Tag: internet

Digital Privacy: Smart Technology and the Naive Consumer

By Leonel Mata

Recent reports concerning the extent to which companies, such as Facebook, have been acquiring and disseminating information of individuals across the world have highlighted the fact that privacy issues do not only concern how governments make use of personal information, but how private companies have been making use of it as well. The pervasiveness of technology, combined with its necessity in the modern world, has made issue of convenience versus protection an all-important debate.

To be a part of the modern world one must be connected to it constantly. The main way of achieving this is through the internet, and the main way the internet is accessed is through our cellphones. Long gone are the days when you could easily get by using physical mail and a landline telephone. While the rise of smartphones has made our lives easier, creating a quick and easy way to access information and to contact others almost instantaneously, it has also become a way to gather information on the individual in ways that were impossible before. As technology has advanced so too has the amount of information that is being acquired by both private and government entities. Despite this rapid scaling of access to personal information, the law has been slow to react and protect the individual in an adequate manner.

In China, one can see how advancements in technology have provided infinite gold-mines of information. China’s government has taken a keen interest in controlling how social media works on popular platforms, such as WeChat, Baidu Tieba, and Sina Weibo, out of a belief that information being disseminated on these platforms can disrupt social order and lead to the violation of laws.

China has also enacted a policy known as “real-name registration” where users must register their personal information with the necessary provider before they can do things like post comments on forums or articles. China’s step toward erasing anonymity is done under the guise of making the community safer and holding individual’s accountable for their statements and actions. However, it also has the effect of dissuading individuals from stating contrary views to those in charge. Naturally, this creates an additional barrier for individuals’ who seek to advocate for change, but it also has a chilling effect on the ability for a community to be able to discuss issues freely and openly without fear of retribution.

Out of a desire to access a larger market, companies regularly acquiesce to rules and regulations imposed by countries such as China. While it is true that Google has rejected some of China’s more restrictive and invasive policies, they have announced that they would be returning to China. Even without American companies such as Google, local companies such as Baidu have grown tremendously and have had no issue agreeing to the terms stipulated by the Chinese government.

Often overlooked is the fact that concern for one’s privacy is not merely an issue for those who live or visit countries such as China. Governments and companies alike in western democracies have increasingly made use of the pervasiveness of technology in order to acquire as much information as they can on each individual. In the United States, people have seen the rise of the National Security Agency and its ability to invade the privacy of individual’s when the government can justify that it is necessary. However, what is more alarming is the increase in the acquisition of personal information by private companies, such as Facebook, or internet service providers, such as Comcast.

In our daily lives we are regularly giving away bits and pieces of our privacy. When we use Fitbit, the company is given access to where and when you have been somewhere. Most shocking to the public has been the realization that when we participate in social media, such as Facebook, we give away an enormous amount of data that then has the potential to be misused and abused by companies.. These issues are not new ones, in fact, Facebook has been involved in privacy violations before, but has been able to come out of each one relatively unscathed because, when it comes to technology, the public prefers convenience.

While privacy advocates have been up in arms regarding the increasingly invasive nature of governments and companies across the globe, the public has been less concerned. Traditionally, when dealing with privacy our protections were written taking into account physical invasions into our space as well as physical collecting of our data. However, the world has changed significantly since these protections were written. Nowadays, an invasion of privacy can occur out of sight and out of mind. This has made the public much more accepting of giving away their privacy because it does not noticeably affect them. Recently, thanks to scandals surrounding companies such as Cambridge Analytica and Grindr, people have become more concerned regarding the extent to which their data is being used. It is unclear as to whether this will be enough to finally force governments to act to properly protect the rights of the individual against blatant misuses of their personal information.

It is true that certain companies have taken a number of steps to better safeguard the personal information of their customers, often to the government’s annoyance, but even these companies have proven to be susceptible to the demands of the government if there is a significant financial incentive to do so. This demonstrates that it cannot be left to companies to self-regulate how they protect the data of individuals. Thus, in order to safeguard our rights, governments must act to pass legislation imposing harsher personal privacy regulations and harsher penalties for those who do not comply with these regulations. The EU has done just this when it passed the General Data Protection Regulation back in 2016. Unsurprisingly, there has already been pushback from companies about enacting the EU requirements globally.

As for governments, such as China, who are more frequently the abuser rather than the protector of rights, the public should engage not only domestically, but at an international level  in order to create change in how abusive governments are treating their citizens’ right to privacy. Even for government’s that are more receptive to public criticism, one must be vigilant as they continue to squeeze away at one’s privacy. If action is not taken at the local, national, and international levels, then the right to privacy will soon be a thing of the past as individuals are taken advantage of by both public and private entities.

Leonel Mata is a third-year law student at The University of Texas School of Law. He is a member of the 2017-2018 Working Paper Series Committee, Submissions Editor of the Texas Journal of International Law, and a member of the Jessup International Moot Court team.

3 Reasons Why We Need Critical Feminist Theory More Than Ever in the Age of Big Data

by Inga Helgudóttir Ingulfsen

8 NOV 2017

This post is a follow-up to Helgudóttir Ingulfsen’s paper “#RefugeesNotWelcome: Making Gendered Sense of Transnational Asylum Politics on Twitter”, which was published in the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series in 2016 (available here). That paper was also the winner of the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2016), and was responded to by Courtney McGinn and Reina Wehbi in the piece “Are Refugees Really Not Welcome?“

In the age of Big Data­­—when Silicon Valley “tech bros” are busy convincing us of the merits of machine learning, and the US president pretends to govern while flirting with his white supremacists followers on Twitter—I make the case for why we need critical feminist scholarship now more than ever.

