#digital surveillance

[z0mbiechylde]

Hang on! Klaus Schwab is getting AWAY with this? | Redacted with Natali ... EVERYBODY NEEDS TO WATCH THIS THIS! DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN!!!!!

[mephemera]

PSA that the spotify stats page is not actually spotify. it’s “favorite music guru”, a third party app that has NO data protection or privacy policy.

I spent twenty minutes of my life hunting for their privacy policy, and then spent more hunting for any way to get in contact with their official presence. even just a placeholder corporate webpage or a single social media account. i tried multiple search keyword combinations on multiple search engines. their old app page, favoritemusic.guru, now immediately redirects to spotify’s third party authorization.

forced to draw the conclusion that the reason spotify doesn’t link you to favorite music guru’s privacy policy is because it simply does not exist.

we already live in digital surveillance hell and it’s so overwhelming that i’ve mostly given up trying to protect myself. but this behavior feels outright contemptuous.

wait lets use that spotify stats page i want to know what everyone’s long term most listened to artist and track are! mine are the cure + “the river the woods” by astronautalis

[softlifesofttech]

002 Social Media's Silent, Yet Loud, Gaze

The previous discussion doesn’t necessarily account for people experiencing these effects on platforms where their connections are more personal. However, the surveillance dynamics within personal relationships are equally worthy of exploration. Social groups—family, friends, and others—are often forced to share a singular digital space, leading to context collapse. This collapse heightens anxiety as users navigate how they are perceived by multiple groups simultaneously, which can breed mistrust even within the closest of relationships. Particularly, users will analyse interactions on platforms like Instagram, where personal connections are more pronounced than on free-for-all platforms like Twitter. They may approach each interaction with excessive detail, falling into the trap of over-interpretation. For example, someone not responding to a comment or viewing a story without engaging might be perceived as a deliberate act. These ambiguous actions can easily manifest into darker thoughts if not counteracted. What users may not understand is that these actions might simply be a case of social overload or simply nothing. Such behaviours are so inconsequential to others that the outcome as stated is not even considered in the realm possibility. Yet, for the person overanalysing, these perceived slights can feel significant and deeply personal.

This tendency to overanalyse digital interactions is symptomatic of the broader challenges from social media. Platforms amplify even the most minor behaviours, making them feel significant in ways they aren't. This heightened sensitivity can distort our understanding of social dynamics, turning neutral or benign things into something larger. These interpretations then spiral, creating unnecessary tension in both digital and offline spaces. In a world mediated by digital platforms, the lines between connection, observation, and judgment have become marred. Social media has created a unique space where users must navigate an interplay of visibility, validation, and vulnerability. The resulting anxiety, paranoia, and mistrust can deeply impact how we view ourselves and our relationships. Recognising these dynamics so we can reclaim a healthier relationship with these platforms is key. Ultimately, the question we must ask is: How much of our digital anxiety is self-imposed, and how much is engineered by the platforms we use?

[josephkravis]

The Age of the Digital Precog: How AI Predicts Our Every Move

Just like the precogs could glimpse future events, AI sifts through enormous amounts of data to make informed guesses about what we’ll do next.

Whats On My Mind Today? Who Are You? How to passively gather personal information is a fascinating look into how businesses, marketers, and tech giants employ techniques to connect your protected data to the information you freely share. Passive information gathering means collecting data about a person without actively seeking it or requiring direct interaction. This can happen through…

[security-cameras-installation-la]

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[pebblegalaxy]

Exploring On Freedom by Timothy Snyder: A Deep Dive Into Liberty, Democracy, and Responsibility @TimothyDSnyder #TBRChallenge #bookchatter #BookReview #OnFreedom

Review of On Freedom by Timothy Snyder: A Timely Exploration of Liberty and Democracy On Freedom by Timothy Snyder delves into one of the most pressing issues of our time—freedom. Known for his works on history and politics, including On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder shifts his focus in On Freedom to explore the concept of liberty and its complex intersections with history,…

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[learningdigitalhere]

"In the digital world, being adaptable is like having Wi-Fi – you can't always control the signal, but you can certainly dance to the rhythm of change"

[liberaljane]

With Trump headed back to office, now is a good time to beef up your digital security.

Here's the Feminist Guide to Digital Security & 4 tips to get started.

Alt-text included on all pieces.

