Laura’s Lens

Written by Khari Johnson on Venturebeat.

“If quarantines are ineffective or improperly carried out, millions of people could die, according to some estimates, but that doesn’t mean we can throw civil liberties out the window.

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Aside from the spread of COVID-19, the other prevailing story this week was a rush of revelations about companies peddling AI-powered surveillance technology to businesses, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

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Global economies are bracing for recession, and no one knows exactly how the spread of COVID-19 will impact global supply chains, public events, travel, and other industries. And even as we’re actively discussing whether a company like Clearview AI will mean the end of privacy, COVID-19 could easily be used as an excuse to spread mass surveillance.

This is not intended to be alarmist, but it’s important to keep an eye on mission creep in this space.”

Read ‘Coronavirus, facial recognition, and the future of privacy’ on the Venturebeat site.

Written by Gabrielle Rejouis on OneZero.

“Despite the benefits Google has received from the Black community, the company has refused to or has been slow to correct the discriminatory algorithmic practices at YouTube, such as its language filter, ads, and its search algorithms. Whether intentional or unconscious, all of these biases have harmed the Black community. For some people, Google is the internet. Civil rights considerations must be central to big data and the platforms they drive. Google should not celebrate the contributions of Black people without also making their platforms welcoming to them.

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Technology will not be the silver bullet solving the problem of content moderation. Neither will sensitivity training nor diverse hiring. Dismantling these structures will require racial literacy and more multifaceted changes.

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To say the internet has a huge impact on our society is an understatement. And the data and privacy missteps committed by Big Tech disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities.”

Read ‘OK Google, Black History Month Is Over. What Now?’ on the OneZero site.

Written by Maria Farrell on The Conversationalist.

“Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse… It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.

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(While we’re thinking about the neatly elided parts of the prodigal tech bro story, let’s dwell for one moment on the deletion of the entire stories of so many women and people of color barely given a first chance in Silicon Valley, let alone multiple reinventions.)

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The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent.”

The lot of this is infinitely quotable. And if you’re a person in tech who is starting to care about justice, equality, ethics and so on, please please read the exceptional advice at the end of the article.

Read ‘The Prodigal Techbro’ on the The Conversationalist site.

Written by Shoshana Wodinsky on Gizmodo.

“[W]hen you look into the way Spotify’s slowly morphed its playlists into data-mining machines, suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

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See, to Spotify, playlists and podcasts aren’t just what you’re listening to, but who you are… In the process of tapping into Spotify day after day after day with some variation of this routine, I’m giving the company not only my emotional state but also my entire schedule.

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Since going public in 2018, Spotify hasn’t been quiet about its push into the big data space, partnering with third party after third party (after third party) to bulk up the intel it can already guesstimate from its user base. More and more, it’s starting to look like Spotify’s less about knowing my “mood” and more about knowing the car I’m most likely to drive, the beer I’m most likely to order at a bar, whether I still live with my parents, and the exact location where I’m binge-eating Baskin Robin’s.”

Read ‘Spotify’s Weird LinkedIn Playlists Sound Like a Cash Register’ on the Gizmodo site.

Written by Ruth Reader on Fast Company.

[L]ots of health companies use Facebook to advertise. As my “off Facebook activity” download showed, much of what gets shared with Facebook is indirect information, such as dates and times I visited a website or app, products, or prescriptions I have looked at or purchased, and products I put in a digital shopping cart.

But glued together, these scraps of information create a collage of my overall health, which Facebook can then sell advertisements against. In collecting data about my health behavior and interests, Facebook probably knows more about my health than my doctor.

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At the end of last year, Planned Parenthood decided to stop using Facebook’s mobile software development kit to make ads for its period tracking app Spot On. When I downloaded my off-Facebook data in January, an outdated version of the Spot On app on my phone had recently pinged Facebook’s servers (this stopped once I updated the app).

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The organization decided that it was worth losing access to some of Facebook’s targeting capabilities in exchange for better user privacy in this instance.

Good on Planned Parenthood for doing the right thing and removing the Facebook tracking. But it’s shocking that developers are ignorant to the tracking embedded in these frameworks and libraries.

