Are Privacy and Democracy Doomed?
The Politics of Technology
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Week 4
Outline
Week 1
Week 3
Week 2
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Week 4
SLIDES: www.TerryGray.org / cri EMAIL: gray@uw.edu
Are Privacy and Democracy Doomed?
Current Debates
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BOTH
Information Warfare
Speech and Safety
Personal Data Use
PRIVACY
DEMOCRACY
13. Information Warfare
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By Peter Kuper
February 21, 2020
Information Warfare
Information warfare is the manipulation of information trusted by a target without the target's awareness so that the target will make decisions against their interest ... As a result, it is not clear when information warfare begins, ends, and how strong or destructive it is.[1]
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Cyber Warfare
Electronic Warfare
EW is any action involving the use of the electromagnetic spectrum or directed energy to control the spectrum, attack an enemy, or impede enemy assaults.
Focus: The Battle for your Mind
Objectives
Methods
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Neuromarketing Tries to Peer Inside the Minds of Voters
February 28, 2020 By Sue Halpern <NewYorker Radio Hour: Reflections on visit to Spark Neuro >
“You could make the argument that what we’re seeing with neuromarketing is just a more refined way of understanding what moves us politically. And it's a way for candidates to better understand the electorate. But if campaigns can tailor their messaging to make us care about things we might not otherwise care about or pay more attention to policies we might otherwise ignore, are we still making our own decisions? And if we’re not, where does that leave our democracy?”
The Neuroscience Technology That Could Change the 2020 Election
Joe Lazauskas Feb 10, 2019
Could the brain-reading tech that predicted Trump’s election in 2016 help determine who takes 2020?
A New Kind of Propaganda
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High-Tech Campaigns (or not)
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“the smartest campaigns now believe they know who you will vote for even before you do”
“microtargeting may be effective, but the algorithms are far simpler than candidates and strategists would have you believe”
2013
2015
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A Quarter of All Tweets About Climate Crisis Produced By Bots (theguardian.com)
Draft of Brown study says findings suggest ‘substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages’
"On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots," reports The Guardian. "This proportion was higher in certain topics -- bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about 'fake science' and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon. Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence."
Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis
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“Yet, while technology has transformed the ways in which we receive and share information, sometimes it is used to mislead public opinion or to fuel violence and hatred,” he said, calling attention to the decrease in civic space and the growth of anti-media rhetoric and violence and harassment of journalists.
“We have also found an uptick in journalists imprisoned on "false news" charges”
May 03, 2019
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“When anti-government protests erupted in Sudan at the end of last year, the response of President Omar al-Bashir came straight from the dictators' playbook -- a crackdown that led to scores of civilian deaths.
At the same time, a more insidious strategy was being developed -- one that involved spreading misinformation on social media, blaming Israel for fomenting the unrest, and even carrying out public executions to make an example of "looters." “
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Facebook blocked the spread of a liberal article because a conservative told it to
How Facebook’s supposedly unbiased fact-checking can go very wrong. By Zack Beauchamp Sep 12, 2018
Facebook, in an effort to deal with the fake news crisis, has given five news outlets the power to block the spread of articles they deem “false” on Facebook — empowering them, in essence, to act as the social media giant’s censors. They are the Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Snopes, PolitiFact, and the Weekly Standard: four nonpartisan outlets and one conservative one. On Tuesday, this arrangement blew up in Facebook’s face.
Last week, the liberal publication ThinkProgress published a piece on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing with the headline “Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v. Wade and almost no one noticed.” The fact-checker for the Weekly Standard ruled it was false. Facebook’s punishment mechanism kicked in, and the ThinkProgress article was cut off from being seen by about 80 percent of its potential Facebook audience.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/12/17848026/facebook-thinkprogress-weekly-standard Sep 12, 2018
ThinkProgress, a Top Progressive News Site, Has Shut Down
https://www.thedailybeast.com/thinkprogress-a-top-progressive-news-site-is-shutting-down Sep. 06, 2019
Progressive News Site ThinkProgress Said Ad Networks ‘Targeted’ It
https://dailycaller.com/2019/06/10/think-progress-new-site-ads/ June 10, 2019
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Not just Facebook...
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“Major media outlets' Twitter accounts amplify
false Trump claims on average 19 times a day”
May 3, 2019 MATT GERTZ & ROB SAVILLO
Major media outlets failed to rebut President
Donald Trump's misinformation 65% of the time
in their tweets about his false or misleading comments, according to a Media Matters review.
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Disinformation driven by swarms of computer bots and emerging technology such as deepfakes are sowing rancor across the world and making it far harder to deal with existential threats such as nuclear war and climate change, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board writes.