[lektursam]

Sistem Operasi Windows: Ibarat CCTV

Halo Pembaca! Privasi merupakan hal yang esensial dalam dunia digital. Tanpa privasi, laptop dan telepon genggam yang kita gunakan sehari-hari akan menjadi seperti CCTV yang mudah dibawa ke mana-mana. Sebanyak 74% orang menggunakan Microsoft Windows pada perangkat desktop mereka.1 Apakah sistem operasi ini menghargai privasi pengguna? Mari kita lihat seberapa privatkah sistem operasi berbasis…

[softlifesofttech]

001 Social Media's Silent, Yet Loud, Gaze

"I lied, y'all—delete your Instagram. Everybody on there is plotting, watching, and doesn’t like you. Start over."

Over the past few years, I’ve seen several iterations of this same tweet or sentiment. It got me thinking about whether there are any studies or phenomena that explore how social media contributes to anxiety and hyperawareness due to its borderline surveillance nature. This particular tweet might seem like a throwaway comment, but I think it speaks to larger issues that don’t yet have precise language to describe them. It captures a perfect intersection of social media anxiety, paranoia, and hyper-surveillance. Our digital platforms today almost act as courtyards, and by nature, environments where users feel constantly observed. Likes, comments, and views quantify this, making it feel all the more real and measurable. Whether these metrics tell the full story is a different matter entirely. Nonetheless, users exist in a heightened state of awareness regarding their audience. That audience watches, and a quiet part of our minds tells us that watching is inevitably followed by judgment. This dynamic fosters self-censorship, hyper-vigilance, and anxiety. For some, the mere idea of an audience that closely monitors behaviour can be a source of great stress.

If we want to circle back to theory, this phenomenon could loosely tie into the panopticon effect. In the panopticon model, prisoners in a courtyard are under constant observation from a central watchtower, whether or not guards are actively watching. Similarly, social media creates the feeling of being perpetually observed by an invisible audience, even if no one is engaging with you. Unlike the prisoner-guard relationship, however, this surveillance is two-way; users are both watchers and watched. They are an actor in the very same structure they repel. These dynamics seem to go unnoticed, or the self-absorption takes precedence, making the dots difficult to connect. The new age of Elon Musk’s Twitter (post-2022) exacerbates this phenomenon. The loss of a personal timeline, and by extension, the loss of key interactions one may have had previously, the introduction of a "For You" page filled with content antithetical to you (said to be intentional to boost engagement through discord), and the emergence of tiered experiences via premium features have fundamentally altered the platform’s social dynamics. What once felt like a communal courtyard now feels distant and fragmented, amplifying feelings of disconnection. This shift feeds into what can be termed algorithmic anxiety. Unaware to many who may be experiencing such, social media algorithms prioritise specific interactions, such as engagement driven by controversy or outrage. However, when more seemingly normal content is given centre stage, it can amplify feelings of exclusion for users. For instance, when users post content that receives fewer likes or interactions, they might interpret this as evidence of being disliked or ignored. Unlike the physical panopticon, where observation is implied, visibility on social media is explicit through notifications and engagement metrics. These tangible markers often lead users to draw conclusions—accurate or not—about their social standing. Furthermore, there isn't particularly a clear-cut way to drive content engagement or visibility, this unpredictability can intensify that feeling of being scrutinised. This can further stress users and erode trust in their digital relationships. This paranoia often spills into offline relationships that also occupy a digital space, such as friendships on social media. Research has shown that heightened social media use can lead to negative comparisons and damage to self-esteem. By comparing themselves to the curated, idealised lives of others, individuals may feel alienated for failing to fit predefined molds or expectations. This alienation can harm perceptions of their social relationships. Everyone yearns for connection, even in digital spaces, and the fear of exclusion can make users particularly sensitive. Some have reported sensing hostility or judgment from their online mutuals, even without concrete evidence to support these feelings. This ties into rumination and confirmation bias, where even ambiguous behaviours can become a point of contention. A 2020 study published in Psychiatry Research found a connection between social media use and paranoia. Increased usage, especially during periods of isolation, was associated with heightened feelings of persecution. This suggests that the surveillance-like nature of social media platforms, combined with their tendency to amplify insecurities, may play a significant role in these psychological effects.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.

It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."

And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).

These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.

This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.

Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.

Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.

But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.

This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.

So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.

But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!

But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.

It's money.

Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.

This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.

First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!

This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you…while serving as the judge…and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.

So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).

It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.

And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/

The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.

This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.

You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561

You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA

Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.

Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.

That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.

By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.

Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free

[security-cameras-installation-la]

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[venusart-1707]

Ah yes my favorite tired single father Soundwave