December 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

SURVEILLANCE GIANTS:, HOW THE BUSINESS MODEL OF GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK, THREATENS HUMAN RIGHTS
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 8, 2019

Dec. 8, 2019

Il Rapporto Amnesty International accoglie il messaggio della Zuboff. <https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/POL3014042019ENGLISH.PDF> The internet has revolutionised our world on a scale not seen since the invention of electricity. Over half of the world’s population now relies on the web to read the news, message a loved one, find a job, or seek answers to an urgent question. It has opened social and economic opportunities at a scale and speed that few imagined fifty years ago. Recognising this shift, it is now firmly acknowledged that access to the internet is vital to enable the enjoyment of human rights. For more than 4 billion people, the internet has become central to how they communicate, learn, participate in the economy, and organise socially and politically. Yet when these billions participate in life online, most of them rely heavily on the services of just two corporations. Two companies control the primary channels that people rely on to engage with the internet. They provide services so integral that it is difficult to imagine the internet without them. Facebook is the world’s dominant social media company. If you combine users of its social platform, its messenger services, WhatsApp and Messenger, and applications such as Instagram, a third of humans on Earth use a Facebook-owned service every day. Facebook sets terms for much of human connection in the digital age. A second company, Google, occupies an even larger share of the online world. Search engines are a crucial source of information; Google accounts for around ninety percent of global search engine use. Its browser, Chrome, is the world’s dominant web browser. Its video platform, YouTube, is the world’s second largest search engine as well as the world’s largest video platform. Google’s mobile operating system, Android, underpins the vast majority of the world’s smartphones. Android’s dominance is particularly important because smartphones have replaced the desktop computer as the primary way people access and use the internet. Smartphones reveal information about us beyond our online browsing habits—such as our physical travel patterns and our location. They often contain thousands of intimate emails and text messages, photographs, contacts, and calendar entries. Google and Facebook have helped to connect the world and provided crucial services to billions. To participate meaningfully in today’s economy and society, and to realise their human rights, people rely on access to the internet—and the tools Google and Facebook offer. But despite the real value of the services they provide, Google and Facebook’s platforms come at a systemic cost. The companies’ surveillance-based business model forces people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human rights abuse. Firstly, an assault on the right to privacy on an unprecedented scale, and then a series of knock-on effects that pose a serious risk to a range of other rights, from freedom of expression and opinion, to freedom of thought and the right to non-discrimination. SURVEILLANCE GIANTS: HOW THE BUSINESS MODEL OF GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK THREATENS HUMAN RIGHTS Amnesty International 5This isn’t the internet people signed up for. When Google and Facebook were first starting out two decades ago, both companies had radically different business models that did not depend on ubiquitous surveillance. The gradual erosion of privacy at the hands of Google and Facebook is a direct result of the companies establishing dominant market power and control over the global “public square”. In Chapter 1, ‘the Business of Surveillance’, this report sets out how the surveillance-based business model works: Google and Facebook offer services to billions of people without asking them to pay a financial fee. Instead, citizens pay for the services with their intimate personal data. After collecting this data, Google and Facebook use it to analyse people, aggregate them into groups, and to make predictions about their interests, characteristics, and ultimately behaviour - primarily so they can use these insights to generate advertising revenue. This surveillance machinery reaches well beyond the Google search bar or the Facebook platform itself. People are tracked across the web, through the apps on their phones, and in the physical world as well, as they go about their day-to-day affairs. These two companies collect extensive data on what we search; where we go; who we talk to; what we say; what we read; and, through the analysis made possible by computing advances, have the power to infer what our moods, ethnicities, sexual orientation, political opinions, and vulnerabilities may be. Some of these categories—including characteristics protected under human rights law—are made available to others for the purpose of targeting internet users with advertisements and other information. In Chapter 2, ‘Assault on Privacy’, we set out how this ubiquitous surveillance has undermined the very essence of the right to privacy. Not only does it represent an intrusion into billions of people’s private lives that can never be necessary or proportionate, but the companies have conditioned access to their services on “consenting” to processing and sharing of their personal data for marketing and advertising, directly countering the right to decide when and how our personal data can be shared with others. Finally, the companies’ use of algorithmic systems to create and infer detailed profiles on people interferes with our ability to shape our own identities within a private sphere. Advertisers were the original beneficiaries of these insights, but once created, the companies’ data vaults served as an irresistible temptation for governments as well. This is for a simple reason: Google and Facebook achieved a