“The international security situation is now more dangerous than it has ever been, even at the height of the Cold War,” the authors write.
Richard Bejtlich, principal security strategist at the cybersecurity firm Corelight, meanwhile, dismissed the Bulletin’s announcement calling it irrational to say the world is more dangerous today than at the height of the Cold War.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-202/2020/01/24/the-cybersecurity-202-disinformation-threat-pushes-doomsday-clock-closer-to-midnight/5e29d32d88e0fa6ea99d3426/
Jan 24, 2020
14. Social Media
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Impact on Privacy, Democracy
The Rise of Social Media (2005)
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The Fall of Social Media (2020)
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From a 2014 lecture...
Social Media Privacy Concerns
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Social Media Policy Issues
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Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017 November 25, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1906420116
“Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized.” https://www.pnas.org/content/117/1/243
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Study of YouTube Comments Finds Evidence of Radicalization Effect
Research ... supports the notion that YouTube's platform is playing a role in radicalizing users via exposure to far-right ideologies. The study ... found evidence that users who engaged with a middle ground of extreme right-wing content migrated to commenting on the most fringe far-right content.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/28/study-of-youtube-comments-finds-evidence-of-radicalization-effect/
Recommendation Reckoning
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Wojcicki compared her video site to a different kind of institution. “We’re really more like a library,” she said, staking out a familiar position as a defender of free speech. “There have always been controversies, if you look back at libraries.”
Like a library?
Don’t libraries have better recommendation engines?
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“The maneuver has ignited a global discussion about the role of social media in the face of crisis. On the one hand, it can be an important tool for first responders, humanitarian groups, and journalists to gather information and for potential victims to let their loved ones know that they’re safe. On the other, social media platforms can be weaponized to spread false information and potentially cause more violence, and companies do not have a great track record of being able to get things under control.”
Facebook will continue letting politicians lie in ads
Google and Twitter have changed their approach to political advertising. Facebook is standing pat.
By Peter Kafka Jan 9, 2020, 6:00am EST
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/9/21057737/facebook-political-ads-policy-targeting-change
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Read Sacha Baron Cohen's scathing attack on Facebook
Fri 22 Nov 2019 13.10 EST
Describing Facebook as “the greatest propaganda machine in history”, Baron Cohen argued that the company, which does not vet political ads for truthfulness, would have allowed Hitler to run propaganda on its platform.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/22/sacha-baron-cohen-facebook-propaganda
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Facebook's version of political neutrality isn't neutral Its stance isn't working.
Daniel Cooper, 10.22.19
Facebook cannot be an entirely neutral party. It already makes plenty of decisions about permitted speech, as its lengthy use policies make clear. It already has definitions about what people can, and cannot, say about others, and those policies have adapted over time. It has an army of fact checkers and moderators at its disposal and could, very easily, apply this to the sort of campaign ads it has chosen to exclude.
And other media outlets, like CNN, have already refused to run ads that contain "demonstrably false" assertions. But behaving CNN would leave Facebook open to the risk of regulation, something it seems intent on ducking. if one party is prepared to cheat and another is not, then refusing to act will seem like Facebook is taking a side.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/22/facebook-political-neutrality/
Facebook and Zuckerberg keep getting ‘freedom of expression’ wrong
Without fundamental privacy protections and full transparency on its practices, that kind of power can’t be good for freedom of expression.
Top Facebook exec: Yes, we got Trump elected and it may happen again
"So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks," Bosworth wrote. "He didn't get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser. Period." https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/07/tech/boz-trump-facebook/index.html
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So which is more frightening: Russian meddling or Facebook’s ad tech?
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The Facebook data breach wasn’t a hack. It was a wake-up call.
Facebook expected its user data to be harvested. It just didn’t expect Cambridge Analytica to do it millions of times. By Aja Romano Mar 20, 2018
Tech Crunch: “it was always kind of shady that Facebook let you volunteer your friends’ status updates, check-ins, location, interests and more to third-party apps.”
Cambridge Analytica: Political Consulting
VP: Steve Bannon; Funded by Mercers
Cam. U. researcher used personality quiz
Got 270K users → 87 M friends data
Massive New Cambridge Analytica leak Will Show Global Voter Manipulation on 'Industrial Scale' (theguardian.com) January 05, 2020
Company’s work in 68 countries laid bare with release of more than 100,000 documents
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/01/05/1724205/massive-new-cambridge-analytica-leak-will-show-global-voter-manipulation-on-industrial-scalehttps://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/04/cambridge-analytica-data-leak-global-election-manipulation
The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower on how American voters are “primed to be exploited”
Christopher Wylie says his former firm easily manipulated democracy with Facebook data. Could it happen again?
