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META DATA AS SURVEILLANCE

�HOW INTERNET ADS �DESTROYED OUR PRIVACY

COMS401.55 S18: KATY ANDERSON�bit.ly/MetaDataAsSurveillance

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QUESTIONS

How do we define privacy in a digital age?
Do you care that your information is being collected and stored, �why or why not?
Do you trust the algorithms that are being used?

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AGENDA

HOW YOU ARE BEING TRACKED
WHO IS TRACKING YOU

CORPORATIONS
GOVERNMENTS

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE
CAN YOU OPT OUT

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You are �being tracked

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We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads�– Zeynep Tufekci

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How advertising cookies let observers follow you across the web

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“THE INVISIBLE WEB”

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Who is tracking you

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CORPORATIONS

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You are not their customer, you are what they sell.

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DATA BROKERS

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Browsing history, including “private browsing”
Social media history: Text, photos and networks
Geolocation: Where you go, when, and with who
Online shopping history
Credit history
Health history
Present and previous addresses
Etc.

Dossiers �of online and offline information

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GOVERNMENTS

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Metadata and the third-party doctrine

Based on a set of 1970s rulings that hold that people who voluntarily give information to third parties — such as banks, phone companies and internet service providers (Rogers, Bell Telus, Shaw), or social media and e-mail servers — have "no reasonable expectation of privacy."

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“More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks ... I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.”

— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 2013

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CCTV

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Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker

An art project focused on Jill Magrid’s 31 day trip in Liverpool, England. She worked with the local police in order to gain access to CCTV footage of her daily travels. It is mainly based on a website but also had some gallery installations. The project involved visitors of the website to sign up and recieve emails that contained written accounts of what the artist did each day, as well as a link to CCTV footage that showed exactly what she did that day.

It highlighted the incomplete nature of CCTV footage, while also provided fairly private information about the artists daily life. For example, after watching all the CCTV footage you would know that the artist likes her coffee sweet, that she is a Jewish-American, she likes feta cheese, she is attracted to men in leather and to motorcycles, and that her birthday is February 25th, among other things.

While this may seem like a lot of information, the project stresses that due to the fragmented view of CCTV cameras, they only really produce the amount of information you would find on a social media profile, such as a facebook profile. The project also stresses that

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Why should you care?

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Price Discrimination

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A company called Global Science Research, contracted by Cambridge analytica used a online quiz and a loophole in order to gather the personal information of the user, as well as their friends, which was on average 200-300 extra people per individual.

The number of people affected by this breach is anywhere between 50-87 million individuals

This collection of data most notably resulted in mostly incorrect political propaganda being spread throughout facebook and had an effect on both the 2016 US Presidential Election and Brexit.

Technically, in the classic sense of the word, you couldn’t consider this collection of data a breach of data, due to the fact that Facebook’s app protocol allowed for all of this information to be gathered without any real form of informed consent, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that anywhere from 50-87 million people had their data collected without their knowledge or consent.

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Coined by Eli Pariser, in 2010

The filter bubble happens when online algorithms infer what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, past searches, geo-location, and past-click history. Through this algorithm it results in an isolation of the users ideas and separates them from viewpoints that differ from their own. The algorithms used to determine what each person sees on the internet based on their past history remains hidden and therefore we are unable to understand how and why we are being shown certain pages while others are not.

The Cambridge analytica scandal as well as the filter bubble represents that through metadata you’re not just being sold products, but you are also being sold different ideas that are being presented to you without any real idea of why they’re being presented to you.�Source: �https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s

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Okay. So,

Can you opt out?

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WHERE WE ARE NOW

“If you’re not comfortable with your data being used, don’t use the service.”

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Alternate options

Email services that don't code for advertisements
Browsers that mask your Internet Protocol (IP) address
Virtual Private Networks
Secure cloud storage
Use HTTPS Everywhere
Ad tracker trackers

Search engines that don't save your searches (DuckDuckGo instead of Google)
Be aware of sharing geolocation (Smartphones, maps, Angry Birds, Flashlight)
Alternative operating systems
Credit card in different name
Signal blocking pouch for phone

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“PRIVATE BROWSING” … ?

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Tor

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Use a Virtual Private Network

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Use an ad blocker

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Disconnect shows the different sources of tracking — what services are following you around the site.

The more informed you are, the more you can decide who you want tracking you.

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Privacy isn’t dead, but...

Is privacy �a luxury good?

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DISCUSSION�

Do you care that your information is being collected and stored, why or why not? Is the convenience worth being tracked?

Do you trust the algorithms that are being used?

How do we define privacy in a digital age?

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REFERENCES

Angwin, J. (2014). Dragnet Nation. New York, NY: Times Books, Henry Holt and Company LLC

Disconnect. (n.d.). Retrieved October 19, 2015, from https://disconnect.me/

Do not track. Retrieved from https://donottrack-doc.com/

Finn, Jonathan. “Surveillance Studies and Visual Art: An Examination of Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker.” Surveillance & Society 10(2), 2012: 134-149. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org | ISSN: 1477-7487.

Ghostery. (n.d.). Retrieved June 10, 2018, from https://www.ghostery.com/en/why-ghostery/tracker-basics/

Jackson, J. (2017, January 08). Eli Pariser: Activist whose filter bubble warnings presaged Trump and Brexit. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/08/eli-pariser-activist-whose-filter-bubble-warnings-presaged-trump-and-brexit

Koen, V. (2014, September 13). Getting to know you: Everything people do online is avidly followed by advertisers and third-party trackers. The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21615871-everything-people-do-online-avidly-followed- advertisers-and-third-party

Newell, Bruce Clayton. “The Massive Metadata Machine: Liberty, Power, and Secret Mass Surveillance in the U.S. and Europe.” A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 10(2), 2014: 481-522.

Mosco, V. (2014). Chapter 5: Big data and cloud culture. In To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, 175 - 226. Retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/lib/ucalgary/reader.action?docID=10865335

Tor Project. Retrieved from https://www.torproject.org/about/overview

Is Privacy becoming a luxury good? Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEfJY3JkacA

Invisible Web: What it is, Why it exists, How to find it, and Its inherent ambiguity. (n.d.). Retrieved October 19, 2015, from http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/InvisibleWeb.html ��Zomorodi, M. (2015, Sept 9). Why online shoppers see different prices for the same item. (Audio podcast) Retrieved from http://www.wnyc.org/story/dynamic-pricing-price-optimization-discrimination/