degree of data extraction from their billions of users that would have been intolerable had governments carried it out directly. Both companies have stood up to states’ efforts to obtain information on their users; nevertheless, the opportunity to access such data has created a powerful disincentive for governments to regulate corporate surveillance. The abuse of privacy that is core to Facebook and Google’s surveillance-based business model is starkly demonstrated by the companies’ long history of privacy scandals. Despite the companies’ assurances over their commitment to privacy, it is difficult not to see these numerous privacy infringements as part of the normal functioning of their business, rather than aberrations. In Chapter 3, ‘Data Analytics at Scale: Human Rights Risks Beyond Privacy’, we look at how Google and Facebook’s platforms rely not only on extracting vast amounts of people’s data, but on drawing further insight and information from that data using sophisticated algorithmic systems. These systems are designed to find the best way to achieve outcomes in the companies’ interests, including finely- tuned ad targeting and delivery, and behavioural nudges that keep people engaged on the platforms. As a result, people’s data, once aggregated, boomerangs back on them in a host of unforeseen ways. These algorithmic systems have been shown to have a range of knock-on effects that pose a serious threat to people’s rights, including freedom of expression and opinion, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination. These risks are greatly heightened by the size and reach of Google and Facebook’s platforms, enabling human rights harm at a population scale. Moreover, SURVEILLANCE GIANTS: HOW THE BUSINESS MODEL OF GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK THREATENS HUMAN RIGHTS Amnesty International 6systems that rely on complex data analytics can be opaque even to computer scientists, let alone the billions of people whose data is being processed. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from 87 million people’s Facebook profiles were harvested and used to micro-target and manipulate people for political campaigning purposes, opened the world’s eyes to the capabilities such platforms possess to influence people at scale – and the risk that they could be abused by other actors. However, although shocking, the incident was the tip of the iceberg, stemming from the very same model of data extraction and analysis inherent to both Facebook and Google’s business. Finally, in Chapter 4, ‘Concentration of Power Obstructs Accountability’, we show how vast data reserves and powerful computational capabilities have made Google and Facebook two of the most valuable and powerful companies in the world today. Google’s market capitalization is more than twice the GDP of Ireland (both companies’ European headquarters); Facebook’s is larger by a third. The companies’ business model has helped concentrate their power, including financial clout, political influence, and the ability to shape the digital experience of billions of people, leading to an unprecedented asymmetry of knowledge between the companies and internet users – as scholar Shoshana Zuboff states “They know everything about us; we know almost nothing about them.” This concentrated power goes hand in hand with the human rights impacts of the business model and has created an accountability gap in which it is difficult for governments to hold the companies to account, or for individuals who are affected to access justice. Governments have an obligation to protect people from human rights abuses by corporations. But for the past two decades, technology companies have been largely left to self-regulate – in 2013, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt described the online world as “the world’s largest ungoverned space”. However, regulators and national authorities across various jurisdictions have begun to take a more confrontational approach to the concentrated power of Google and Facebook—investigating the companies for competition violations, issuing fines for infringing Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or introducing new tax regimes for big technology companies. Businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights in the context of their business operations that requires them to carry out “human rights due diligence” to identify and address their human rights impacts. Google and Facebook have established policies and processes to address their impacts on privacy and freedom of expression – but evidently, given that their surveillance-based business model undermines the very essence of the right to privacy and poses a serious risk to a range of other rights, the companies are not taking a holistic approach, nor are they questioning whether their current business models themselves can be compliant with their responsibility to respect human rights. Amnesty International gave both Google and Facebook an opportunity to respond to the findings of this report in advance of publication. Facebook’s letter in response is appended in the annex below. Amnesty International had a conversation with senior Google staff, who subsequently provided information around its relevant policies and practices. Both responses are incorporated throughout the report. Ultimately, it is now evident that the era of self-regulation in the tech sector is coming to an end: further state-based regulation will be necessary, but it is vital that whatever form future regulation of the technology sector takes, governments follow a human rights-based approach. In the short-term, there is an immediate need for stronger enforcement of existing regulation. Governments must take positive steps to reduce the harms of the surveillance-based business model—to adopt digital public policies that have the objective of universal access and enjoyment of human rights at their core, to reduce or eliminate pervasive private surveillance, and to enact reforms, including structural ones, sufficient to restore confidence and trust in the internet.

