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Overview: Social Web

Relevant resources

A privacy war is raging inside the W3C - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech
www.protocol.com
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Fascinating longread: "inside story of how the W3C ... became a key battleground in the global fight for web privacy", covering:how a few companies (browser engineers) traditionally dominate W3C (pre-vote) conversations,new & disruptive entrants to W3C working groups fighting to save existing ad-tech models following Google's la…

Consent Theater
onezero.medium.com
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Doctorow on understanding how vital GDPR is in combating "consent theatre".Opening point: if "we “fix” Facebook, making it possible for you to take your data and go to a rival service... Do you need to get all your friends’ consent?" According to Big Tech, we can't force them to "give people their own data back... It’…

Privacy activists are winning fights with tech giants. Why does victory feel hollow? | Evgeny Morozov | The Guardian
www.theguardian.com
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Although this looks like someone looking for problems because of the apparent near-future success of "solutionism", some good points here: we need "an institution that will know what ... regulations to suspend (eg libraries and IPR) ... to fully leverage the potential inherent in digital technologies for the public good."Recent…

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech | Knight First Amendment Institute
knightcolumbia.org
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Given the myriad problems posed by social media platforms - content moderation, disinformation, censorship, privacy, anti-trust - this article "proposes an entirely different approach... that enables more free speech, while minimizing ... trolling, hateful speech, and large-scale disinformation efforts... also might help users ... regain cont…

How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices | WIRED
www.wired.com
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Privacy Zuckering... when “you are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to... Facebook... paid a $5 billion fine for making “deceptive claims about consumers’ ability to control the privacy of their personal data.” ... “dark patterns,” ... particularly insidious “when you’re deciding what privac…

Dataminr Helped Police Use Tweets To Surveil BLM Protests
theintercept.com
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LEVERAGING CLOSE TIES to Twitter... Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the [BLM] protests ... with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators... essentially surveillance by U.S. law enforcement entities, contradicting its earlier assurances... siphoning vast amounts of social media data ... converting it into tidy police …

Big Tech’s Big Defector | The New Yorker
www.newyorker.com
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McNamee has mentored many of the people who have transformed Silicon Valley... advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s offer... a billion dollars... encouraged Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg...Ten days before the Presidential election... “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,”... I was expecting them to take it seriously... t…

Boris Johnson made politics awful, then asked people to vote it away | openDemocracy
www.opendemocracy.net
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recent UK election was a quarrel about the character of politics...Labour Party argued that it can be used for good... Conservative Party claimed that politics is bad... promised to... ‘get Brexit done’, so that we can all forget about it ...wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth. Ensure the whole experience is miserable, bewild…

Opinion | It’s Time to Break Up Facebook - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility... Mark’s influence is staggering... his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks... surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challengi…

Principles - For The Web
fortheweb.webfoundation.org
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The web was designed to bring people together and make knowledge freely available. Everyone has a role to play to ensure the web serves humanity. By committing to the following principles, governments, companies and citizens around the world can help protect the open web as a public good and a basic right for everyone.

(6) A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking | Facebook
www.facebook.com

our vision and principles around building a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform... Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally... private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication... an opportunity to build a simpler platform th…

08/03/2019
Confronting a Nightmare for Democracy – David Carroll – Medium
medium.com
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Cambridge Analytica (part of SCL Group Ltd.) constructed a significant data set based on US voter rolls... Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests... the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journal…

Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence? - Scientific American
www.scientificamerican.com
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every Chinese ... ”Citizen Score” will determine under what conditions they may get loans, jobs, or travel visa to other countries. ... individual monitoring would include people’s Internet surfing and the behavior of their social contacts... algorithms know pretty well what we do, what we think and how we feel—possibly even better than our friend…

Public Service Bots Should Support the Open Web
chatbotsmagazine.com
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3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices. 

What happens when AI, Psychology & Big Data drive politics? (Top3ics, February 19)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

If there’s a single Top3ic running through the following stories, it’s probably Artificial Intelligence (AI), but I’m deeply into learning about psychology for the moment, so that’s my starting point.

How Chatbots Will Redefine the Future of App Privacy
chatbotsmagazine.com
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when bot platforms take off, we will be... completing the new shift in data control from the users’ hands to Facebook’s, Google, and Microsoft’s hands... the next big privacy concern... end-to-end encryption between the user and the bot developer... goes against their [platform's] business models

18/02/2017
The Data That Turned the World Upside Down - Motherboard
motherboard.vice.com
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model to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the "Big Five." also known as OCEAN... openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism... their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. ... the problem with this approach was data collection... Then came the Internet. And Facebook... on the b…

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World's Most Secretive Startup
www.wired.com
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But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences... although every one of these environments was fake, the experiences I had in them were genuine... you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.…

Why Do We Expose Ourselves?
theintercept.com
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the first crux of Harcourt’s argument: The expository society exploits, rather than represses, our desires. The second ... government and commercial surveillance infrastructures have wholly merged.... Harcourt’s analysis hinges on desire: We want to participate, we are impelled to do so, and we like it. But it seems to me we are as much compelled …

Good intro on social logins and the end of the anonymous web
qz.com
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"The notion that the world outside its homepage remains anonymous is increasingly untrue. Millions of internet users voluntarily give Facebook, Google, and others access to their movements across the web and on mobile when they use “social log in,” or the ability to sign in to a website using credentials from the big identity providers.... as mob…

Atlas. Shrug?
www.nytimes.com
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One thing I'm not hearing is whether website owners will be able to use Atlas data to customise their user experience. "Atlas will allow marketers to tap its detailed knowledge of its users to direct ads to those people on thousands of other websites and mobile apps.... Facebook has deep, deep data on its users. You can slice and dice markets, l…

Facebook as Bully
medium.com
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"Facebook executives met with a group of drag queens from San Francisco to discuss the social network’s infamous “real names” policy... Facebook apparently had no intention of negotiating because the policy was crafted for the sale of targeted ads not for the safety of human beings with complex identities.... Facebook appears like a school bully…

28/09/2014
Ello Is There Anybody Out There
valleywag.gawker.com

"But for those searching for what's next, Ello is not it. There have been a few versions of this virtuous social network before—from Diaspora (forgotten), App.net (oof), and even Path (oy) ... [Diaspora] was intended less as an imitation of Facebook than as an escape route from it... New York magazine wrote almost four years ago to the day."

Everything We Know About Facebook's Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com
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"We’re tracking the ethical, legal, and philosophical response to this Facebook experiment here. "

02/07/2014
Webs of flesh, spun over saleable data
www.zdnet.com
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Apparently we are all now "little more than webs of flesh spun over packages of saleable data", according to a searing indictment of Google's anti-anonymity policy specifically. This is required reading for anyone interested in a balanced view of anonymity, privacy and public discourse: "The Google+ so-called "real name" policy can best be descr…

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