In Russia, Putin's regime has created a system called SORM, which is installed at each and every internet  service provider; and it allows them to surveil what information each and every citizen spreads through the internet.

Moving scanning from the server to the client pushes it across the boundary between what is shared (the cloud) and what is private (the user device). By creating the capability to scan files that would never otherwise leave a user device, CSS thus erases any boundary between a user’s private sphere and their shared (semi-)public sphere [6]. It makes what was formerly private on a user’s device potentially available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, even in the absence of a warrant. Because this privacy violation is performed at the scale of entire populations, it is a bulk surveillance technology.

Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of theimagined future, driven—this time by great financial rewards andglobal competition—despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating whatit may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome ofwhat we are creating and imagining.

(my bias is showing through - marketing people don't call it surveillance capitalism, to be fair. That's a pejorative term. They just call it doing their job, generating leads, and increasing conversions.)

just shooting from the hip, to me, I'm glad that subscription services like Netflix and Spotify are becoming more popular. That means that the companies (as opposed to Google & Facebook) don't have the incentive to follow this "surveillance capitalism," i.e. building increasingly sophisticated advertising technology predicated upon the behavioral history of users.(my bias is showing through - marketing people don't call it surveillance capitalism, to be fair. That's a pejorative term. They just call it doing their job, generating leads, and increasing conversions.)

The FTC has accused Kochava of violating the FTC Act by amassing and disclosing "a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers," alleging that Kochava's database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States. According to the FTC, Kochava's customers, ostensibly advertisers, can access this data to trace individuals' movements—including to sensitive locations like hospitals, temporary shelters, and places of worship, with a promised accuracy within "a few meters"—over a day, a week, a month, or a year. Kochava's products can also provide a "360-degree perspective" on individuals, unveiling personally identifying information like their names, home addresses, phone numbers, as well as sensitive information like their race, gender, ethnicity, annual income, political affiliations, or religion, the FTC alleged.

It's noteworthy that RFC 7258 doesn't consider that bad actors are limited to governments, and personally, I think many advertising industry schemes for collecting data are egregious examples of pervasive monitoring and hence ought also be considered an attack on the Internet that ought be mitigated where possible. However, the Internet technical community clearly hasn't acted in that way over the last decade.

Many have written about how being under constant surveillance changes a person. When you know you're being watched, you censor yourself. You become less open, less spontaneous. You look at what you write on your computer and dwell on what you've said on the telephone, wonder how it would sound taken out of context, from the perspective of a hypothetical observer. You're more likely to conform. You suppress your individuality. Even though I have worked in privacy for decades, and already knew a lot about the NSA and what it does, the change was palpable. That feeling hasn't faded. I am now more careful about what I say and write. I am less trusting of communications technology. I am less trusting of the computer industry.

A central concept was the Latin term fama, which encompassed rumour, reputation, gossip and news: Fama herself was often imagined as a winged goddess, with ears and eyes covered and tongues extending from her palms. These images were a visual representation of what it was like to live under constant surveillance by one’s neighbours as well as the authorities.

We started out collecting this information by accident, as part of our project to automate everything, but soon realized that it had economic value. We could use it to make the process self-funding. And so mechanized surveillance has become the economic basis of the modern tech industry.

Expert Opinionon theCurrent State of U.S. Surveillance Law and AuthoritiesfromProf. Stephen I. Vladeck,University of Texas School of Law

Le président du conseil général délivre l'autorisation decréation et de transformation et assure le contrôle et lasurveillance des établissements et services accueillantdes enfants de moins de 6 ans (crèches, haltesgarderies, centres de vacances, centres de loisirs,garderies, etc.)

La surveillance et le contrôle des établissements etservices d'accueil des enfants de moins de six ans

It was Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery) who first developed the idea thatEuropean slave plantations in the New World were, in effect, the first factories; theidea of a “pre-racial” North Atlantic proletariat, in which these same techniques ofmechanization, surveillance, and discipline were applied to workers on ships, waselaborated by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (The Many-Headed Hydra).

What is abrogated here is our right to the future tense, which is the essence of free will, the idea that I can project myself into the future and thus make it a meaningful aspect of my present. This is the essence of autonomy and human agency. Surveillance capitalism’s “means of behavioral modification” at scale erodes democracy from within because, without autonomy in action and in thought, we have little capacity for the moral judgment and critical thinking necessary for a democratic society.

surveillance capitalism represents an unprecedented concentration of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge. They know everything about us, but we know little about them. They predict our futures, but for the sake of others’ gain. Their knowledge extends far beyond the compilation of the information we gave them. It’s the knowledge that they have produced from that information that constitutes their competitive advantage, and they will never give that up. These knowledge asymmetries introduce wholly new axes of social inequality and injustice.