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Moscow Cops Sell Access to City CCTV, Facial Recognition Data
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 8, 2019

Dec. 8, 2019

La notizia è diffusa da MBK Media, outlet anti-Putin di Mikhail Khodorkovsky e ripresa in inglese dall'aggregatore lituano Meduza.io <https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/moscow-cops-sell-access-to-c…> Anyone with a little money can buy access to Moscow's surveillance system of tens of thousands of cameras along and check footage stored over the previous five days. Sellers on forums and messenger groups that trade illegal data also provide facial recognition lookup services. City-wide surveillance To ensure safety in the city, there are over 175,000 CCTV cameras in Moscow, most of them installed at entrances and more than 4,000 present in crowded places. Back in 2017, the mayor's office in Moscow stated that facial recognition technology integrated with Russia's police databases had been activated and it was pulling data from 3,000 cameras. The plan was to link the rest of the video surveillance to the facial recognition system. The city's website says that the video surveillance system can be accessed by "employees of federal government bodies, the Moscow Mayor and their authorized officials, law enforcement and executive authorities." "Restricted" access Investigative media outlet MBKh Media found that access to this technology and the live streams is being sold on underground forums and chat rooms. Andrey Kaganskikh, the journalist that did the investigation says that the sellers are law enforcement individuals as well as government bureaucrats that can log into the Integrated Center for Data Processing and Storage (YTKD), the very system that keeps the data from cameras in Moscow. Whoever wants to check the live stream from a camera receives a unique link to the City CCTV System that connects to all public cameras in Moscow. The URL works for five days, Kaganskikh says. This is the same period mentioned on the city's CCTV section for storing footage from crowded places, shops, and courtyards. Data from educational organizations is saved for 30 days. Furthermore, government officials or police officers sell their login credentials to the system to provide unlimited access to all cameras. The price of admission is 30,000 rubles ($470), according to Kaganskikh. To test the facial recognition attributes, the investigator provided a photo of him to a seller. The search returned 238 images of people (male and female) with a similar look from 140 cameras, along with a list of addresses and times they were caught on camera. "We managed to find the cameras from the file at the indicated addresses - their angles coincided with the pictures, the camera indices and the camera indices from the open registry also coincided" - Andrey Kaganskikh Among the metadata available for each photo there was a label indicating if the person was regularly seen by that camera or if they were spotted for the first time. As for the accuracy of the results, none of the photos returned were of the investigator. However, the facial features were similar to the input and the system assessed a similarity of 67%. Kaganskikh says in a video report that the poor results may be explained by the limited number of cameras connected to the face recognition algorithm. The investigator says that the sellers he'd been in contact with told him that the police have free access to this technology. No justification, such as a warrant for a legal investigation, is required to run a search. Finding the sellers is not difficult, either. Apparently, the forums are indexed by search engines, so their content is easy to discover. This type of access is popular with private detectives, scammers, or individuals that trade surveillance services.

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Big Tech’s Big Defector | The New Yorker
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 8, 2019

