Coded Bias follows MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that many facial recognition technologies fail more often on darker-skinned faces, and delves into an investigation of widespread bias in artificial intelligence.
Another alternative to Google Analytics—nice and lightweight too!
A simple, real-time website scanner to see what invisible creepers are lurking in the shadows and collecting information about you.
Looks good for adactio.com, thesession.org, and huffduffer.com …but clearleft.com is letting the side down.
Take a look at your smartphone and delete all the apps you don’t really need. For many tasks, you can use a browser on your phone instead of an app.
Privacy-wise, browsers are preferable, because they can’t access as much of your information as an app can.
This is an excellent new tool for showing exactly what kind of tracking a site is doing:
Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
Best of all, you can inspect the raw data and analyse the methodology.
There are some accompanying explainers:
Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to entitlement: they think our privacy is theirs for the taking because they’ve been getting away with taking it without our knowledge, and it is valuable.
- Opted out experiences are ~35% faster
- Opting in downloads 2.5MB of additional JavaScript
- Opted in repeat views are twice as slow as opted out
Look, employers are always free to – and should! – evaluate the work product produced by employees. But they don’t have to surveil someone’s every move or screenshot their computer every five minutes to do so. That’s monitoring the inputs. Monitor the outputs instead, and you’ll have a much healthier, saner relationship.
If you hire smart, capable people and trust them to do good work – surprise-surprise – people will return the sentiment deliver just that! The irony of setting up these invasive surveillance regimes is that they end up causing the motivation to goof off to beat the very systems that were setup to catch such behavior.
Two observations of websites on mobile devices today:
- They are beautifully designed, with great typography, clear branding, all optimized for readability.
- I had to install Firefox, Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, as well as manually select and remove additional elements such as subscription overlays.
Both observations are the result of conscious design decisions.
A new online publication from Julia Angwin:
Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.
Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh.
👏
In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder.
If you add another advertisement to your pages, you generate more revenue. If you track your users better, now you can deliver tailored ads and your conversion rates are higher. If you restrict users from leaving your walled garden ecosystem, now you get all the juice from whatever attention they have.
The question is: At which point do we reach the breaking point?
And I think the answer is: We are very close.
Facebook. Twitter. Medium. All desparate to withhold content they didn’t even create until you cough up your personal details.
Amnesty International have released a PDF report on the out-of-control surveillance perpetrated by Google and Facebook:
Google and Facebook’s platforms come at a systemic cost. The companies’ surveillance-based business model forces people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human rights abuse. Firstly, an assault on the right to privacy on an unprecedented scale, and then a series of knock-on effects that pose a serious risk to a range of other rights, from freedom of expression and opinion, to freedom of thought and the right to non-discrimination.
However…
This page on the Amnesty International website has six tracking scripts. Also, consent to accept tracking cookies is assumed (check dev tools). It looks like you can reject marketing cookies, but I tried that without any success.
The stone PDF has been thrown from a very badly-performing glass house.
Let us not overlook the fact that a semantic HTML web site is inherently accessible by default. When we bend the web to our will, we break that. So we have a responsibility to correct it. Sure the new technologies are neat, but the end result is usually garbage. This all requires some next-level narcissism that our goals and priorities as developers are far more important than that of the audience we’re theoretically building software to serve.
The benchmarks that advertising companies use — intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed — are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).
It gets worse: the brightest minds of this generation are creating algorithms which only increase the effects of selection.
A terrificly well-written piece on the emperor’s new clothes worn by online advertising. Equal parts economic rigour and Gladwellian anecdata, it’s a joy to read! Kudos to Alana Gillespie for the great translation work (the original article was written in Dutch).
We currently assume that advertising companies always benefit from more data. … But the majority of advertising companies feed their complex algorithms silos full of data even though the practice never delivers the desired result. In the worst case, all that invasion of privacy can even lead to targeting the wrong group of people.
This insight is conspicuously absent from the debate about online privacy. At the moment, we don’t even know whether all this privacy violation works as advertised.
The interaction design of this article is great too—annotations, charts, and more!
The slides from Laura’s excellent talk at FF Conf on Friday.
I really like this latest addition in Firefox to show how many tracking scripts are being blocked. I think it’s always good to make the invisible visible (one of the reasons why I like RequestMap so much).
If you haven’t done so already, you should really switch to Firefox.
Then encourage your friends and family to switch to Firefox too.
Mike follows up on the changes made by email startup Superhuman after his initial post:
I will say this: if you were skeptical of Superhuman’s commitment to privacy and safety after reading the last article, you should probably be even more skeptical after these changes. The company’s efforts demonstrate a desire to tamp down liability and damage to their brand, but they do not show an understanding of the core problem: you should not build software that surreptitiously collects data on people in a way that would surprise and frighten them.
A really excellent analysis by Mike of a dark pattern in the Superhuman email app.
That’s right. A running log of every single time you have opened my email, including your location when you opened it. Before we continue, ask yourself if you expect this information to be collected on you and relayed back to your parent, your child, your spouse, your co-worker, a salesperson, an ex, a random stranger, or a stalker every time you read an email.
Exactly! This violates the principle of least surprise. Also, it’s just plain wrong.
Amazingly though, Mike has been getting pushback from guys on Twitter (and it’s always guys) who don’t think this is a big deal.
Anyway, read the whole thing—it’s fair, balanced, and really well written.