Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle

on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful — and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

Are we on China's All-Seeing Surveillance path?

Just a fascist surveillance capitalism version of the autocratic surveillance communism?

A crude version of such a system is already in operation in China’s northwestern territory of Xinjiang, where more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs have been imprisoned, the largest internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the fall of the Third Reich. Once Xi perfects this system in Xinjiang, no technological limitations will prevent him from extending AI surveillance across China. He could also export it beyond the country’s borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats.

A New York City police officer was charged Monday with spying on Tibetan immigrants in the United States as an “intelligence asset” for the Chinese government.

Angwang’s job was to “locate potential intelligence sources” and “identify potential threats to the PRC in the New York metropolitan area,” court papers say. He also was expected to provide consulate officials “access to senior NYPD officials through invitations to official NYPD events,” they add.

“Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” Mark Zuckerberg told the Harvard Crimson way back in 2003

It’s been almost six years since an NSA whistleblower exposed the reach of government surveillance and a year since a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower unveiled the corporate side of the surveillance coin, and the risks of something as simple as an online quiz. But the public has been hearing and sounding alarms about digital privacy for an eternity. “Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” Mark Zuckerberg told the Harvard Crimson way back in 2003, after his Hot or Not-esque Facemash website, built from photos he scraped in bulk from dormitories’ online “face books,” caused a campus uproar.

Zuck: They "trust me"
 Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
 Zuck: Just ask.
 Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
 [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?


Zuck: People just submitted it.


Zuck: I don't know why.


Zuck: They "trust me"


Zuck: Dumb fucks.

privacy is alive, it’s just not evenly distributed.

In the face of all the data abuse, many of us have, quite reasonably, thrown up our hands. Some have even parroted Zuckerberg and the other big tech executives who have heralded the end of privacy. But privacy didn’t die. It didn’t go away. It’s just been beaten up, sold, obscured, diffused unevenly across society. To mutate William Gibson’s quote about the future and its unevenness and inequalities, privacy is alive, it’s just not evenly distributed.

As it gets more detailed and more correlated, increasingly, our data is us.

“Privacy”is about the data about us that’s harvested, bought, sold, and traded by an obscure army of data brokers without our knowledge, feeding marketers, landlords, employers, immigration officials, insurance companies, debt collectors, as well as stalkers and who knows who else. It’s the body camera or the sports arena or the social network capturing your face for who knows what kind of analysis. Don’t think of personal data as just “data.” As it gets more detailed and more correlated, increasingly, our data is us.

That kind of influence isn’t just the promise of shadowy political consultants or state-run misinformation campaigns, but the premise of modern-day digital advertising.

Privacy harms are dark ads bought with dark money and the 
micro-targeting of voters by overseas propagandists or domestic political campaigns. That kind of influence isn’t just the promise of shadowy political consultants or state-run misinformation campaigns, but the premise of modern-day digital advertising. (Facebook’s research division hired one of the psychology researchers behind Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping Facebook quiz.) “Privacy” isn’t just privacy, but fairness, security, freedom, justice, free speech, and free thought.

India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations

The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

A manager on Strategic Response mused to myself that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator

“With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time,” she wrote, according to BuzzFeed. “A manager on Strategic Response mused to myself that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator ― he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me.”

the workplace has turned into a digital panopticon.

Critics note that opting out of surveillance today is as difficult as opting out of “electricity, or cooked foods,” and the workplace has turned into a digital panopticon. Between 2015 and 2018, 50% of 239 companies surveyed used some form of employee surveillance, according to a 2019 survey by Gartner. This number was expected to increase to 80% in 2020. Corporate practices have gotten so invasive that one of America’s leading security experts, Bruce Schneier, stated that employers are “the most dangerous power that has us under surveillance.”

In 1750, wealthy slave owners in Jamaica and Barbados would meticulously track and manage enslaved workers in order to maximize their productive output.

What business schools today call “scientific management” actually has its very roots in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. ...High-tech corporate monitoring of workers today undoubtedly stems from this legacy of meticulous and detailed tracking of enslaved workers in order to extract the most profit from them, and to quell potential rebellion and collective action.

the racial origins and evolutions of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon

In her book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown describes the racial origins and evolutions of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, an institution of social control and surveillance where individuals are watched without ever knowing whether they are being watched or where the watcher is located. Bentham envisioned it while traveling aboard a ship with “18 young Negresses” who’d been enslaved and held “under the hatches.”

newly built or expanded prisons, or sent to walled factory compounds for coerced labor assignments.”