Dec. 8, 2019

<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/02/big-techs-big-defector> Roger McNamee started his career in 1982, as a twenty-six-year-old analyst at the investment firm T. Rowe Price. The personal-computer revolution was just beginning. He invested in Electronic Arts (now a leading video-game maker) and Sybase (a pioneering database firm), among others, eventually running one of the most successful funds in the industry. In 1991, he partnered with the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he listened to pitches for Netscape and Amazon. He invested in those companies, too, and a few years later he co-founded Silver Lake Partners. The businesses in Silver Lake’s portfolio now produce two hundred and thirty billion dollars in annual revenue and employ three hundred and seventy thousand people. In the early two-thousands, McNamee helped create a private-equity firm, Elevation Partners, which invested two hundred and ten million dollars in Facebook in 2009 and 2010, two years before it went public. If the founders of Big Tech were a family, McNamee might be its eccentric uncle. A longtime guitarist who still plays some fifty shows a year, he has toured for more than two decades with an evolving cast of venture capitalists, technologists, and career musicians such as Pete Sears, of Jefferson Starship. On tracks like the stoner anthem “It’s 4:20 Somewhere,” by his band Moonalice, McNamee performed under the stage name Chubby Wombat. McNamee has mentored many of the people who have transformed Silicon Valley. In 2006, when Facebook was a two-year-old company with less than fifty million dollars in annual revenue, McNamee advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s offer to buy it for a billion dollars. (It’s now worth more than five hundred billion.) Not long afterward, he encouraged Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg. His acquaintances have included Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who was an investor at Silver Lake. McNamee saw the tech industry as an experiment in creative and profitable problem-solving. He grew unnerved by its ethical failures only in 2012, when Uber came to him for investment capital. He decided that Silicon Valley had changed. “These guys all wanted to be monopolists,” he said recently. “They all want to be billionaires.” McNamee was convinced that Facebook was different. Then, in February, 2016, shortly after he retired from full-time investing, he noticed posts in his Facebook feed that purported to support Bernie Sanders but struck him as fishy. That spring, the social-media-fuelled vitriol of the Brexit campaign seemed like further proof that Facebook was being exploited to sow division among voters—and that company executives had turned a blind eye. The more McNamee listened to Silicon Valley critics, the more alarmed he became: he learned that Facebook allowed facial-recognition software to identify users without their consent, and let advertisers discriminate against viewers. (Real-estate companies, for example, could exclude people of certain races from seeing their ads.) Ten days before the Presidential election, McNamee sent an e-mail to Zuckerberg and Sandberg. “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,” he wrote. Recently, Facebook has done some things that are truly horrible and I can no longer excuse its behavior. . . . Facebook is enabling people to do harm. It has the power to stop the harm. What it currently lacks is an incentive to do so. Within hours, both Zuckerberg and Sandberg sent McNamee cordial replies, assuring him that they were already working to address some of the issues he’d raised, and dispatched a Facebook executive, Dan Rose, to talk to him. Rose told McNamee that Facebook was a platform, not a publisher, and couldn’t control all user behavior. Since leaving the investment world, McNamee had been looking forward to being a full-time musician. But Rose’s dismissiveness rattled him. “They were my friends. I wanted to give them a chance to do the right thing. I wasn’t expecting them to go, ‘Oh, my God, stop everything,’ but I was expecting them to take it seriously,” he said. “It was obvious they thought it was a P.R. problem, not a business problem, and they thought the P.R. problem was me.” McNamee hasn’t spoken to Sandberg or Zuckerberg since. (Both declined to comment for this article.) He now refers to Zuckerberg as an “authoritarian.” As Russian election interference became increasingly apparent, McNamee published a series of op-eds—in the Guardian, USA Today, Time, and elsewhere—arguing that the social-media business model thrived on divisive rhetoric: the more extreme the content, the more users shared it; the more the algorithms amplified it, the more ad revenue was generated. McNamee also scheduled meetings with policymakers, investors, and Silicon Valley executives. He and Nancy Pelosi, now the Speaker of the House, had been introduced some twenty years earlier, by the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, and McNamee set out to expand his network of Washington contacts. As lawmakers prepared for hearings about Russian meddling, in the fall of 2017, McNamee put together a curriculum for them, which he jokingly called “Internet Platforms 101.” Adam Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, had been focussed on foreign manipulation of social media, but, in a meeting, McNamee urged him to consider a broader problem—how the platforms were sowing discord among Americans. “Roger was really ahead of the curve,” Schiff said. “Time has borne out his warnings.” McNamee’s zeal for diagnosing problems soon evolved into a mission to devise a solution. He argued that piecemeal regulation would never get to the root of the problem: mining users’ private data for profit. In February, 2019, McNamee published “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe”—part memoir, part manifesto. He then embarked on a book tour that has turned into an ongoing public-shaming campaign. He has taken his message to bookstores, breweries, high-school gymnasiums, and college campuses. He estimates that he’s made his pitch to more than three hundred audiences in the past year. “I have a hippie value system,” McNamee told me recently. “I’m always going to speak truth to power.” McNamee is not the first Silicon Valley insider to become a critic of the tech industry, but he may be the most strenuous. Kara Swisher, a co-founder of the tech-news site Recode and a New York Times columnist, recalled, “Whenever I would say negative things about Facebook, I’d always get a text or a call from Roger.” Now, she continued, McNamee is “sort of shunned” in the Valley. Last winter, Bill Gates told Forbes, “I think what Roger has said is completely unfair and kind of outrageous. They’re blaming Mark for everything.” Swisher thinks the Valley has been eager to portray McNamee as “off the rails.” As she sees it, “He’s a little wacky, but he’s not crazy. The more they make fun of him, the more I’m, like, He’s one-hundred-per-cent right.” Among some skeptics, however, the profit McNamee has accrued from the technology that he now urges us to renounce makes him difficult to trust. One view of McNamee is that he has the gravitas of a man willing to admit that he was wrong. (“Shame on me,” he told one interviewer.) Another is that, having successfully ridden one wave, he is trying to ride another. [...]

