Posts tagged data collection

Confronting a Nightmare for Democracy

Medium, politics, data collection, privacy, data protection, EU, USA, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Google, 2017

What we fear is a future in which potent personal data is combined with increasingly sophisticated technology to produce and deliver unaccountable personalized media and messages at a national scale. Combined with data-driven emerging media technologies, it is clear that the use of behavioral data to nudge voters with propaganda-as-a-service is set to explode. Imagine being able to synthesize a politician saying anything you type and then upload the highly realistic video to Facebook with a fake CNN chyron banner. Expect the early versions of these tools available before 2020. At the core of this is data privacy, or as they more meaningfully describe it in Europe, data protection. Unfortunately, the United States is headed in a dangerous direction on this issue. President Trump’s FCC and the Republican party radically deregulated our ISP’s ability to sell data monetization on paying customer data. Anticipate this administration further eroding privacy protections, as it confuses the public interest for the interests of business, despite being the only issue that about 95% of voters agree on, across every partisan and demographic segment according to HuffPo/YouGov. We propose three ideas to address these issues, which are crucial to preserving American democracy.

via https://medium.com/@profcarroll/confronting-a-nightmare-for-democracy–5333181ca675

“THE VULTURES OF Britain’s International Centre for Birds of Prey don’t know it, but they’re dupes. Every day, the giant birds…

vultures, augmented ecology, data collection

“THE VULTURES OF Britain’s International Centre for Birds of Prey don’t know it, but they’re dupes. Every day, the giant birds carefully tend to their eggs, rotating them periodically so they incubate just right. But…take a closer look at that nest. Not every egg in there is made of calcium carbonate, and they don’t always contain baby birds.No, at this conservation center, some of those eggs are actually 3-D printed. And they’re packed with a bounty that may be more precious to the vultures than an actual embryo: sensors.”

via http://www.wired.com/2016/04/future-wildlife-conservation-electronic-vulture-egg/