Australian Strategic Policy Institute researcher Nathan Ruser wrote in the report released late Thursday: “Available evidence suggests that many extrajudicial detainees in Xinjiang’s vast ‘re-education’ network are now being formally charged and locked up in higher security facilities, including newly built or expanded prisons, or sent to walled factory compounds for coerced labor assignments.”

"Xi also wants to use AI’s awesome analytical powers to push China to the cutting edge of surveillance."

He wants to build an all-seeing digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time.

Amazon patented a wristband that “can precisely track where warehouse employees are placing their hands and use vibrations to nudge them in a different direction.”

Amazon has vast ambitions to expand its surveillance and control over its workers. Amazon patented a wristband that “can precisely track where warehouse employees are placing their hands and use vibrations to nudge them in a different direction.” The patent states that “ultrasonic tracking of a worker’s hands may be used to monitor performance of assigned tasks.”

"China’s government has a history of using major historical events to introduce and embed surveillance measures."

In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Chinese security services achieved a new level of control over the country’s internet. During China’s coronavirus outbreak, Xi’s government leaned hard on private companies in possession of sensitive personal data. Any emergency data-sharing arrangements made behind closed doors during the pandemic could become permanent.

Fearing coronavirus, a Michigan college is tracking its students with a flawed app

If a student leaves campus without permission, the app will alert the school, and the student’s ID card will be locked and access to campus buildings will be revoked, according to an email to students, seen by TechCrunch.

It could remotely commandeer “smart locks” in public or private spaces, to confine her until security forces arrived.

If her risk factor fluctuated upward—whether due to some suspicious pattern in her movements, her social associations, her insufficient attention to a propaganda-consumption app, or some correlation known only to the AI—a purely automated system could limit her movement. It could prevent her from purchasing plane or train tickets. It could disallow passage through checkpoints. It could remotely commandeer “smart locks” in public or private spaces, to confine her until security forces arrived.

Every employer who screens her application with the agency now sees that she’s been profiled as a “depressed unreliable.”

Unbeknownst to her—because she didn’t read the fine print—some data from the research study, along with her liquor purchase history, has made it to one of the two employment agencies that have come to dominate the market. Every employer who screens her application with the agency now sees that she’s been profiled as a “depressed unreliable.” No wonder she can’t get work. But even if she could discover that she’s been profiled in this way, what recourse does she have?

Fearing coronavirus, a Michigan college is tracking its students with a flawed app

Aura was developed by Nucleus Careers in the months after the pandemic began. Nucleus Careers is a Pennsylvania-based recruiting firm founded in 2020, with no apparent history or experience in building or developing healthcare apps

Fearing coronavirus, a Michigan college is tracking its students with a flawed app

“The keys were practically ‘full access’,” Gilda told TechCrunch. She said the keys — since changed — gave her access to the app’s databases and cloud storage in which she found patient data, including COVID-19 test results with names, addresses and dates of birth.

Amazon is first and foremost a surveillance company

But make no mistake about it — Amazon is first and foremost a surveillance company. Data collection is the core of its business model, no matter what the business line. Amazon surveils consumers, competitors, citizens, and immigrants, and it invasively and ubiquitously surveils its employees.

Amazon has for years had a sophisticated, secret program and team to spy on its workers

Tuesday, after news that Amazon was hiring an intelligence analyst to identify labor organizers went viral, the company said the job listing was made “in error.” But internal documents, reports, and an online tool left on the open internet and viewed by Motherboard shows that Amazon has for years had a sophisticated, secret program and team to spy on its workers in closed Facebook groups.

"China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people."

In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens.

They eat meals with the family, and some “big brothers” sleep in the same bed as the wives of detained Uighur men.

Uighurs who were spared the camps now make up the most intensely surveilled population on Earth. Not all of the surveillance is digital. The Chinese government has moved thousands of Han Chinese “big brothers and sisters” into homes in Xinjiang’s ancient Silk Road cities, to monitor Uighurs’ forced assimilation to mainstream Chinese culture.

Such measures have reduced the birthrate in some regions of Xinjiang more than 60 percent in three years.

Uighur women are also made to endure pregnancy checks. Some are forced to have abortions, or get an IUD inserted. Others are sterilized by the state. Police are known to rip unauthorized children away from their parents, who are then detained.

Amazon delivery drivers had been involved in more than 60 crashes that led to serious injuries, including at least 13 deaths, between 2015 and 2019.