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esperimento https://amazon.tracking.exposed - verificare se le DSAR sono complete
by Claudio Agosti Dec. 8, 2019

Dec. 8, 2019

Buongiorno Nexa, Sono stato invitato un paio di mesi fa, a partecipare ad una trasmissione (Petrolio, Rai2, episodio del 6 Dicembre) su Amazon. Quindi, abbiamo modificato la tecnologia alla base di facebook.tracking.exposed e di youtube.tracking.exposed per analizzare l'algoritmo di Amazon. Questo report abbastanza breve spiega la nostra investigazione: https://github.com/tracking-exposed/presentation/blob/master/amazon.trackin… Studiando i risultati personalizzati, abbiamo giocato con le funzioni di amazon per verificare quali variabili influissero nella macchina di profilazione, e secondo noi, alcuni dati che dovrebbero essere sotto il nostro controllo (perché personali) sono usati nella profilazione, senza che ci siano comunicato. se avete riflessioni in merito, mi piacerebbe parlarne con voi. * p.s. dal subject, DSAR, sta per Data Subject Access Request Cordialmente, Claudio

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Wired Italia: Fare l avvocato ai tempi dell intelligenza artificiale
by don Luca Peyron Dec. 7, 2019

Dec. 7, 2019

Un libro interessante? La riduzione giornalistica forse non gli rende ragione, alcune i tuizioni o scenari fanno comunque riflettere. Buona domenica! Dl https://www.wired.it/economia/business/2019/12/05/avvocato-futuro-susskind/

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Tweet by Digital Ethics on Twitter
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 7, 2019

Dec. 7, 2019

Digital Ethics (@DigitalEthicsRD) 07/12/2019, 14:52 Frank, X. (2019). Is Watson for Oncology per se Unreasonably Dangerous?: Making A Case for How to Prove Products Liability Based on a Flawed Artificial Intelligence Design. American Journal of Law & Medicine, 45(2–3), 273–294. doi.org/10.1177/009885… Download the Twitter app (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Germany proposes Europe’s first diversity rules for social media platforms
by J.C. DE MARTIN Dec. 7, 2019

Dec. 7, 2019

*Germany proposes Europe’s first diversity rules for social media platforms* /Tighter regulation of social media and other online services in now under discussion in several European countries, as well as in the UK where the government has released a white paper outlining its proposed approach to tackling online harm. Here, Professor Natali Helberger, Paddy Leerssen and Max Van Drunen from the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam argue that a German proposal to impose diversity obligations on social media platforms’ algorithms deserves more scrutiny. / [...] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2019/05/29/germany-proposes-europes-first-…

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Inside the hate factory: how Facebook fuels far-right profit | Australia news | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 6, 2019

