• Re-identification
  • Deducing someone’s identity: A Primer on Information Theory and Privacy

Other ways to understand these issues¶

Apps

• Ublock Origin blocks trackers
• Privacy Badger blocks trackers
• Panopticlick, Is your browser safe against tracking? check here!

Games

• Data Dealer → play a databroker, sell data and make lots of money!
• Phone Story (banned on Iphone) → the cost of technology.

Fiction

• Little Brother

Film

• Digital Disconnect
• Black Mirror’s Nosedive episode

Activities

• Yellow Dots of Mystery: Is Your Printer Spying on You?

Talks

• Understanding privacy in terms of societal epidemics, consent and harm reduction strategies: re:publica 2014 talk
• re:publica 2016 -Kate Crawford: Know your terrorist credit score! → explores the limits of transparency
• The era of blind faith in big data must end, Cathy O’Neil
• 34C3 - Financial surveillance
• 34C3 - Policing in the age of data exploitation

Allegheny County Specific¶

• Allegheny Partners for Out of School Time or APOST: Out of School Time Learning, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing #remakeLearningDays #knowledgeworks

Outline of Surveillance Capitalism Talk¶

• Data – Who collects it?
• How do they do it? – Cookies, browser fingerprinting, etc.
  • Actively produced/collected data – Facebook status, Instagram pictures, etc.
  • Passively produced/collected data – websites visited, search history, credit score
• What do they do with it?
  • Targeted advertising, adaptive pricing
  • Risk management, reputation economy, social credit (compare to China)
• What are the impacts?
  • Algorithmic discrimination, mathwashing
  • Self-censorship, social cooling, society of control, decentralized panopticon
  • Third party doctrine, PRISM
• What can we do? (Think Different).
  • Ethical corporations, an oxymoron
    • But harm reduction is a thing, there exist lesser evils than Google
  • Don’t give money to rich people
    • Use services that don’t harvest your data – DuckDuckGo, OpenStreetMaps, Mastodon, Diaspora, Scuttlebutt
      • Yes, all your friends are on Twitter, but they used to all be on MySpace… we can consign Twitter to the dustbin of history
      • Ask yourself, if they make money, where do they make it? If the service is free, then you are the product
  • Mitigate value extraction by surveillance capitalists: Encryption, Anonymization, and Data Pollution. (ie Tor)
  • Remember that the #Resistance will not save you
  • Fight the commodification of counter-culture → Community-Based Infrastructure
  • Envisioning a data commons (decode project, getgee.xyz)