ProPublica recently reported that breathing machines purchased by people with sleep apnea are secretly sending usage data to health insurers, where the information can be used to justify reduced insurance payments.

from the start the logic reflected the social relations of the one-way mirror. They were able to see and to take — and to do this in a way that we could not contest because we had no way to know what was happening.

I define surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later.

More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs

I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.

Peele’s official ending happily defuses this tensionfor the viewer by having the car belong not to a cop, but to Chris’s friend, aproud TSA agent.

body, he is bathed in the red and blue lights of what the viewer assumes isa police cruiser

This is evident at two points in Peele’s film: when Chris is treatedunfairly by a police officer after riding as a passenger in the car that strikesthe deer, and when, at the climax of the film, standing over Rose’s expiring

Hidden below all of this is the normalization of surveillance that consistently targets marginalized communities. The difference between a smartwatch and an ankle monitor is, in many ways, a matter of context: Who wears one for purported betterment, and who wears one because they are having state power enacted against them?

The conveniences promised by Amazon’s suite of products may seem divorced from this context; I am here to tell you that they’re not. These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance”—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits.

DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS. According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

surveillance beacons

A Midwestern hospital system is treating its use of Google and Facebook web tracking technologies as a data breach, notifying 3 million individuals that the computing giants may have obtained patient information.

After cornering the market on entertainment, TikTok began offering its model of behavioral tracking and algorithmic suggestion to advertisers, promising them a way to know which ads people find most compelling without having to ask. It was an instant hit: The company’s ad revenue tripled this year, to $12 billion, according to eMarketer estimates, and is expected to eclipse YouTube at nearly $25 billion by 2025. In the United States, the cost to advertisers for TikTok’s premium real estate — the first commercial break a viewer sees in their feed, known as a “TopView” — has jumped to $3 million a day.

How TikTok ate the internetThe world’s most popular app has pioneered a new age of instant attention. Can we trust it?By Drew HarwellOct. 14

Marvin Gaye has a brief six-page file, which details an incident that followed him not being paid for a concert. Jimi Hendrix has a file including documents related to a pot bust in Canada. Mariam Makeba, an anti-apartheid activist who was married to Stokely Carmichael,  has a 292-page file which details the couple’s every move, including buying new home appliances.

From 1967 to 2007, the Federal Bureau of Investigation methodically collected information about Aretha Franklin using false phone calls, surveillance, infiltration, and highly-placed sources, according to the documents obtained in September by Rolling Stone.  Franklin’s FBI file — first requested in via the Freedom of Information Act on Aug. 17, 2018 —  is 270 pages long, peppered with phrases like “Black extremists,” “pro-communist,” “hate America,” “radical,” “racial violence,” and “militant Black power” and overflowing with suspicion about the singer, her work, and the other activists and entertainers with whom she she spent time. Some documents are heavily redacted and others indicate that there may be additional materials in the FBI’s possession. Rolling Stone has requested the FBI make available any and all additional records.

Our algorithmic self may or may not be faithful to how we see ourselves, but it has just as many dimensions and secrets. Whether we generate data deliberately or not, more information makes this shadow figure more economically valuable

The instructor may require the submission of the notesas an evidence of pro ress before the writing of the essayis begun, or he may as! for their presentation with the com-pleted essay.

When we talk about “the algorithm,” we might be conflating recommender systems with online surveillance, monopolization, and the digital platforms’ takeover of all of our leisure time—in other words, with the entire extractive technology industry of the twenty-first century.

The documents highlight the massive scale of location data that government agencies including CBP and ICE received, and how the agencies sought to take advantage of the mobile advertising industry’s treasure trove of data.

Location tracking is just one part of a panoply of data-collection practices that are now center stage in the abortion debate, along with people’s online search histories and information from period-tracking apps.

Efforts to use AI to predict crime have been fraught with controversy due to the potential to replicate existing biases in policing. But a new system powered by machine learning holds the promise of not only making better predictions but also highlighting these biases.

What many of these predictive systems promise is a measure of certainty in situations about which there can be none.

Get a copy of Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection

“Data is the new oil,” she said. 

Private tech companies have greater power to influence, censor and control the lives of ordinary people than any government on earth

the real enemy would be government, the bastion of traditional power. Old power. Dark suits. Heavy badges.