Dec. 6, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/06/inside-the-hate-fact…> [...] A Guardian investigation can reveal those messages were part of a covert plot to control some of Facebook’s largest far-right pages, including one linked to a rightwing terror group, and create a commercial enterprise that harvests Islamophobic hate for profit. This group is now using its 21-page network to churn out more than 1,000 coordinated faked news posts per week to more than 1 million followers, funnelling audiences to a cluster of 10 ad-heavy websites and milking the traffic for profit. The posts stoke deep hatred of Islam across the western world and influence politics in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US by amplifying far-right parties such as Australia’s One Nation and vilifying Muslim politicians such as the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, and the US congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The network has also targeted leftwing politicians at critical points in national election campaigns. It posted false stories claiming the UK Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said Jews were “the source of global terrorism” and accused the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, of allowing “Isis to invade Canada”. The revelations show Facebook has failed to stop clandestine actors from using its platform to run coordinated disinformation and hate campaigns. The network has operated with relative impunity even since Mark Zuckerberg’s apology to the US Senate following the Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference scandals. When the Guardian notified Facebook of its investigation, the company removed several pages and accounts “that appeared to be financially motivated”, a spokesperson said in a statement. “These pages and accounts violated our policy against spam and fake accounts by posting clickbait content to drive people to off-platform sites,” the spokesperson said. “We don’t allow people to misrepresent themselves on Facebook and we’ve updated our inauthentic behaviour policy to further improve our ability to counter new tactics.” But this comes too late for some of the network’s victims. Australia’s first female Muslim senator, Mehreen Faruqi, felt the full force of the network in August last year, when 10 of its pages launched coordinated posts inciting their 546,000 followers to attack her for speaking in parliament against racism. The posts prompted what Faruqi described as a “horrific feeding frenzy of racism, fake news and hate”, soliciting vile comments like “put your burka on – and shut the fuck up!”, “deport the whining bitch” and “Revoke citizenship and Deport”. Faruqi said the network represented a “new level of far-right organisation and coordination”, and she places the blame squarely on social media companies. “By allowing racist and misleading posts, social media giants like Facebook … are profiteering from the proliferation of hate speech and abuse,” Faruqi said. “Facebook could do much more and shut these pages down but so long as they continue to profit from the reach and engagement, they don’t seem to be interested in decisive action.” A spokesperson for Facebook told the Guardian: “Nobody can advocate or advertise hate or violence on Facebook and we remove any violations as soon as we become aware.” It begins with a single post, curated by Israel-based administrators. The post typically has an attention-grabbing headline and links to an article that mimics the style of a legitimate news story. It employs a blend of distorted news and total fabrication to paint Muslims as sharia-imposing terrorists and child abusers, whose existence poses a threat to white culture and western civilisation. It is then published almost simultaneously to the network’s 21 Facebook pages, which have a combined 1 million followers across the globe. The content is so predictable that even Devito once complained to his Israeli counterpart. “I told her flat out, ‘you’re a one-trick pony’,” he said. “It’s Islam, Islam, Islam, Islam and more Islam. Like, enough with the Islam already, we get it.” Interactive The Guardian conducted an analysis to confirm the extent of coordination across the network, checking where posts were identical in content and similar in publication time across different pages. The network published 5,695 coordinated posts at its height in October 2019, receiving 846,424 likes, shares or comments in that month alone. In total, the network has published at least 165,000 posts and attracted 14.3 million likes, shares or comments. The content is amplified further by other far-right Facebook pages, including those run by the rightwing UK Independence party (Ukip), who share it organically. The posts link back to one of 10 near-identical websites masquerading as news sites with generic titles like “The Politics Online” and “Free Press Front”. Ad-heavy and poorly designed, the websites feature “stories” that usually combine slabs of copied text intermingled with unsourced opinion and graphic imagery. The Guardian worked with researchers from Queensland University of Technology’s digital media research centre, who conducted an analysis of the order in which identical posts appeared across the 21 Facebook pages. Their analysis indicates a single entity is coordinating the publication of content across the Facebook pages, likely using automatic scheduling software, and that a single entity controls the websites that receive traffic from the posts. “It’s very obvious looking at the websites, the way that they’re structured, the way that they’re sharing design and code, and the way they share Google site IDs, that they’re all interconnected with each other,” said QUT professor Axel Bruns, one of Australia’s leading internet researchers. “They’re just cheap sites to set up, cheap sites to run … It’s not very sophisticated and it’s just brute force, to push all this stuff out.” Bruns and his colleagues believe the motivation is commercial, and that hatred, division and political influence may be byproducts of the pursuit of profit. “Here’s a bunch of people who – they’re not stupid but they’re highly prone to clicking on content that reflects their already held beliefs, especially content that is highly emotive and contains polarising and extreme material,” said Timothy Graham, a senior lecturer on social network analysis at QUT. “These people are great for business. If you get them to come to your website, they’re not going to [look closely at] the content, they’re going to click through and keep [sharing] it. They’re the perfect foot soldiers.” ‘You’re the one profiting’ The network wasn’t always so extensive. The delivery of coordinated content began in 2016 through just a few pages in Israel and the US. Unique v duplicated content within a network of far-right Facebook pages >From 2018 onwards, the network began approaching the administrators of large, pre-existing Facebook pages across Australia, Austria, Canada, the US and the UK, promising content that would help grow their audiences. In March 2018, the network gained access to a Canadian pro-Israel page dubbed Never Again Canada, which has 232,000 followers. A previous BuzzFeed News investigation into Never Again Canada showed it was regularly sharing content about the Jewish Defence League, an FBI-designated rightwing terror group, and coordinating content with other pages. Coordinated content posting by far-right Facebook pages, by target country The network reached its peak in October this year with coordination across 21 pages. Each time a local page-owner agrees to let one of the Israeli administrators in, they become unwitting though not necessarily unwilling participants in the globally coordinated distribution of online hate. Some page-owners, like Villereal, who runs Pissed off Deplorables, had no idea their new Israeli counterparts were making money from the following they had built. “It’s a little disheartening to sit here and think I’ve been doing this for two years and I haven’t made a dime, and I allowed someone to come in who’s built the little back channel but they’re going to use my clientele to make money,” he said. “You know, it’s like I own the store, I built it and everything like that, and you’re the one profiting.” Those behind the network went to great lengths to hide their identities, concealing personal information from websites and using different Facebook profiles when contacting the owners of existing far-right pages. But by following a trail of digital breadcrumbs, the Guardian’s investigation traced the network back to a key player: a man going by the username Ariel1238a. [...]