Read ‘Planned Parenthood let Facebook track how often I logged my period’ on the Fast Company site.

Written by Anna Merlan on Motherboard.

“You may have forgotten about the photos you uploaded to a then-popular social media site ten or fifteen years ago… but Clearview hasn’t,” Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, wrote in an email. “A lot of data about individuals can quickly become ‘stale’ and thus low-value by those seeking to monetize it. Jobs, salaries, addresses, phone numbers, those all change. But photos are different: your face doesn’t go stale.”

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“What is clear is that this information is available to far more people than Clearview likes to acknowledge, and that they have future, as-yet-unannounced plans for their photos of your face.”

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“The face search results show exactly why we need a moratorium on face surveillance. In a democratic society, we should not accept our images being secretly collected and retained to create a mass surveillance database to be used, disclosed, and analyzed at the whim of an unaccountable company.”—Jeramie D. Scott

Read ‘Here’s the File Clearview AI Has Been Keeping on Me, and Probably on You Too’ on the Motherboard site.

Written by Daniel Kolitz on Gizmodo.

“We should not be scared of permanent records. We should be scared of informational power dynamics that bring immediate, harmful consequences and a serious lack of preservation infrastructure for contemporary culture.”—Meg Leta Jones

“Rather than focus on data (as in the term “data protection”), shouldn’t we be focused on people and communities and the good and the harm that can be done to them with data? I would argue it is far more useful and more practical to focus on what can be done with data, no matter how old or how collected—how can that data be used? So we could identify uses that are harmful or objectionable or likely to cause offense, and either prohibit them outright or require explicit, opt-in consent.”—Fred H. Cate

“A company may have to ask you for consent to collect your geolocation data, but you have no idea what’s being inferred from it. And this is important, because the potential for privacy-invasive harms don’t necessarily occur at the input stage, where you volunteer information to a company. The interesting stage comes afterwards, once machine learning and AI are applied to that data, a process that can derive a lot of potentially very intimate information: your sexual orientation, your housing status, your religion, your political beliefs, potential disabilities, your gender identity. The user often has no idea that the data they’ve surrendered can actually disclose those things.”—Sandra Wachter

Read ‘Will My Data Be Online Forever?’ on the Gizmodo site.

Written by Jeremy B. Merrill on Quartz.

“Americans with disabilities should not be an afterthought for tech companies. There is no justification for forcing them to spend extra time and effort to navigate past online ads,” said Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. And they should be able to easily learn why they were targeted by those ads, just like everyone else.”

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“Not including legible labels on ads “certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] and raises questions about whether Facebook is engaging in deceptive practices under the FTC Act,” said Blake Reid, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder who studies accessibility and technology law.

Via Claire Brotherton on Twitter.

Read ‘Facebook didn’t mark ads as ads for blind people for almost 2 years’ on the Quartz site.

Written by Nabiha Syed on The Markup.

“You also deserve to hear these facts from an independent source. We want to investigate the ecosystem of data exploitation, and we don’t think we can do that while shackled to it. And so we make a privacy promise to you, our readers: We will not track you. Unlike many companies, we put your privacy first. We collect the minimum amount of data possible when you visit our site, and we will never monetize this data. We won’t display advertisements on our site, because they too often contain tracking technology. This makes our work more complicated and more expensive—but your privacy is worth it.”

A media organisation that’s leading on privacy. This is SO COOL.

Read ‘A Letter from the President (at The Markup)’ on the The Markup site.

Written by Maya Shwayder on Digital Trends.

“They’re not really changing underlying tactics [of how they track us], they’re just channeling it all through Google,” [Elizabeth] Renieris told Digital Trends.

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“At least we knew how cookies worked. Instead, Google will shore up its surveillance power with even less oversight and accountability, black-boxed behind its proprietary technology. Not good news at all.”[— Christopher Chan]

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This means Google will now have full functional, filled out profiles on every single movement and purchase that every one of its billions of users makes across the internet.

Read ‘Chrome is ditching third-party cookies because Google wants your data all to itself’ on the Digital Trends site.