Hiding in plain sight, and knowing where everything is
In this issue, we wrestle with a basic question: who gets to decide what people know about you, and what they can do with that information? Whether your movements in your neighborhood, your comments on social platforms, or your reading habits, technologists and designers are influencing you in ways both subtle and obvious. Also, read to the end for some pro-democracy hair-braiding tips.
– Alexis & Matt
1: Mesh networks to help find anything and anyone
In a pair of product announcements over the last few weeks, both Amazon and Apple have released new technologies that could extend both network connectivity and location surveillance.
Apple’s new U1 chip, which is in its iPhone 11 line, uses ultra-wideband networking protocols to find other devices directionally. For example, in the new AirDrop, you can choose who to share with simply by pointing your phone toward or away from other phones nearby. Amazon, on the other hand, quietly introduced Sidewalk, a networking protocol designed to extend networks beyond the confines of your home to low-power devices up to a mile away. Sidewalk will soon be available in Amazon’s Ring Fetch pet monitoring solutions, but may also be present in Ring Light and other home surveillance products.
These technologies, when taken together, promise a future where any connected object can be located, even extremely low-power ones like Tile. Fine-grained direction and location would be of huge benefit to AR applications, increasing the ability to interact with virtual objects in real space with verisimilitude, and the technology could support lots of other compelling applications. On the other hand, when companies have the ability to do fine-grained tracking of objects’ (or people’s) locations, it’s easy to imagine highly invasive uses for surveillance as well. Since these networks are being developed quietly and embedded in popular personal devices like iPhone and Alexa, it’s possible those futures might arrive without much discussion or intentional consent.
Amazon and Apple are quietly building rival networks that know where everything is
Amazon’s new Sidewalk protocol and Apple’s experiments with ultra-wideband signal a new battleground that gets Amazon out of the house and Apple inside it.
2: Designing for compliments
Years ago, Alexis saw a talk by an early designer at Tumblr who talked about the rationale behind Tumblr’s reaction system. They had intentionally designed it so that the only reaction you could attach to a post on Tumblr was a like / heart. The goal was that you shouldn’t be able to pollute someone else’s Tumblr with your negativity. If you wanted to say something negative, you had to “reblog” the post and put it on your own Tumblr, thereby only polluting your own space.
Of course, that’s not how most social media has evolved — on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, you can attach both positive and negative reactions to someone else’s posts. Frank Chimero has written a thoughtful piece about the impact that the design of those reactions has on their impact. Specifically, since positive reactions are built in as a simple, undifferentiated feature (a heart is a heart is a heart), they take up less visual and mental space than negative reactions. And because of the relative specificity of negative reactions, “one heckler with incisive comments can block out the generalized applause of many more people”. So, he posits the question of how we can encourage more specific and visible positive feedback on social platforms:
“A like can’t go anywhere, but a compliment can go a long way. Passive positivity isn’t enough; active positivity is needed to counterbalance whatever sort of collective conversations and attention we point at social media.”
A Like Can’t Go Anywhere, But a Compliment Can Go a Long Way
This is a blog post about how social networks can structurally inspire negativity by making positivity a feature.
3: Public (social) media?
Amidst the continuing discourse about the problems of social media platforms, Mark Coatney wrote an op-ed in The New York Times arguing for a “PBS for social media” — a platform that would be explicitly not-for-profit and would “answer only to its leaders and to the public, not to investors, shareholders or advertisers.” This points squarely at profit motives, specifically advertising-driven profit motives, as the fundamental reason why social media platforms often fail to serve the public good.
The deeper issue here is what we do when capitalism is fundamentally at odds with society. Providing a publicly-funded option could certainly provide an alternative, but doesn’t really solve the underlying problem. It seems like a false dichotomy to suggest public social media as an alternative to regulating private companies. Rather we likely need both: social media platforms that have a public mandate at heart and regulations for profit-driven platforms that ensure they don’t exploit people in the name of monetization.
