Laura’s Lens

“as this burgeoning movement becomes an industry, some worry that the “wellness” approach and its emphasis on personal responsibility is whitewashing deeper structural issues within the tech industry.”

Read ‘Why beating your phone addiction may come at a cost’.

“So, what does privacy have to do with this? This question calls for another question: whose privacy are we fighting for when we say we defend the right to privacy? Talking about privacy in the abstract – as if we all benefit from the same rights, as if we are all equal – means taking the risk of defending the rights of only the most privileged ones in society – with privilege coming in different forms from having a voice to be heard to socio-economic status.”

Read ‘Reclaiming privacy: a feminist manifesto’.

Written by Sigal Samuel on Vox.

“The list of concerns about self-driving cars just got longer. 

In addition to worrying about how safe they are, how they’d handle tricky moral trade-offs on the road, and how they might make traffic worse, we also need to worry about how they could harm people of color. 

If you’re a person with dark skin, you may be more likely than your white friends to get hit by a self-driving car, according to a new study out of the Georgia Institute of Technology. That’s because automated vehicles may be better at detecting pedestrians with lighter skin tones.”

Read ‘A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians’ on the Vox site.

But can Facebook reform its 15-year legacy as devourer of all things private with a single sweeping, underedited screed from its copycat visionary and dark-pattern technocrat?

Fuck no, of course it can’t.”

Read ‘Mark Zuckerberg discovers privacy’.

“By buying or licensing data or scraping public records, third-party data companies can assemble thousands of attributes each for billions of people… These days, if you use a smartphone or a credit card, it’s not difficult for a company to determine if you’ve just gone through a break-up, if you’re pregnant or trying to lose weight, whether you’re an extrovert, what medicine you take, where you’ve been, and even how you swipe and tap on your smartphone.

All that information can be used to create profiles of you—think of them as virtual, possibly erroneous versions of you—that can be used to target you with ads, classify the riskiness of your lifestyle, or help determine your eligibility for a job. Like the companies themselves, the risks can be hard to see. Apart from the dangers of merely collecting and storing all that data, detailed (and often erroneous) consumer profiles can lead to race or income-based discrimination, in a high-tech version of redlining.)”

Read ‘Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information’.

“The documents… reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU.”

Also worth reading the longer article on Computer Weekly.

Read ‘Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws’.

“‘The phenomenon that is the [GDPR] has demonstrated one thing above all else: people’s interest in and appetite for understanding and controlling use of their personal data is anything but a reflection of apathy and fatalism,’ writes Helen Dixon, Ireland’s commissioner for data protection.”

Read ‘Privacy complaints received by tech giants’ favorite EU watchdog up more than 2x since GDPR’.

“These histories illustrate Facebook’s radical indifference, my term for the formal relationship between surveillance capitalists and their users. Facebook doesn’t care about disinformation, or mental health, or any of the other issues on Zuckerberg’s list of resolutions. Users are not customers, nor are they ‘the product.’ They are merely free sources of raw material.”

Read ‘The real reason why Facebook and Google won’t change’.

“That people don’t know there are human beings doing this work is, of course, by design. Facebook would rather talk about its advancements in artificial intelligence, and dangle the prospect that its reliance on human moderators will decline over time.

But given the limits of the technology, and the infinite varieties of human speech, such a day appears to be very far away. In the meantime, the call center model of content moderation is taking an ugly toll on many of its workers.”

Read ‘The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America’.

“The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook…”

“At the heart of the issue is an analytics tool Facebook offers developers, which allows them to see statistics about their users’ activities—and to target those users with Facebook ads.”

Read ‘You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook’.