In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my Globe and Mail column, Why do people believe the Earth is flat?, which connects the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise in actual conspiracies, in which increasingly concentrated industries are able to come up with collective lobbying positions that result in everything from crashing 737s to toxic baby-bottle liners to the opioid epidemic.
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Tag: surveillance capitalism
Eminent psychologists condemn “emotion detection” systems as being grounded in junk science
One of the more extravagant claims made by tech companies is that they can detect emotions by analyzing photos of our faces with machine learning systems. The premise is sometimes dressed up in claims about “micro-expressions” that are below the threshold of human detection, though some vendors have made billions getting security agencies to let them train officers in “behavior detection” grounded in this premise.
Internet users are wising up to persuasive “nudge” techniques
Every now and again, a company will come up with a product “innovation” that seems to deprive people of their free will, driving great masses of internet users to look for Pokemon, or tend virtual farms, or buy now with one-click, or flock to Upworthy-style “You won’t believe what happened next” stories, or be stampeded into buying something because there are “only two left” and “14 people have bought this item in the past 24 hours.”
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Empirical analysis of behavioral advertising finds that surveillance makes ads only 4% more profitable for media companies
In Online Tracking and Publishers’ Revenues: An Empirical Analysis, a trio of researchers from U Minnesota, UC Irvine and CMU report out their findings from a wide-ranging (millions of data-points) study of the additional revenues generated by behaviorally targeted ads (of the sort sold by Facebook and Google) versus traditional, content-based advertising (that is, advertising a piano to you because I spied on you when you searched for pianos yesterday, versus showing you an ad about pianos next to an article about pianos).
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AT&T’s dystopian advertising vision perfectly illustrates the relationship between surveillance and monopoly
AT&T has come a long way from the supernormative, feel-good messages of its You Will ads; now CEO Randall Stephenson predicts a future where his company will dynamically alter your TV ads based on what it thinks you will buy; and chase you with that ad from your TV to your computer to your phone, and then spy on your location to see whether you go to a retailer to buy the thing you’ve had advertised to you; and use that intelligence to command high advertising rates from advertisers.
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Stop & Shop strike convinces 75% of loyal customers to take business elsewhere
Northeastern grocery chain Stop & Shop has been goosing its profits at its workers’ expense, increasing their healthcare costs, reducing company pension contributions, and reducing holiday and Sunday overtime pay; the United Food & Commercial Workers, who organize the Stop & Shop employees called for a strike nearly two weeks ago, and since then, 31,000 workers from 240 stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have been off the job.
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The Antitrust Case Against Facebook: a turning point in the debate over Big Tech and monopoly
In 2017, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan turned the antitrust world on its ear with her Yale Law Review paper, Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, which showed how Ronald Reagan’s antitrust policies, inspired by ideological extremists at the University of Chicago’s economics department, had created a space for abusive monopolists who could crush innovation, workers’ rights, and competition without ever falling afoul of orthodox antitrust law.
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Canadian Civil Liberties Association sues Toronto, Ontario, and Canada over the plan for a Google Sidewalk Labs “smart city” in Toronto
Sidewalk Labs is the division of Alphabet/Google that builds “smart city” technology; their most ambitious project to date is a massive privatised city-within-a-city planned for Toronto’s lakeshore — a project that received secretly approval to be much larger than was announced, a fact that Sidewalk lied about.
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Illinois almost passed a bill that banned devices that record you without your consent — and then Big Tech stepped in
This week, Keep Internet Devices Safe Act was gutted by the Illinois senate: it would have allowed people sue manufacturers if they determined that a device had engaged in remote recording without notifying its owner.
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Amazon stores recordings of Alexa interactions and turns them over to internal staff and outside contractors for review
Bloomberg reporters learned that — despite public pronouncements to the contrary — Amazon has an “annotation team” of thousands of people all over the world, charged with reviewing recordings made by Alexa devices in the field, with both staffers and contractors listening to conversations that Alexa owners have had with and near their devices.
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