The ad lists various data that WhatsApp doesn’t collect or share. Allaying data collection concerns by listing data not collected is misleading. WhatsApp doesn’t collect hair samples or retinal scans either; not collecting that information doesn’t mean it respects privacy because it doesn’t change the information WhatsApp does collect.

The next time someone tells you “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” remember this. These farmers weren’t getting free, ad-supported tractors. Deere charges six figures for a tractor. But the farmers were still the product. The thing that determines whether you’re the product isn’t whether you’re paying for the product: it’s whether market power and regulatory forbearance allow the company to get away with selling you.

We've had three things happen simultaneously: we've moved from an open web where people start lots of small projects to one where it really feels like if you're not on a Facebook or a YouTube, you're not going to reach a billion users, and at that point, why is it worth doing this? Second, we've developed a financial model of surveillance capitalism, where the default model for all of these tools is we're going to collect as much information as we can about you and monetize your attention. Then we've developed a model for financing these, which is venture capital, where we basically say it is your job to grow as quickly as possible, to get to the point where you have a near monopoly on a space and you can charge monopoly rents. Get rid of two aspects of that equation and things are quite different.

Teaching with social reading doesn’t mean peering over students’ shoulders. Rather, teaching with social reading should help students share and connect.

Refinement is a social process: New ideas are conceived of by individuals, and then they are refined through reviews from knowledgeable peers and mentors.

Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.

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Preventing cheating during remote test-taking:https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorioSpying on work-from-home employees:https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#bosswareSpying on students and their families:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_DistrictRepossessing Teslas:https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/Disabling cars after a missed payment:https://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/17/aa.bills.shut.engine.down/index.htmlForcing you to buy official printer ink:https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printerSpying on people who lease laptops:https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/09/ftc-halts-computer-spyingBricking gear the manufacturer doesn’t want to support anymore:https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/google-reaches-into-customers-homes-and-bricks-their-gadgets/

Yet the existence of an independent and goodwill-based web is endangered : threatened by the never-ending technology race which makes the websites more difficult and expensive to set up, by the overwhelming commercial advertising pressure, and soon by dissymetric networks, Network Computers, proprietary networks, broadcasting, all aiming at the transformation of the citizen into a basic consumer.

I think of the Kindle and what enormous potential that browser had to change our relationship with the internet, to push it towards a web that you read (instead of one that tries so very hard to read you).

"Consumer" is LITERALLY replacing "citizen" as an identity.

You might be looking for a gift for a friend, doing research for a project, trying to learn other perspectives — they filter all data through the lens of capitalism and how they can sell you more things. That’s no replacement for human connection, or expertise a person has that could help you leap to things you didn’t know to look for.

Are women generally more interested in other social causes besides online surveillance and the negative cultural impacts of social media companies?

Building on platforms' stores of user-generated content, competing middleware services could offer feeds curated according to alternate ranking, labeling, or content-moderation rules.

In April 2000, Clinton hosted a celebration called the White House Conference on the New Economy. Earnest purpose mingled with self-congratulation; virtue and success high-fived—the distinctive atmosphere of Smart America. At one point Clinton informed the participants that Congress was about to pass a bill to establish permanent trade relations with China, which would make both countries more prosperous and China more free. “I believe the computer and the internet give us a chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in all of human history,” he exulted.

If this past year-and-change has taught us anything, it's how interconnected we all are — a bat coughs and the world gets sick. Vaccines aside, our greatest weapon for defeating Covid-19 has been the mask, an accessory I'd formerly appreciated only a symbol: masks make secret, masks hide, masks cover, in protests as in pandemics. The social value of the mask has been made clear: they're not deceptive so much as protective, of ourselves and of others too. Masking is a mutual responsibility, a symbol of common identity founded in a common hope. 

The intimate linking of users' online personas with their offline legal identity was an iniquitous squandering of liberty and technology that has resulted in today's atmosphere of accountability for the citizen and impunity for the state. Gone were the days of self-reinvention, imagination, and flexibility, and a new era emerged — a new eternal era — where our pasts were held against us. Forever.

i feel for for tool builders that are serious about building useful software interoperability can actually be a huge 00:45:22 spoon uh to their success um it'll make easier to acquire users it will make it easier to help users embed your own tool in their workflows um you may be also losing some users but 00:45:34 that's okay i guess because it'll create sustainable pressure to you for you to focus on an audience well and build really really useful services for them and if you do that they also won't leave as easily

And while hunting for caches, he uses some tricks to avoid unwanted attention, like carrying a clipboard. “If you look like you’re working, people don’t tend to pay attention to you.”