  1. Gender is at the Core of Xenophobic and Nationalistic Discourses

In December 2015, I was in my third semester of graduate school at New York University. Concerned about the rising tide of xenophobia (little did I know how much worse it would get), I wanted to look at online discourses about immigration and was interested in applying a feminist lens to the research. I typed #Refugees and #RefugeesNotWelcome in the search bar on Twitter and what I discovered was so dense with explicit sexist and misogynistic imagery and language that a few months later it amounted to a 120 page thesis.

My dataset revealed conversations littered with images of young white women covered in blood – supposed European victims of rape perpetrated by male immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Twitter users from the US, Europe, and Japan alike portrayed the flow of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Europe as a carefully calculated Muslim invasion of Europe, threatening to destroy Western civilization. The Twitter users employed powerful gendered language and imagery to construct a binary opposition between ‘Us’ – the White, Western, Enlightened community – and ‘Them’ – refugees, particularly Muslim refugees, construed as threats to the racial and cultural preservation and physical safety of the Western community.

Ironically, Enlightenment ideas – civil and political rights, feminism, freedom of speech – were used to justify fundamentally illiberal immigration and integration policies. The appropriation of feminist ideas was a prevalent strategy among the Twitter users I studied. These strategies are fraught with contradictions. The Twitter users call for the protection of both Western and Muslim women against the supposed violent nature of Muslim men, while consistently attacking what they see as hypocritical liberal and multicultural feminists, framed as naïve traitors of the Enlightened White community. The below meme from my dataset is one example of this strategy, accompanied by the following tweet: “RT@……….: The perks of multiculturalism #refugeesnotwelcome”.

(Image 8: Dataset 2 tweet 120)

  1. Feminist Research as a Tool to Understand and Combat Xenophobia

The realization that gender is instrumentalized in nationalistic and xenophpobic narratives is not new. Feminist scholars like Cynthia Enloe and Nira Yuval-Davis have been arguing as much since the 1980s. However, feminist studies of gender and nationalism have tended to be primarily based on interpretation of elite discourses or political statements. The vast amount of data produced by the billions of social media users around the world represents a new opportunity to develop more rigorous and empirically driven feminist studies of xenophobia. Social media are not just accessible pools of data that can be sampled for quantitative studies of social interactions; they are just as interesting for the richness and detail of the data produced by their users. Images, memes, and videos are combined with text commentary, providing detailed insight into how an individual user constructs a narrative and the types of visual and rhetorical tools employed to support that narrative. Knowing whether hashtags like #RefugeesNotWelomce, #Rapefugees or #WhiteGenocide are trending is not as valuable as understanding how each user justifies a narrative that frames male Muslim refugees as violent or racially inferior. If we want to combat xenophobia we have to understand what makes xenophobic narratives powerful and why they resonate with particular groups of people. Rather than counting hashtag use and “likes,” we need to delve into the stories behind the hashtags. Feminist discourse analysis is a powerful tool to do just that because gender binaries are key organizing principles behind these stories.

  1. Feminist Scrutiny of Algorithms: Exposing Patriarchal Bias in the Big Data Universe

My study, published in 2016, highlights why we should be careful to mine Facebook and Twitter to study public sentiment: social media users differ from the general population in multiple ways, and the algorithms that structure information on social media are built to generate profit rather than organic conversations and interactions. Returning to the topic now, I see that my study failed to explore in detail a critical component of algorithmic bias – the ways in which gender and race biases are themselves integral to the structure of online information and interactions. Scientists have revealed how “machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use.” The data that is used to train algorithms is after all generated by humans. One study found algorithms have adopted implicit biases commonly detected in psychology experiments: “[t]he words “female” and “woman” were more closely associated with arts and humanities occupations and with the home, while “male” and “man” were closer to math and engineering professions.” How might for example, Twitter’s algorithms have learned these types of implicit gender biases and how could those in turn be helping to make certain (gendered and racialized) content more prominent?

Phrases like artificial intelligence, Big Data, and machine learning give off a false aura of objectivity that can lead to fatal misrepresentations and uses of the data generated by social media users. I have witnessed first-hand how policy-makers can be seduced by Big Data’s false promise of objectivity. Participating in a meeting on Big Data and evaluation hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation and attended by UN evaluation officers and data scientists, algorithmic bias was not adequately addressed and Twitter was presented as a promising source of information on public sentiment. UN Global Pulse – the UN’s Big Data Initiative – was the main proponent, and several of their projects make use of social media data for perception studies. Presenting my findings to the data and research team at UN Women, I warned of the algorithmic biases in social media data and argued for extreme caution in using Twitter data to track public sentiment or perceptions on gender.

Feminist scholars would make ideal methodological foot soldiers in the battle to discount false narratives of Big Data objectivity, as feminist epistemology is inherently critical and skeptical of any tradition that lays claim to objective truth. We need more strong feminist voices like Soraya Chemaly to counter the corporate spin of Silicon Valley “tech bros.” We should ramp up investments in initiatives like the Women’s Media Center’s Speech project and the Algorithmic Justice League to begin to construct a more just and inclusive internet.

Inga H. Ingulfsen is a Research Analyst in Global Partnerships, at Foundation Center and graduated from NYU’s Center for Global Affairs in May 2016 with an MS in Global Affairs, specializing in gender, immigration and peacebuilding.