Tag: surveillance capitalism
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Grindr Shares Location, Sexual Orientation Data, Study Shows
Written by Sarah Syed , Natalia Drozdiak , and Nate Lanxon on Bloomberg.
“Grindr is sharing detailed personal data with thousands of advertising partners, allowing them to receive information about users’ location, age, gender and sexual orientation…” … “‘Every time you open an app like Grindr, advertisement networks get your GPS location, device identifiers and even the fact that you use a gay dating app,’ said Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems.”
Read ‘Grindr Shares Location, Sexual Orientation Data, Study Shows’ on the Bloomberg site.
Tagged with: Grindr, surveillance capitalism, privacy.
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Big Mood Machine
Written by Liz Pelly on The Baffler.
“[M]usic streaming platforms are in a unique position within the greater platform economy: they have troves of data related to our emotional states, moods, and feelings. It’s a matter of unprecedented access to our interior lives, which is buffered by the flimsy illusion of privacy.
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Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions. Further, since 2016, Spotify has shared this mood data directly with the world’s biggest marketing and advertising firms.
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“At Spotify we have a personal relationship with over 191 million people who show us their true colors with zero filter,” reads a current advertising deck. “That’s a lot of authentic engagement with our audience: billions of data points every day across devices! This data fuels Spotify’s streaming intelligence—our secret weapon that gives brands the edge to be relevant in real-time moments.”
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In Spotify’s world, listening data has become the oil that fuels a monetizable metrics machine, pumping the numbers that lure advertisers to the platform. In a data-driven listening environment, the commodity is no longer music. The commodity is listening. The commodity is users and their moods. The commodity is listening habits as behavioral data. Indeed, what Spotify calls “streaming intelligence” should be understood as surveillance of its users to fuel its own growth and ability to sell mood-and-moment data to brands.
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What’s in question here isn’t just how Spotify monitors and mines data on our listening in order to use their “audience segments” as a form of currency—but also how it then creates environments more suitable for advertisers through what it recommends, manipulating future listening on the platform.”
Tagged with: Spotify, mood, surveillance capitalism.
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Who Listens to the Listeners?
Written by LibrarianShipwreck on LibrarianShipwreck.
“And thus, in the guise of a seemingly innocuous tradeoff (in which the user thinks they’re really getting the benefit), the user accepts being subjected to high-tech corporate surveillance.
Importantly, this is one of the primary ways in which such surveillance gets normalized.
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High-tech surveillance succeeds by slowly chipping away at the obstacles to its acceptance. It does not start with the total takeover, rather it begins on a smaller scale, presenting itself as harmless and enjoyable. As people steadily grow accustomed to this sort of surveillance, as they come to see themselves as its beneficiaries instead of as its victims, they become open to a little bit more surveillance, and a little bit more surveillance, and a little bit more. This is the steady wearing down of defenses, the slow transformation of corporate creepiness into cultural complacency, that allows rampant high-tech surveillance to progress.”
Read ‘Who Listens to the Listeners?’ on the LibrarianShipwreck site.
Tagged with: Spotify, surveillance capitalism, normalisation.
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No one should buy the Facebook Portal TV
Written by Megan Wollerton on CNET.
“It’s a complete anomaly – a solidly performing, decently priced device that just isn’t suited for anyone because of the privacy concerns and increasingly alarming issues plaguing the social networking site.”
Read ‘No one should buy the Facebook Portal TV’ on the CNET site.
Tagged with: Facebook, surveillance capitalism, privacy.
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‘Alexa, are you invading my privacy?’ – the dark side of our voice assistants
Written by Dorian Lynskey on The Guardian.
“You are building an infrastructure that can be later co-opted in undesirable ways by large multinationals and state surveillance apparatus, and compromised by malicious hackers,” says Dr Michael Veale, a lecturer in digital rights and regulation at UCL Faculty of Laws at University College London.
Tagged with: alexa, surveillance capitalism, privacy.
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The Creators Of Pokémon Go Mapped The World. Now They're Mapping You
Written by Cecilia D'Anastasio and Dhruv Mehrotra on Kotaku.
“Ubiquitous computing is still a fantasy, but not because the technology isn’t ready. It is. The fantasy is that any system mediating someone’s personal experience of the physical world that uses a modern corporation’s digital infrastructure would be objective or neutral. Humans are data and data is money, and this is the business model of many of the technology firms up to the task of ubiquitous computing.”
Read ‘The Creators Of Pokémon Go Mapped The World. Now They're Mapping You’ on the Kotaku site.
Tagged with: Niantic, surveillance capitalism, mapping.
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These Ads Think They Know You
Written by Stuart A. Thompson on The New York Times.
“Today’s data providers can receive information from almost every imaginable part of your life: your activity on the internet, the places you visit, the stores you walk through, the things you buy, the things you like, who your friends are, the places your friends go, the things your friends do, and on and on.”
Read ‘These Ads Think They Know You’ on the The New York Times site.
Tagged with: ads, targeting, surveillance capitalism.
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State websites are aiding a disgraceful silent surveillance
Written by Karlin Lillington on Irish Times.
“Of ‘special concern’ is that, by cross-referencing such data to the vast trove of personally-identifying information Google also holds from services like Gmail, Android apps, and Search, Google can ‘easily associate web activity with the identities of real people’, the report warns.”
Read ‘State websites are aiding a disgraceful silent surveillance’ on the Irish Times site.
Tagged with: surveillance capitalism, public sector, privacy.
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Tech is not neutral and we need to do better
The best bookmarks I saved in Week 12, 2019.
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Dangerous data and understanding privilege
The best bookmarks I saved in Week 10, 2019.
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