This week in Data Exploitation Issue 2*
*An irregular newsletter about data and exploitation
What is data exploitation? Watch this and read below.
25th April 2017
Where does all the data go? And what does it take to truly delete data? Also, your headphones are spying on you, the BND is spying on Interpol and Uber is playing with fire.
_In the news
Ad-Blocking Feature in Popular Chrome Browser
Bose headphones spy on listeners: lawsuit
In A Shocking Breach, Aadhaar Details Of A Million Pensioners Leaked In Jharkhand
German intelligence spied on Interpol: Spiegel
_Unflattering portraits of male tech CEOs
Selling Mark Zuckerberg
Uber’s C.E.O. Plays With Fire
Turns out Uber secretly tracked users after they deleted app. Tim Cook found out, threatened Kalanick w/ App Store deletion until Uber stood down. Also, Uber bought data on Lyft users’ ride receipts to conduct competitive intelligence on its rival.
And here is a follow-up stories on this one:
Uber responds to report that it tracked devices after its app was deleted
_Data in the Wings
Where does all that data go?
What It Takes To Truly Delete Data
List of more than 600 Third Parties (other than PayPal Customers) with Whom Personal Information May be Shared
_Profiling
OK, Google, You’re Creeping Me Out: Advertising in the Age of Voice Devices
Amazon Is Making It Easier for Companies to Track You
_The future
Sex wearable is coming to track your performance and judge you
Mattel’s New AI Will Help Raise Your Kids
These surveillance robots will work together to chase down suspects
That Google Spinoff’s Scary, Important, Invasive, Deep New Health Study
_AI opacity
The Financial World Wants to Open AI’s Black Boxes
_Security
Machine Learning Just Made It Really Easy To Break Into Your Phone
You will be glued to this: Mumbai college’s students trick biometric system
Securing Driverless Cars From Hackers Is Hard. Ask the Ex-Uber Guy Who Protects Them
_Think pieces
History of The Quantified Self
Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance
Is It Time to Break Up Google?
_Film
The Moderators
In an office in India, a cadre of Internet moderators ensures that social media sites are not taken over by bots, scammers, and pornographers. The Moderators shows the humans behind content moderation, taking viewers into the training process that workers go through in order to become social media’s monitors.
The Ongoing Trauma of the Muslim Students an Undercover Cop Spied on For 4 Years
_Academic Papers
Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases
Abstract: Machine learning is a means to derive artificial intelligence by discovering patterns in existing data. Here, we show that applying machine learning to ordinary human language results in human-like semantic biases. We replicated a spectrum of known biases, as measured by the Implicit Association Test, using a widely used, purely statistical machine-learning model trained on a standard corpus of text from the World Wide Web. Our results indicate that text corpora contain recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether morally neutral as toward insects or flowers, problematic as toward race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the status quo distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. Our methods hold promise for identifying and addressing sources of bias in culture, including technology.
_Events
Data and Society: Future Perfect Conference
On June 16, 2017, Data & Society Research Institute’s Speculative Fiction Reading Group will host Future Perfect, a conference exploring the use, significance, and discontents of speculative design, narrative, and world-building in technology, policy, and culture.
