A presentation at New Adventures in 2020 January in Nottingham, UK by Laura Kalbag
This talk goes over digital targeting, profiling, and ad-tech fueled manipulation. Laura talks about Surveillance Capitalism and how to protect ourselves as individuals (with a link to Investigating sources of PII used in Facebook’s targeted advertising which discovered and documented data misuse of security information for advertising targeting at Facebook, and also Twitter)
I think Laura's argument for not using gmail is compelling and worth considering. This is an argument, I guess, to either break up Google or towards stronger laws around data-lineage and appropriate processing practice. Though, google has made loud claims and careful doublespeak that they don't do this.1 She also lends a lot of weight to my arguments that quote-unquote Informed Consent is a canard and we need to radically rethink this.
The cost of not consenting is to lose access to social, civil and labour infrastructure. It’s certainly not a real choice when the cost of not consenting is to lose access to social, civil, and labour infrastructure.
I am a big fan of the drive towards discussing this as systems of power and domination rather than a fair deal, and how important it is to have a path cut through this through essentially collective action
That’s where you and me come in. As people who work in technology, and who create technology, we have far more power for change. We can encourage more ethical practice. We can build alternatives.
Build Small Technology! Laura is half of the Small Technology Foundation.
"You don’t need analytics that segment people into stereotypes based on guesswork."
Invert the responsibilities for data consent + knowledge, make it the company's responsibility:
Make it your responsibility to know what they’re doing with your users’ information. If you do use third-party services, make it your responsibility to know their terms and policies, what information they are collecting, and what they are doing with that information.
"Our whole approach matters" really rings true to me.
Tag links NOEXPORT
Surveillance Capitalism Privacy