Tag: surveillance capitalism
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International coalition calls for action against surveillance-based advertising
Written by Finn Myrstad and Øyvind H. Kaldestad on Forbrukerrådet.
“Every day, consumers are exposed to extensive commercial surveillance online. This leads to manipulation, fraud, discrimination and privacy violations. Information about what we like, our purchases, mental and physical health, sexual orientation, location and political views are collected, combined and used under the guise of targeting advertising.
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The collection and combination of information about us not only violates our right to privacy, but renders us vulnerable to manipulation, discrimination and fraud. This harms individuals and society as a whole, says the director of digital policy in the NCC, Finn Myrstad.”
Includes a detailed list of the consequences of surveillance-based advertising.
Tagged with: surveillance capitalism, targeted advertising, privacy.
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Perspectives on tackling Big Tech’s market power
Written by Natasha Lomas on Techcrunch.
“Slaughter also argued that it’s important for regulators not to pile all the burden of avoiding data abuses on consumers themselves.
‘I want to sound a note of caution around approaches that are centered around user control,’ she said. ’I think transparency and control are important. I think it is really problematic to put the burden on consumers to work through the markets and the use of data, figure out who has their data, how it’s being used, make decisions… I think you end up with notice fatigue; I think you end up with decision fatigue; you get very abusive manipulation of dark patterns to push people into decisions.
‘So I really worry about a framework that is built at all around the idea of control as the central tenant or the way we solve the problem. I’ll keep coming back to the notion of what instead we need to be focusing on is where is the burden on the firms to limit their collection in the first instance, prohibit their sharing, prohibit abusive use of data and I think that that’s where we need to be focused from a policy perspective.’”
Read ‘Perspectives on tackling Big Tech’s market power’ on the Techcrunch site.
Tagged with: regulation, Big Tech, surveillance capitalism.
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I Would Rather Die Than Let Facebook Monitor My Heart Rate
Written by Victoria Song on Gizmodo.
“I’m well aware that if you want your health data to remain private, smartwatches are certainly risky. But we’re way past that now. These devices can and have saved lives, and despite some early skepticism, wearables aren’t going anywhere. Why pick a smartwatch made by a company whose founder called early users ‘dumb fucks’ for trusting him? Why trust the company that had a full-page temper tantrum in several national newspapers because Apple introduced stronger privacy features? I’ve got two drawers bursting with smartwatches launched in 2020—there are plenty of lesser evils to choose from.”
Read ‘I Would Rather Die Than Let Facebook Monitor My Heart Rate’ on the Gizmodo site.
Tagged with: Facebook, smart watch, surveillance capitalism.
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TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints’
Written by Sara Perez on TechCrunch.
“It is worth noting, however, that the new disclosure about biometric data collection follows a $92 million settlement in a class action lawsuit against TikTok, originally filed in May 2020, over the social media app’s violation of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The consolidated suit included more than 20 separate cases filed against TikTok over the platform’s collection and sharing of the personal and biometric information without user consent. … In the grand scheme of things, TikTok still has plenty of data on its users, their content and their devices, even without biometric data.
For example, TikTok policy already stated it automatically collects information about users’ devices, including location data based on your SIM card and IP addresses and GPS, your use of TikTok itself and all the content you create or upload, the data you send in messages on its app, metadata from the content you upload, cookies, the app and file names on your device, battery state and even your keystroke patterns and rhythms, among other things.
This is in addition to the ‘Information you choose to provide,‘ which comes from when you register, contact TikTok or upload content. In that case, TikTok collects your registration info (username, age, language, etc.), profile info (name, photo, social media accounts), all your user-generated content on the platform, your phone and social network contacts, payment information, plus the text, images and video found in the device’s clipboard.”
Tagged with: tiktok, biometric data, surveillance capitalism.
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Twitter May Start Labeling Your Tweets Based on How Wrong You Are
Written by Alyse Stanley on Gizmodo.
“It does raise concerns about censorship, particularly given how we’ve seen social media platforms bungle moderating Palestinian voices in recent weeks amid the Israel conflict. Twitter’s algorithms have screwed up before, and there’s no arguing that mislabeling inconvenient truths as ‘fake news’ could have lasting repercussions.”
Read ‘Twitter May Start Labeling Your Tweets Based on How Wrong You Are’ on the Gizmodo site.
Tagged with: Twitter, censorship, surveillance capitalism.
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Car Companies Want to Monitor Your Every Move With Emotion-Detecting AI
Written by Todd Feathers on Motherboard.
“Very soon, Cerence announced, it plans to deepen that data mining operation with in-cabin cameras linked to emotion-detecting AI—algorithms that monitor minute changes in facial expression in order to determine a person’s emotional state at any given time.
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But safety is only one attraction of in-cabin monitoring. The systems also hold huge potential for harvesting the kind of behavioral data that Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists have exploited to target ads and influence purchasing habits.
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Eyeris CEO Modar Alaoui likewise told Motherboard that while his company’s technology is primarily designed to improve safety, “we do foresee at some point that [automakers] will try to leverage the data for several use cases, whether it be for advertising or [determining] insurance” premiums.”
Tagged with: surveillance capitalism, emotion detection, artificial intelligence.
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Spotify’s Weird LinkedIn Playlists Sound Like a Cash Register
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.
Tagged with: Spotify, LinkedIn, surveillance capitalism.
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Planned Parenthood let Facebook track how often I logged my period
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.
Tagged with: Facebook, tracking, surveillance capitalism.
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Will My Data Be Online Forever?
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
Tagged with: personal data, right to be forgotten, surveillance capitalism.
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You Are Now Remotely Controlled
Written by Shoshana Zuboff on New York Times.
“In Wonderland, we celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policy, but we’ve begun to understand that “privacy” policies are actually surveillance policies.
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All of these delusions rest on the most treacherous hallucination of them all: the belief that privacy is private. We have imagined that we can choose our degree of privacy with an individual calculation in which a bit of personal information is traded for valued services — a reasonable quid pro quo.
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The lesson is that privacy is public — it is a collective good that is logically and morally inseparable from the values of human autonomy and self-determination upon which privacy depends and without which a democratic society is unimaginable.”
Read ‘You Are Now Remotely Controlled’ on the New York Times site.
Tagged with: surveillance capitalism, privacy, inequality.