Fighting against tracking, synthetic media, and bot ennui
It’s rare that we can tell stories by threading this newsletter together, but this week, we found several signals and their direct reflections at the same time. Read on to see how outbreaks in China led to added privacy, how teens are melding their online identities, and what drones would do if you gave them the option.
— Matt & Alexis
1: That’s one way around a subpoena
In December, The New York Times began publishing pieces in its Opinion page investigation “One Nation Tracked”. The investigation, based on millions of mobile phone locations, revealed the travels of a Secret Service agent on the President’s detail. It quickly became obvious that such a database could be used by anyone with enough money for all kinds of purposes.
It should come as no surprise, then, that The Wall Street Journal has reported that the immigration enforcement divisions under the Department of Homeland Security have acquired such a database from a commercial data broker to assist in tracking migrants at the Mexican border.
It’s important to note that a 2018 Supreme Court case defined location data as a specially-protected class of information, requiring strict court supervision over its collection and use when it’s requested from cell carriers. In this situation, the government has just purchased commercially-available data, circumventing any courts or warrants.
Federal Agencies Use Cellphone Location Data for Immigration Enforcement
The Trump administration has been using a database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones to monitor the Mexican border and make immigration arrests, according to people familiar with the matter.
2: An increasingly political space: the bottom half of your face
In the wake of the coronavirus, face masks are now mandatory in at least two Chinese provinces. However, an unintended consequence of the decree is that the masks interfere with face recognition technology. This may seem like a minor inconvenience if you’re just thinking about unlocking your phone, but facial recognition is deeply embedded in the fabric of Chinese life. It’s used for everything from tracking student attendance (and engagement) in schools to ordering food, and even in restrooms (!!). Furthermore, it’s an intrinsic part of the Chinese state surveillance system.
Ironically, the masks now being mandated by the Chinese government were recently being banned in Hong Kong because protestors were using them to obfuscate their faces from tracking by the police. When combined with a recent gun rights rally in Virginia where the only arrest was of a counter-protester for covering her face (see the photos in that story for countless examples of others who weren’t arrested) it becomes clear that the right to privacy may include a right to mask one’s face in public, and who gets to do that will be inconsistently defined and enforced depending on the circumstances.
Frustration grows in China as face masks compromise facial recognition
Facial recognition technology is essential to daily life in China, on a scale beyond any other nation.
3: Like that party in The Good Place
What would recommendations look like if they were based on your behavior, but also on the behavior of a dozen other people who weren’t anything like you? They’d be pretty disparate, as some teens who share an Instagram account recently discovered.
It’s not just ad tech tracking they’re concerned with, however. Increasingly, college admissions departments and employers are reviewing applicants’ social media presences. By using a combined account with no single identity, these students have found a way to express themselves without leaving a lasting imprint on their names. “It’s an identity people can follow, but we didn’t want it to be our true identity that people can find in real life,“ said one high school student.
We applaud the ingenuity of these high schoolers, but to be honest, it would be better for all of us if we had more fluid identities online with less permanent histories.
Teens have figured out how to mess with Instagram's tracking algorithm
Teenagers are using group accounts to flood Instagram with random user data that can’t be tied to a single person.
4: Navigating the fake, the deceptive, and the harmful
For the second time, Twitter has followed a weak policy statement from Facebook with a far stronger one of its own. This time, after Facebook’s “ban” on deepfakes, Twitter announced a more nuanced approach to what it calls “synthetic and manipulated media”. Recognizing that not every fake is meant to deceive, Twitter announced a three-part policy that will allow some fakes to run without any interference, others to be distributed with a small notice, and still others to be removed outright.
While it’s impossible to know if this policy will be effective in slowing the spread of misinformation, this approach does take into account the possible creative and expressive uses of “synthetic media” while acknowledging the potential harm. Automated accounts have long been one of the joys of using Twitter, so we appreciate that Twitter continues to focus on intent and impact in its enforcement actions, and not on the mechanisms themselves.
Building rules in public: Our approach to synthetic & manipulated media
A policy statement hosted on Twitter’s blog.
5: It’s not great, but it’s better than Vogon
A group of Silicon Valley folk recently self-published a short book called “Transformer Poetry”, built using a GAN-2 based AI that was first trained on Reddit posts (just good ones, though, with at least 3 net upvotes). They then seeded the network with the first few lines of famous poems, and saw what resulted.
In most cases the bots kept to the basic form of the seed phrases, but completely missed the narrative, rhyme scheme, and other key elements. They did, however, create some works that were worth analyzing, and drove to surprising conclusions given the originals to compare to. And let’s face it: very few humans could write Frost better than Frost, so we should give the bots some credit.
While it’s fun to point out the failings of AI routines, in this case it’s also compelling to consider what “creativity” means in a system that is entirely governed by knowable rules, and what that may teach us about our own capacity for imagination.
The Machines Are Coming, and They Write Really Bad Poetry
If and when the machines take over, it won’t be as we dreamt it. It won’t be a cold, homicidal smart speaker, or an albino android, or living tissue over a
6: The purpose-driven drone
If you haven’t encountered Sarah Gailey’s writing before, this short piece of speculative fiction is a lovely introduction. It takes place in an authoritarian future, where a sentient surveillance drone is captured by a renegade agricultural commune. The community has established a new kind of relationship between drones and humans — and the drone is confronted with a life-altering choice. Enough said, don’t want to spoil it!
In a near future, a surveillance drone serving an authoritarian state is captured—and offered a new lease on sentience.
One thing with a Little Red Wagon
Artist Simon Weckert put 90 Android phones in a Radio Flyer and walked around mostly empty streets in Berlin, creating virtual traffic jams on Google Maps, and redirecting traffic accordingly. A simple hack, but also a statement on how much space — both physical and mental — we give to cars in our urban spaces.
Google Maps Hacks by Simon Weckert
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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