Amazon’s surveillance is also used to enforce the corporation’s rigorous employee performance standards outside the physical premises of its warehouses. Delivery drivers often speed to meet Amazon’s rigorous delivery demands, harming both drivers and bystanders. Investigations conducted by ProPublica and BuzzFeed discovered that Amazon delivery drivers had been involved in more than 60 crashes that led to serious injuries, including at least 13 deaths, between 2015 and 2019.

Apparel industry profits from forced Uyghur labor

Abercrombie & Fitch

adidas

Amazon

Badger Sport (Founder Sport Group)

C&A (Cofra Holding AG)

Calvin Klein (PVH)

Carter’s

Cerruti 1881 (Trinity Limited)

Costco

Cotton On

Apparel industry profits from forced Uyghur labor

Dangerfield (Factory X Pty Ltd)

Esprit (Esprit Holdings Ltd.)

Fila (FILA KOREA Ltd)

Gap

H&M

Hart Schaffner Marx (Authentic Brands Group)

Ikea (Inter IKEA Systems B.V.)

Jack & Jones (Bestseller)

Jeanswest (Harbour Guidance Pty Ltd)

L.L.Bean

Apparel industry profits from forced Uyghur labor

Lacoste (Maus Freres)

Li-Ning

Marks & Spencer

Mayor

Muji (Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd.)

Nike

Patagonia

Polo Ralph Lauren (Ralph Lauren Corporation)

Puma

Skechers

Apparel industry profits from forced Uyghur labor

Summit Resource International (Caterpillar)

Target Australia (Wesfarmers)

Tommy Hilfiger (PVH)

Uniqlo (Fast Retailing)

Victoria’s Secret (L Brands)

Woolworths (Woolworth Corporation, LLC.)

Zara (Inditex)

Zegna

82 companies profiting from forced Uyghur labor

Abercrombie & Fitch, Acer, Adidas, Alstom, Amazon, Apple, ASUS, BAIC Motor, BMW, Bombardier, Bosch, BYD, Calvin Klein, Candy, Carter’s, Cerruti 1881, Changan Automobile, Cisco, CRRC, Dell, Electrolux, Fila, Founder Group, GAC Group (automobiles), Gap, Geely Auto, General Motors, Google, Goertek, H&M, Haier, Hart Schaffner Marx, Hisense, Hitachi, HP, HTC, Huawei, iFlyTek, Jack & Jones, Jaguar, Japan Display Inc., L.L.Bean, Lacoste, Land Rover, Lenovo, LG, Li-Ning, Marks & Spencer, Mayor, Meizu, Mercedes-Benz, MG, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Mitsumi, Nike, Nintendo, Nokia, Oculus, Oppo, Panasonic, Polo Ralph Lauren, Puma, Roewe, SAIC Motor, Samsung, SGMW, Sharp, Siemens, Skechers, Sony, TDK, Tommy Hilfiger, Toshiba, Tsinghua Tongfang, Uniqlo, Victoria’s Secret, Vivo, Volkswagen, Xiaomi, Zara, Zegna, ZTE. Some brands are linked with multiple factories.

Have you been impacted by Surveillance Capitalism?

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Is Bezos our Digital Pharaoh and resistance futile?

Please explore our Amazon InfoArt Scroll, beginning at the left and moving to the right, to better comprehend the incredible power our Digital Pharaoh lords over us.  This work will be regularly updated.

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What is Surveillance Capitalism?

We can't remember. They never forget.

Surveillance Capitalism is the manifestation of George Orwell's prophesied Memory Hole combined with the constant surveillance, storage and analysis of our thoughts and actions, with such minute precision, and artificial intelligence algorithmic analysis, that our future thoughts and actions can be predicted, and manipulated, for the concentration of power and wealth of the very few. These 32 citations barely scratch the surface of Surveillance Capitalism and yet provide a terrifying display of the powerful forces arrayed against democracy. Surveillance Capitalism desensitizes us to their destruction of individual autonomy, rights, freedom of thought and action, privacy, sovereignty, thoughtful analysis and memory while demanding and ensuring corporations, and the 1%, have absolute rights, privacy and impunity.

Surveillance Capitalism relies on the 24 hour news cycle overwhelming our capacity to consider their manipulations before they are quickly buried and forgotten in the Memory Hole.  If you agree that just these 32 citations are terrifying then dive in and navigate our InfoArt above and below the citations.  You will learn the audacity of impunity!

