Tags: data

Facebook Is Tracking Me Even Though I’m Not on Facebook | American Civil Liberties Union

But while I’ve never “opted in” to Facebook or any of the other big social networks, Facebook still has a detailed profile that can be used to target me. I’ve never consented to having Facebook collect my data, which can be used to draw very detailed inferences about my life, my habits, and my relationships. As we aim to take Facebook to task for its breach of user trust, we need to think about what its capabilities imply for society overall. After all, if you do #deleteFacebook, you’ll find yourself in my shoes: non-consenting, but still subject to Facebook’s globe-spanning surveillance and targeting network.

Facebook’s “shadow profiles” are truly egregious …and if you include social sharing buttons on a website, you’re contributing to the data harvest.

If you administer a website and you include a “Like” button on every page, you’re helping Facebook to build profiles of your visitors, even those who have opted out of the social network.

If you are responsible for running a website, try browsing it with a third-party-blocking extension turned on. Think about how much information you’re requiring your users to send to third parties as a condition for using your site. If you care about being a good steward of your visitors’ data, you can re-design your website to reduce this kind of leakage.

Doc Searls Weblog · Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing

What will happen when the Times, the New Yorker and other pubs own up to the simple fact that they are just as guilty as Facebook of leaking its readers’ data to other parties, for—in many if not most cases—God knows what purposes besides “interest-based” advertising? And what happens when the EU comes down on them too? It’s game-on after 25 May, when the EU can start fining violators of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Key fact: the GDPR protects the data blood of EU citizens wherever they risk having it sucked in the digital world.

Sessions Map

This is nifty—a map of all the Irish music sessions and events happening around the world, using the data from TheSession.org.

If you’re interested in using data from The Session, there’s a read-only API and regularly-updated data dumps.

Animated SVG Radial Progress Bars - daverupert.com

Using a single path SVG, a smidge of CSS, and ~6 lines of JavaScript.

In this days of monolithic frameworks, I really like seeing modest but powerful patterns like this—small pieces that we can loosely join.

What would happen if a nuclear bomb went off in your backyard? | Outrider

Hot nuclear blasts in your area.

(like Eric’s HYDEsim)

Paul Ford: Facebook Is Why We Need a Digital Protection Agency - Bloomberg

The word “leak” is right. Our sense of control over our own destinies is being challenged by these leaks. Giant internet platforms are poisoning the commons. They’ve automated it.

New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future by James Bridle

James is writing a book. It sounds like a barrel of laughs.

In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy.

Be Kind, Design – Nat Dudley – Medium

The transcript of Nat’s superb Webstock talk.

We need to start thinking about inclusivity the same way as we think about mobile design. We realised with mobile, that we have to put that experience at the centre of what we do, otherwise it won’t be successful and we’ll fail mobile users. We realised we have to design mobile-first.

The same is true for inclusivity. Instead of it being an afterthought if it’s thought about at all, it needs to be our first thought. It needs to be central to our strategy, embedded in how we analyse and solve the problems we encounter. Designing inclusive-first is the only way we’ll manage to serve and protect all of the people who use what we build.

Let’s talk about usernames

This post goes into specifics on Django, but the broader points apply no matter what your tech stack. I’m relieved to find out that The Session is using the tripartite identity pattern (although Huffduffer, alas, isn’t):

What we really want in terms of identifying users is some combination of:

1. System-level identifier, suitable for use as a target of foreign keys in our database
2. Login identifier, suitable for use in performing a credential check
3. Public identity, suitable for displaying to other users

Many systems ask the username to fulfill all three of these roles, which is probably wrong.

as days pass by — Collecting user data while protecting user privacy

Really smart thinking from Stuart on how the randomised response technique could be applied to analytics. My only question is who exactly does the implementation.

The key point here is that, if you’re collecting data about a load of users, you’re usually doing so in order to look at it in aggregate; to draw conclusions about the general trends and the general distribution of your user base. And it’s possible to do that data collection in ways that maintain the aggregate properties of it while making it hard or impossible for the company to use it to target individual users. That’s what we want here: some way that the company can still draw correct conclusions from all the data when collected together, while preventing them from targeting individuals or knowing what a specific person said.

XML is 20

XML 1.0 was released on February 10th, 1998. I remember the hype around XML at the time—it was our saviour, the chosen one, prophesied to bring balance to data exchange. Things didn’t quite work out that way, but still…

Twenty years later, it seems obvious that the most important thing about XML is that it was the first. The first data format that anyone could pack anything up into, send across the network to anywhere, and unpack on the other end, without asking anyone’s permission or paying for software, or for the receiver to have to pay attention to what the producer thought they’d produced it for or what it meant.

Privacy could be the next big thing

A brilliant talk by Stuart on how privacy could be a genuinely disruptive angle for companies looking to gain competitive advantage over the businesses currently in the ascendent.

How do you end up shaping the world? By inventing a thing that the current incumbents can’t compete against. By making privacy your core goal. Because companies who have built their whole business model on monetising your personal information cannot compete against that. They’d have to give up on everything that they are, which they can’t do. Facebook altering itself to ensure privacy for its users… wouldn’t exist. Can’t exist. That’s how you win.

The beauty of this is that it’s a weapon which only hurts bad people. A company who are currently doing creepy things with your data but don’t actually have to can alter themselves to not be creepy, and then they’re OK! A company who is utterly reliant on doing creepy things with your data and that’s all they can do, well, they’ll fail. But, y’know, I’m kinda OK with that.

Asgardia - The Space Nation

Remember those offshore forts that would get taken over and repurposed as tax/data havens? Well, this is like that …but in space. Half design fiction, and half ponzi scheme, this will give those libertarian seasteaders a run for the money (in a made-up currency, of course).

Owning My Own Content - TimKadlec.com

Hell, yeah!

I write to understand and remember. Sometimes that will be interesting to others, often it won’t be.

But it’s going to happen. Here, on my own site.

The “File Not Found” series on Science Friday

A three-part series on digital preservation:

1. Ghosts In The Reels
2. The Librarians Saving The Internet
3. Data Reawakening

Data portability

2018 will be the year that GDPR hits the fan. Jeni has lots of thoughts about what data portability could mean for individuals.

Cognitive Overload - daverupert.com

From Scott McCloud to responsive design, Dave is pondering our assumptions about screen real estate:

As the amount of information increases, removing details reduces information density and thereby increasing comprehension.

It reminds me of Edward Tufte’s data-ink ratio.

CSS usage on the web platform - Microsoft Edge Development

Top of the props.

CSS properties …props …top of the. Never mind.

This CSS usage data comes from a Bing-powered scan of 2,602,016.00 pages.

The Times | data viz catalogue

Data visualisations created for The Times, complete with code.

Jeremy Keith - Building Blocks of the Indie Web - YouTube

Here’s the talk I gave at Mozilla’s View Source event. I really enjoyed talking about the indie web, both from the big-picture view and the nitty gritty.

In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that’s how!