By Hope Reese Nov 4, 2019 https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/28/20932790/chris-wylie-cambridge-analytica-facebook-trump-2020
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Facebook vs. Democracy @ TED2019, Vancouver, BC
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Carole Cadwalladr: Facebook's role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy
Flashback!
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UCLA
CSD
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“The Fifth Risk (the risk posed by incompetent government leaders) “
"There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview."
Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson marshals the troll posts, unique polling data, analyses of how the press used hacked content, and a synthesis of half a century of media effects literature to argue that, although not certain, it is probable that the Russians helped elect the 45th president.
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In this lively guide to everything from misleading statistics to "fake news," Bergstrom and West help you recognize bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it--in data, in conversation, even within yourself--and explain it to your crystal-loving aunt or casually racist uncle. Now more than ever, calling bullshit is crucial to a properly functioning community, whether it be a circle of friends, a network of academics, or the citizenry of a nation.
-- Amazon COMING: August 4, 2020
• Who is saying it?
• How do they know?
• What do they have to gain by persuading me?
• Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true?
• Is the claim comparing like with like or apples and oranges?
• Is it confirming your personal bias?
“Levy portrays a tech company where no one is taking responsibility for what it has unleashed… The book closes with a recognition that Facebook is bulldozing ahead with new innovations — from Facebook dating to its Libra digital currency project — while Zuckerberg continues to shrug off any ethical queries about his past behaviour.” —Financial Times
Summary: IW and Social Networking
Takeaways
Questions
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15. Solutions: Privacy
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Recap: Current Status
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Protecting Privacy
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Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law. Good.
Zack Whittaker@zackwhittaker • September 19, 2019
Image Credits:
Some Cautionary Notes...
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Europe’s sweeping privacy rule was supposed to change the internet, but so far it’s mostly created frustration for users, companies, and regulators
PUBLISHED SUN, MAY 5 2019 Kate Fazzini
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Under California’s new privacy law, firms are disclosing too little data — or far too much
Jan. 21, 2020 at 4:36 am Updated Jan. 21, 2020 at 4:27 pm
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/21/ccpa-transparency/
Mark Rabins, a data scientist in Los Angeles, spent several hours recently trying to collect personal information about himself from a variety of corporations and data brokers. “Either they give you a fire hose of information that is almost impossible to interpret,” he said, “or they give you practically nothing.”
“Everyone seems to be putting their toe into the water to see what they can get away with,” Rabins said. “I hate to say it, but I think the companies are going to win.”
What 10 years of my Instagram data revealed
A new California law forced Instagram to hand over my data. It included thousands of messages and photos, but not everything
by Kari Paul
“I am 100% sure this is not the only data that Instagram has on you,” said John Ozbay, the chief executive of privacy and security tool Cryptee. “But because we cannot prove they have more, they will never give it to you.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/16/instagram-my-data-california-privacy-law-request
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Apple and Google’s tough new location privacy controls are working
As users opt out of tracking en masse, advertisers will have to make do with limited location data.
“Since the launch of iOS 13 last fall, the amount of background location data that marketers collect has dropped by 68%”
“advertisers now have to make do with less accurate information. That in turn could make them rethink overly invasive tracking in the first place.”
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Google favors temporary facial recognition ban as Microsoft pushes back
The EU is considering a five-year ban on the technology, but big tech is divided
By James Vincent Jan 21, 2020, 6:45am ES
So far, the market is indeed dictating the rules, with big tech companies taking different stances on the issue. Microsoft sells facial recognition but has self-imposed limits, for example, like letting police use the technology in jails but not on the street, and not selling to immigration services. Amazon has eagerly pursued police partnerships, particularly though its video Ring doorbells, which critics say gives law enforcement access to a massive crowdsourced surveillance network.
The government has indicated that it wants to take a hands-off approach to the regulation of AI, including facial recognition, in the name of spurring innovation.
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We’re Banning Facial Recognition. �We’re Missing the Point.
The whole point of modern surveillance is to treat people differently, and facial recognition technologies are only a small part of that.
By Bruce Schneier Jan. 20, 2020
“modern mass surveillance has three broad components: identification, correlation and discrimination.”
Today, facial recognition technologies are receiving the brunt of the tech backlash, but focusing on them misses the point. We need to have a serious conversation about all the technologies of identification, correlation and discrimination, and decide how much we as a society want to be spied on by governments and corporations — and what sorts of influence we want them to have over our lives.
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What will it take for the government to protect your privacy?