We Need a PBS for Social Media
Instead of breaking up Facebook, America should create a public alternative.
4: Productizing dark patterns
The idea of microtargeting ads to a single person in order to change their opinion is not a new one. There is, however, a service that makes such a transaction far simpler than you may have realized.
For the low price of $49, The Spinner will target a specific person you choose with 180 impressions of native advertising stories over the course of three months. For those unfamiliar with the term “native advertising”, The Spinner describes it as follows: “The targeted person gets repetitively exposed to hundreds of items which are placed and disguised as editorial content.”
Topics they offer include convincing your spouse to settle your divorce out of court, educating your loved ones on the benefits of marijuana use, teaching your driving-age kids how to avoid accidents, and showing your wife the importance of initiating sex. All you have to do is convince your “target” to click a link, which will place a cookie in their browser and power the native ad retargeting.
Ultimately, The Spinner isn’t doing anything that other brands online are doing: using retargeting cookies to expose readers to hundreds of messages that they hope will convince their target to take a desired action, whether that’s buy a pair of shoes or support a particular political candidate. The main difference with The Spinner is simply that all the artifice is stripped away, revealing a system that is designed to change your mind.
The Spinner* is a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.
5: Africa's burgeoning AI industry
Many of the most prominent conferences on AI and machine learning have been designed in ways that end up excluding researchers working outside of the Western hemisphere. These conferences are often prohibitive in terms of distance, cost, or visas for many researchers. In response to this situation, African AI academics started their own conference in 2017, called Deep Learning Indaba. It has become an important space for African researchers not only to meet and discuss research, but also to build a pan-African tech community that is shaped around the specific cultural, geographic, and infrastructural issues that matter to Africans. The organizers and participants want to build African AI in a way that is distinct from the dominant approaches of Silicon Valley and speaks to their needs.
“All this foreign investment and data collection raises red flags on a continent scarred by exploitation. [PhD candidate Abeba Birhane argues] ‘This discourse of ‘mining’ people for data is reminiscent of the colonizer attitude that declares humans as raw material free for the taking.’”
Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley
Deep Learning Indaba has become connective tissue for the African A.I. community — not only the space for the community to meet, but a part of the community itself.
6: Is encrypted DNS an antitrust issue?
Short answer: No.
Still short answer: It depends on who you ask, and what their business model is.
Antitrust investigators in the US House of Representatives are reportedly asking Google questions about its DNS-over-HTTPS plans for the Google Chrome browser. Functionally, this protocol would encrypt your DNS lookup requests (the part of using a browser that translates ethicalfutureslab.com into an IP address) so that only you and your DNS provider would know what your request contained.
At this point you may be thinking “wait, that implies someone else currently sees my DNS requests, doesn’t it?” And yes, as it turns out, many service providers like your cable or telephone company use this data to understand your browsing profile, and in some cases, even build recommendations or ad products on top of it.
Critics say that Google will route DNS requests to its own servers, thus capturing all that browsing information for itself without sharing it with anyone else. Google says it has “no plans to centralize or change people’s DNS providers to Google by default”, and has been getting support from Mozilla and others who focus on user privacy, allies that Google typically wouldn’t attract. Given that Google is already being investigated by fifty states and territories and the US Department of Justice for its advertising practices, it’s likely that the issue of DNS data protection will not be a clear cut one.
House investigators scrutinizing Google's DNS encryption plans
Antitrust investigators are looking into Google’s plans to add DNS over HTTPS to its Chrome browser.
One subversive thing: hacking Hong Kong anti-mask rules
This past week, Hong Kong enacted a ban on wearing face masks in an attempt to crack down on the months-long pro-democracy protests. Protestors have work face masks for practical reasons, like protection from tear gas, as well as to protect their anonymity, allowing them to protest with less fear of reprisal. In reaction to the new ban, protestors have been getting creative, finding ways to cover their faces without technically “wearing a mask”. Below is one particularly novel approach, using hair braiding techniques to effectively create a full face mask. Check out the tutorial video here.
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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