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Crack down on genomic surveillance
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 5, 2019

Dec. 5, 2019

<https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03687-x> Across the world, DNA databases that could be used for state-level surveillance are steadily growing. The most striking case is in China. Here police are using a national DNA database along with other kinds of surveillance data, such as from video cameras and facial scanners, to monitor the minority Muslim Uyghur population in the western province of Xinjiang. Concerns about the potential downsides of governments being able to interrogate people’s DNA have been voiced since the early 2000s1 by activist groups, such as the non-profit organization GeneWatch UK, and some geneticists (myself included). Partly thanks to such debate, legislation and best practices have emerged in many countries around the use of DNA profiling in law enforcement2. (In profiling, several regions across the genome, each consisting of tens of nucleotides, are sequenced to identify a person or their relatives.) Now the stakes are higher for two reasons. First, as technology gets cheaper, many countries might want to build massive DNA databases. Second, DNA-profiling technology can be used in conjunction with other tools for biometric identification — and alongside the analysis of many other types of personal data, including an individual’s posting behaviour on social networks. Last year, the Chinese firm Forensic Genomics International (FGI) announced that it was storing the DNA profiles of more than 100,000 people from across China (FGI, known as Shenzhen Huada Forensic Technology in China, is a subsidiary of the BGI, the world’s largest genome-research organization). It made the information available to the individuals through WeChat, China’s equivalent of WhatsApp, using an app accessed by facial recognition. A pregnant woman and other migrants are apprehended by a Border Patrol agent With stringent safeguards and oversight, it is legitimate for law-enforcement agencies to use DNA-profiling technology. But these uses can easily creep towards human-rights abuses. In October this year, the US Department of Homeland Security announced that it would authorize the mandatory collection of DNA samples from immigrants in federal custody at the US border, including children and those applying for asylum at legal ports of entry. The resulting DNA profiles will be available through a database called CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), which includes the profiles of convicted offenders and individuals arrested for serious offences. Such treatment could reinforce debunked claims that immigrants are more prone to criminal behaviour than the general population. A much broader array of stakeholders must engage with the problems that DNA databases present. In particular, governments, policymakers and legislators should tighten regulation and reduce the likelihood of corporations aiding potential human-rights abuses by selling DNA-profiling technology to bad actors — knowingly or negligently. Researchers working on biometric identification technologies should consider more deeply how their inventions could be used. And editors, reviewers and publishers must do more to ensure that published research on biometric identification has been done in an ethical way. [...]

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To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Dec. 5, 2019