Edward C. Baig USA TODAY Jan 20, 2020
Though the tech industry may be saying all the right things – and in some instances doing something about it – critics aren't persuaded. Washington Post columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler calls such statements "privacy white-washing: when tech companies market control and transparency over data but continue gobbling it up." It's not what we need, he said.
one thing is apparent: It will take a lot more industry effort – combined with stricter federal intervention – to give consumers the data safeguards and level of privacy they ought to expect.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/01/20/why-we-need-federal-data-privacy-law/2803896001/
Action Plan
* MFA = Multi-Factor Authentication, e.g. password plus one-time code sent to your phone
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16. Solutions: Democracy
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New Yorker
Feb 26, 2020
Haight-Ashbury Solution
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Protecting Democracy
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Life without Facebook
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Matthew Gentzkow, Stanford University @UW on 2 May 2019
Pope to Catholics: For Lent, give up trolling
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VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -
During Lent, Catholics are called on to give up something, like sweets. On Wednesday, Pope Francis added a modern twist to the list of things to quit during the season and beyond: insulting people on social media.
FEBRUARY 26, 2020
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From a Jan 2020 TownHall, talk:
See also: EthicalOS.org
“What if, in addition to fantasizing about how our tech will save the world, we spent some time dreading all the ways it might, possibly, perhaps, just maybe, screw everything up?”
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Framework for Building Ethical Technology -- EthicalOS.org
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The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us
They see facial recognition, smart diapers, and surveillance devices as inevitable evolutions. They’re not.
By Rose Eveleth Updated Oct 8, 2019
“the myth of inevitable technological progress.”
NO NATURAL PROCESS IS CREATING A “SMART” HAIRBRUSH
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Google will enlist 10,000 employees
to moderate YouTube videos
The video platform will also have stricter criteria on which channels can earn from ads.
Dec 2017
May 2019
Content Curation is not easy...
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Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes
MAY 8, 2019 Bernhard Warner / The Atlantic
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Section 230
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What happens if the internet’s most important law disappears?
Wave goodbye to the comment section of the internet. Daniel Cooper 31 Jan 2020
Buried deep in the 1996 Telecommunications Act is a tiny clause that underpins everything we do online. It's often described as the 26 words that created the internet -- and with very good reason. Every email you send, social media post you make and review you submit, you do so under this law's protection, after a fashion. And now, it's under threat. www.engadget.com/2020/01/31/s230-repeal/
Bill Would Make Tech Firms Accountable for Child Sex Abuse Imagery By Michael H. Keller March 5, 2020
“The broad application of Section 230 is widely credited with allowing the modern internet to flourish. But some experts say that the law’s effectiveness stems from its simplicity, and that carving out exceptions for certain types of content, as the bill does, will cause concerns.” “The American Civil Liberties Union and the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity jointly opposed the bill on Thursday, cautioning that it could be used to outlaw encryption.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/us/child-sexual-abuse-legislation.html
Looking Forward -- Ideas to strengthen democracy
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Final
Theme
"Buy the beer first, this job ain't gonna be easy."
You asked:
Why am I optimistic?
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“I'd rather make a mistake in believing that people were better than they are than going through life thinking that they're worse than they are." -Ted Turner
Why Optimism?
“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.” -G. Stern
“Sometimes when you're in a dark place you think you've been buried, but you've actually been planted.” -Christine Caine
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity;
an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” -Winston Churchill
"What makes us different? We're the only creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing." -Bill McKibben, Falter
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“I used to be a cynic, but I gave it up when I got to UW because the competition was too rough.”
My Story (you asked!)
1959
1989
I am an engineer by training. Engineers solve problems.
But a good engineer is a study in contradictions...
-You can’t solve problems without some optimism.
-You can’t solve them well without some pessimism.
Dysfunctional democracy is just another problem to solve.
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”-Martin Luther King (1968), Theodore Parker (1853)
Encouraging Signs
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“the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred.” -Wikipedia
“Rosling suggests the vast majority of human beings are wrong about the state of the world. He demonstrates that his test subjects believe the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it actually is, attributing this not to random chance but to misinformation.” -Wikipedia
Rays
of
Light
What’s it going to be?
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🤔
But Just In Case...
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Thank you!
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Terry Gray, PhD www.TerryGray.org
Bonus Videos
Relating to Items on Looking Forward Slide
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Liquid Democracy --aka delegative democracy
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A blend of direct and indirect democracy
“Vote on real legislation. Or delegate your vote to anyone you trust.”
Solid: Envisioning a future with beneficent apps and users in control of their data
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“Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s
learned may be crucial to Western democracy”
A look at the multi-pronged, cross-sector approach Finland is taking to successfully fight misinformation campaigns and fake news
Eliza Mackintosh / CNN:
Baratunde Thurston @ Google I/O
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START: 15:40
END: 24: 50
(but the whole thing is good!)