 

But Bezos, given how much he works and profits to destroy the privacy of everyone else (to say nothing of the labor abuses of his company), is about the least sympathetic victim imaginable of privacy invasion. In the past, hard-core surveillance cheerleaders in Congress such as Dianne Feinstein, Pete Hoekstra, and Jane Harman became overnight, indignant privacy advocates when they learned that the surveillance state apparatus they long cheered had been turned against them.

  Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else
Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept (February 8 2019)

Unbeknownst to her—because she didn’t read the fine print—some data from the research study, along with her liquor purchase history, has made it to one of the two employment agencies that have come to dominate the market. Every employer who screens her application with the agency now sees that she’s been profiled as a “depressed unreliable.” No wonder she can’t get work. But even if she could discover that she’s been profiled in this way, what recourse does she have?

  It’s time for a Bill of Data Rights
Martin Tisne, MIT Technology Review (December 14, 2018)

If her risk factor fluctuated upward—whether due to some suspicious pattern in her movements, her social associations, her insufficient attention to a propaganda-consumption app, or some correlation known only to the AI—a purely automated system could limit her movement. It could prevent her from purchasing plane or train tickets. It could disallow passage through checkpoints. It could remotely commandeer “smart locks” in public or private spaces, to confine her until security forces arrived.

The Panopticon Is Already Here - 
Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.
Ross Andersen, The Atlantic (September 2020)

But AI Now, which was established last year to grapple with the social implications of artificial intelligence, expresses in the document particular dread over affect recognition, “a subclass of facial recognition that claims to detect things such as personality, inner feelings, mental health, and ‘worker engagement’ based on images or video of faces.” The thought of your boss watching you through a camera that uses machine learning to constantly assess your mental state is bad enough, while the prospect of police using “affect recognition” to deduce your future criminality based on “micro-expressions” is exponentially worse.

Artificial Intelligence Experts Issue Urgent Warning Against Facial Scanning With a “Dangerous History”
Sam Biddle, The Intercept (December 6 2018)

At the beginning of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.

Amazon’s Accent Recognition Technology Could Tell the Government Where You’re From
Belle Lin, The Intercept (November 15 2018)

Selling products based on emotions also offers opportunities for advertisers to manipulate consumers. “If you’re a woman in a certain demographic and you’re depressed, and we know that binge shopping is something you do … knowing that you’re in kind of a vulnerable state, there’s no regulation preventing them from doing something like this,” King said.

Amazon’s Accent Recognition Technology Could Tell the Government Where You’re From
Belle Lin, The Intercept (November 15 2018)

For now, people who want to hold onto their privacy and minimize surveillance risk shouldn’t buy a speaker at all, recommended Granick. “You’re basically installing a microphone for the government to listen in to you in your home,” she said.

Amazon’s Accent Recognition Technology Could Tell the Government Where You’re From
Belle Lin, The Intercept (November 15 2018)

AI Now’s Whittaker singles out corporate secrecy as confounding the already problematic practices of affect recognition: “Because most of these technologies are being developed by private companies, which operate under corporate secrecy laws, our report makes a strong recommendation for protections for ethical whistleblowers within these companies.” Such whistleblowing will continue to be crucial, wrote Whittaker, because so many data firms treat privacy and transparency as a liability, rather than a virtue:

Artificial Intelligence Experts Issue Urgent Warning Against Facial Scanning With a “Dangerous History”
Sam Biddle, The Intercept (December 6 2018)

“Most people don’t know what’s going on,” said Emmett Kilduff, the chief executive of Eagle Alpha, which sells data to financial firms and hedge funds.

Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret
JENNIFER VALENTINO-DeVRIES, NATASHA SINGER, MICHAEL H. KELLER and AARON KROLIK, The New York Times (DEC. 10, 2018)

“We look to understand who a person is, based on where they’ve been and where they’re going, in order to influence what they’re going to do next,” Ms. Greenstein said.

Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret
JENNIFER VALENTINO-DeVRIES, NATASHA SINGER, MICHAEL H. KELLER and AARON KROLIK, The New York Times (DEC. 10, 2018)

Tell All Digital, a Long Island advertising firm that is a client of a location company, says it runs ad campaigns for personal injury lawyers targeting people anonymously in emergency rooms.

Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret
JENNIFER VALENTINO-DeVRIES, NATASHA SINGER, MICHAEL H. KELLER and AARON KROLIK, The New York Times (DEC. 10, 2018)

Several businesses claim they can track about half the mobile devices in the US, with precise locations updated up to 14,000 times a day in some cases. This data is sold or analyzed for advertising and retail, among other uses. Sales of location-targeted advertising reached an estimated $21 billion this year, and it’s a growing market. The data is anonymized, but those with access to the raw data could easily identify someone without consent. Companies aren’t content with just tracking your location, either—they want to predict your future movements too, as this patent from Facebook shows.

The scale of location tracking by our smartphone apps has been exposed
The Download, MIT Technology Review, 12/11/18

The power of the digital dead to manipulate the living is enormous; who better to sell us a product than someone we’ve loved and lost? Thus our digital representations might be more talkative, pushy, and flattering than we are—and if that’s what their makers think is best, who’s going to stop them?

Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever
Courtney Humphries, MIT Technology Review (October 18, 2018)

the dominant services, which are mostly owned by Google and Facebook — things like YouTube and WhatsApp — these things are driven by the manipulation model where all the money is made by third parties who are trying to manipulate the people who are their users. If that’s the way the system is designed at its core, I don’t think it has any chance to be good; it’s born to be terrible.

Jaron Lanier Helped Create Social Media, And Now He’s Begging You To Leave It Behind
Ja’han Jones, HuffPost (12/12/2018)

The next generation of high-end cars will come equipped with software and hardware (cameras and microphones, for now) to analyze drivers’ attentiveness, irritation, and other states.

Alexa, Should We Trust You?
Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic (November 2018 Issue)

Virtual assistants able to discern and react to their users’ frame of mind could create a genuine-seeming sense of affinity, a bond that could be used for good or for ill.

Alexa, Should We Trust You?
Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic (November 2018 Issue)

My biggest concern is with young people, whose brains are still developing from birth through adolescence. There’s a process called pruning [the process of removing neurons that are damaged or degraded to improve the brain’s networking capacity]. This could be affected through all the time using tech. We don’t have data on that — but it certainly can raise a concern.

Is our constant use of digital technologies affecting our brain health? We asked 11 experts.
Brian Resnick, Julia Belluz, and Eliza Barclay, Vox (Nov 29, 2018)

Those digital bread crumbs amass over time, equipping tech companies with staggeringly precise information about each of us. Product designers then use that data, alongside machine-learning tools, to study how we react to certain interfaces, rewards and inputs, and to identify patterns in our behaviors. That allows them to predict, fairly precisely, Brown says, how we’ll react in the future.

You're Addicted to Your Smartphone. This Company Thinks It Can Change That
Haley Sweetland Edwards, Time (April 13, 2018)

“People joke all the time about trying to build a ‘diaper product,'” he says. “The idea is, ‘Make something so addictive, they don’t even want to get up to pee.'”

You're Addicted to Your Smartphone. This Company Thinks It Can Change That
Haley Sweetland Edwards, Time (April 13, 2018)

Big tech now employs mental health experts to use persuasive technology, a new field of research that looks at how computers can change the way humans think and act. This technique, also known as persuasive design, is built into thousands of games and apps, and companies like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft rely on it to encourage specific human behavior starting from a very young age.

Tech companies use “persuasive design” to get us hooked. Psychologists say it’s unethical.
Chavie Lieber, Vox ( Aug 8, 2018)

The founding father of this research is B.J. Fogg, a behavioral scientist at Stanford University [where there’s a lab dedicated to this field]. Fogg has been called the “millionaire maker,” and he developed an entire field of study based off research that proved that with some simple techniques, tech can manipulate human behavior. His research is now the blueprint for tech companies who are developing products to keep consumers plugged in.

Tech companies use “persuasive design” to get us hooked. Psychologists say it’s unethical.
Chavie Lieber, Vox ( Aug 8, 2018)

Facebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”, according to a leaked documents based on research quietly conducted by the social network.

Facebook told advertisers it can identify teens feeling 'insecure' and 'worthless'
Sam Levin, The Guardian (1 May 2017)

The internal report produced by Facebook executives, and obtained by the Australian, states that the company can monitor posts and photos in real time to determine when young people feel “stressed”, “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless” and a “failure”.

Facebook told advertisers it can identify teens feeling 'insecure' and 'worthless'
Sam Levin, The Guardian (1 May 2017)

The recent document, described as “confidential,” outlines a new advertising service that expands how the social network sells corporations’ access to its users and their lives: Instead of merely offering advertisers the ability to target people based on demographics and consumer preferences, Facebook instead offers the ability to target them based on how they will behave, what they will buy, and what they will think. These capabilities are the fruits of a self-improving, artificial intelligence-powered prediction engine, first unveiled by Facebook in 2016 and dubbed “FBLearner Flow.”

Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence to Predict Your Future Actions for Advertisers, Says Confidential Document
Sam Biddle, The Intercept (April 13 2018)

The document does not detail what information from Facebook’s user dossiers is included or excluded from the prediction engine, but it does mention drawing on location, device information, Wi-Fi network details, video usage, affinities, and details of friendships, including how similar a user is to their friends. All of this data can then be fed into FBLearner Flow, which will use it to essentially run a computer simulation of a facet of a user’s life, with the results sold to a corporate customer. The company describes this practice as “Facebook’s Machine Learning expertise” used for corporate “core business challenges.”

Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence to Predict Your Future Actions for Advertisers, Says Confidential Document
Sam Biddle, The Intercept (April 13 2018)

Pasquale, the law professor, told The Intercept that Facebook’s behavioral prediction work is “eerie” and worried how the company could turn algorithmic predictions into “self-fulfilling prophecies,” since “once they’ve made this prediction, they have a financial interest in making it true.” That is, once Facebook tells an advertising partner you’re going to do some thing or other next month, the onus is on Facebook to either make that event come to pass, or show that they were able to help effectively prevent it (how Facebook can verify to a marketer that it was indeed able to change the future is unclear).

Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence to Predict Your Future Actions for Advertisers, Says Confidential Document
Sam Biddle, The Intercept (April 13 2018)

“We’re seeing a resegregation of society that’s catalyzed by algorithms,” Wylie said. Sites like Facebook reward informational echo chambers where partisan views are reinforced instead of challenged. “Instead of a common fabric,” he said, “we’re tearing that fabric apart.”

Christopher Wylie Warns Senators: Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon Want ‘Culture War’
Ryan Grenoble, HuffPost  05/16/2018

One major takeaway from both studies is the breadth of Russian interference that appeared on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and was not frequently mentioned when its parent company testified on Capitol Hill. The study says that as attention was focused on Facebook and Twitter in 2017, the Russians shifted much of their activity to Instagram.

Russian Troll Farms Are Still Using Social Media To Meddle In U.S Politics
Mary Clare Jalonick, HuffPost (12/18/2018)

The military exploited Facebook’s wide reach in Myanmar, where it is so broadly used that many of the country’s 18 million internet users confuse the Silicon Valley social media platform with the internet. Human rights groups blame the anti-Rohingya propaganda for inciting murders, rapes and the largest forced human migration in recent history.

A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military
Paul Mozur, The New York Times (Oct. 15, 2018)

They then turn to their well-organized army of “social media specialists” via group chats in apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, sending them lists of people to threaten, insult and intimidate; daily tweet quotas to fill; and pro-government messages to augment.

Saudis’ Image Makers: A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider
Katie Benner, Mark Mazzetti, Ben Hubbard and Mike Isaac, The New York Times (10/12/18)

It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.

An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption
Nitasha Tiku, Wired (10.22.18)

“The taxpayers in this country should not be subsidizing a guy who’s worth $150 billion, whose wealth is increasing by $260 million every single day,” said Sanders. “That is insane. He has enough money to pay his workers a living wage. He does not need corporate welfare. And our goal is to see that Bezos pays his workers a living wage.”

Bernie Sanders’ problem with Amazon
Brian Heater, TechCrunch (8/28/2018)

I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me.’ ” The fears vary, but many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth. (Southwestern Connecticut is first.) “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”

Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
Evan Osnos, The New Yorker (January 30, 2017)

Sousveillance: Watching the Watchers, and the Manipulators

The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.

The evolution did not stop there. Ultimately they understood that the most predictive behavioural data comes from what I call “economies of action”, as systems are designed to intervene in the state of play and actually modify behaviour, shaping it toward desired commercial outcomes. We saw the experimental development of this new “means of behavioural modification” in Facebook’s contagion experiments and the Google-incubated augmented reality game Pokémon Go.

It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.”

'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
John Naughton, The Guardian (20 Jan 2019)

Zucking Manipulation Fractured Flag – medium density wall hanging

May 26, 2018 |

Our 59″ x 50″ wall hanging, the “Zucking Manipulation” fractured flag, documents the digital forces mobilized by the most powerful companies and wealthiest individuals in history who actively manipulate society for their personal profit. They designed and control our attention economy and the misinformation we are fed by the few monopolistic platforms. Their high priests…

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