Dec. 5, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/tech-climate-change-ludd…> Big tech claims AI and digitization will bring a better future. But putting computers everywhere is bad for people and the planet @bentarnoff Last modified on Wed 2 Oct 2019 20.42 BST Our built environment is becoming one big computer. “Smartness” is coming to saturate our stores, workplaces, homes, cities. As we go about our daily lives, data is made, stored, analyzed and used to make algorithmic inferences about us that in turn structure our experience of the world. Computation encircles us as a layer, dense and interconnected. If our parents and our grandparents lived with computers, we live inside them. A growing chorus of activists, journalists and scholars are calling attention to the dangers of digital enclosure. Employers are using algorithmic tools to surveil and control workers. Cops are using algorithmic tools to surveil and control communities of color. And there is no shortage of dystopian possibilities on the horizon: landlords evicting tenants with “smart locks”, health insurers charging higher premiums because your Fitbit says you don’t exercise enough. Digitization doesn’t just pose a risk to people, however. It also poses a risk to the planet. July was the hottest month on record. Large chunks of the Arctic are melting. In India, more than half a billion people face water shortages. Putting computation everywhere directly contributes to this crisis. Digitization is a climate disaster: if corporations and governments succeed in making vastly more of our world into data, there will be less of a world left for us to live in. To understand the relationship between data and climate, the best place to start is machine learning (ML). Billions of dollars are being spent on researching, developing, and deploying ML because major breakthroughs in the past decade have made it a powerful tool for pattern recognition, whether analyzing faces or predicting consumer preferences. ML “learns” by training on large quantities of data. Computers are stupid: babies know what a face is within the first few months of being alive. For a computer to know what a face is, it must learn by looking at millions of pictures of faces. Digitization is a climate disaster: if corporations and governments succeed in making vastly more of our world into data, there will be less of a world left for us to live in This is a demanding process. It takes place inside the data centers we call the cloud, and much of the electricity that powers the cloud is generated by burning fossil fuels. As a result, ML has a large carbon footprint. In a recent paper that made waves in the ML community, a team at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found that training a model for natural-language processing – the field that helps “virtual assistants” like Alexa understand what you’re saying – can emit as much as 626,155lb of carbon dioxide. That’s about the same amount produced by flying roundtrip between New York and Beijing 125 times. Training models isn’t the only way ML contributes to the cooking of our planet. It has also stimulated a hunger for data that is probably the single biggest driver of the digitization of everything. Corporations and governments now have an incentive to acquire as much data as possible, because that data, with the help of ML, might yield valuable patterns. It might tell them who to fire, who to arrest, when to perform maintenance on a machine or how to promote a new product. One of the best ways to make more data is to put small connected computers everywhere: Cisco predicts there will be 28.5bn networked devices by 2022. Aside from the energy required to manufacture and maintain those devices, the data they produce will live in the carbon-intensive cloud. Data centers currently consume 200 terawatt hours per year – roughly the same amount as South Africa. Anders Andrae, a widely cited researcher at Huawei, tells me that number is likely to grow 4-5 times by 2030. This would put the cloud on par with Japan, the fourth-biggest energy consumer on the planet. What can be done to curb the carbon costs of data? Greenpeace has long pushed cloud providers to switch to renewable energy sources and improve efficiency. These efforts have seen some success: the use of renewables by data centers has grown substantially. Meanwhile, efficiency gains from better techniques and bigger economies of scale have moderated the cloud’s power consumption in recent years. When it comes to ML, a group of researchers are calling for a more energy-conscious approach, which they call “Green AI”. These are encouraging trends, and tech workers themselves are likely to play a key role in advancing them: Amazon employees have been organizing for a climate plan since late last year, and they recently announced a global walkout for 20 September. Among their demands is for the company to commit to zero emissions by 2030 and to stop selling cloud services to fossil fuel companies. But it’s clear that confronting the climate crisis will require something more radical than just making data greener. That’s why we should put another tactic on the table: making less data. We should reject the assumption that our built environment must become one big computer. We should erect barriers against the spread of “smartness” into all of the spaces of our lives. To decarbonize, we need to decomputerize. This proposal will no doubt be met with charges of Luddism. Good: Luddism is a label to embrace. The Luddites were heroic figures and acute technological thinkers. They smashed textile machinery in 19th-century England because they had the capacity to perceive technology “in the present tense”, in the words of the historian David F Noble. They didn’t wait patiently for the glorious future promised by the gospel of progress. They saw what certain machines were doing to them in the present tense – endangering their livelihoods – and dismantled them. We are often sold a similar bill of goods: big tech companies talk incessantly about how “AI” and digitization will bring a better future. In the present tense, however, putting computers everywhere is bad for most people. It enables advertisers, employers and cops to exercise more control over us – in addition to helping heat the planet. Fortunately, there are latter-day Luddites working to stem the tide. Community groups like the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition are organizing to shut down algorithmic policing programs. A growing campaign to ban the government use of facial recognition software has won important victories in San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts, while workers at Amazon are calling for the company to stop selling such software to law enforcement. And in the streets of Hong Kong, protesters are developing techniques for evading the algorithmic gaze, using lasers to confuse facial recognition cameras and cutting down “smart” lamp-posts equipped with monitoring devices. These are just a few possible sources of inspiration for a broader movement for decomputerization, one that pursues social and ecological goals simultaneously. The premise of the Green New Deal is that we can make society greener and more equitable at the same time – that we can democratize as we decarbonize. We should apply the same logic to our digital sphere. Preventing a local police department from constructing an ML-powered panopticon is a matter of algorithmic, social and climate justice. As they used to say in the 1960s: one struggle, many fronts. For such a struggle to be successful, however, resistance is not enough. We also need a vision of the future we want. Again, the history of the Luddites can be helpful. In 1812, a group of Yorkshire Luddites sent a factory owner a letter promising continued action until “the House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality”. Following their example, we might derive a simple Luddite principle for democratizing technology: we should destroy machinery hurtful to the common good and build machinery helpful to it. What matters is not only how much data a service collects, but what imprint that service leaves upon the world – and thus whether it should be performed at all What does this mean in practice? It’s hard to think of anything more hurtful to our common life than heating large portions of the planet beyond habitable levels. Privacy advocates have long called for companies to restrict their collection of data to the minimum necessary to perform a service – a principle now enshrined in the GDPR, the EU’s omnibus data regulation. A 21st-century Luddism should embrace this principle but go further. What matters is not only how much data a service collects, but what imprint that service leaves upon the world – and thus whether it should be performed at all. Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people. Precisely which computational activities should be preserved in a less computerized world is a matter for those billions of people themselves to decide. The question of whether a particular machine hurts or helps the common good can only be answered by the commons itself. It can only be answered collectively, through the experiment and argument of democracy. The zero-carbon commonwealth of the future must empower people to decide not just how technologies are built and implemented, but whether they’re built and implemented. Progress is an abstraction that has done a lot of damage over the centuries. Luddism urges us to consider: progress towards what and progress for whom? Sometimes a technology shouldn’t exist. Sometimes the best thing to do with a machine is to break it.

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