Category: Responders

During Tuesday’s class, Dr. Sample played a video clip advertising the new Walking Dead video game, which was relevant because of how the game kept track of individual decisions and compiled statistics aggregating all of its users’ choices. Forced to make heat-of-the-moment decisions—“Do I save Ben, or let him fall to his death?”—users were likely to choose options they would later second-guess. The aggregated stats gave context for those split-second decisions, either comforting those in the majority (“I felt bad for letting him die, but at least 79% of users did the same thing”) or compounding regret for the few (“Wow, that really was stupid to try and save him”). Generally, people find comfort in choosing with the majority, although there are certainly rogues out there who would intentionally take the less-beaten path.

What interests me is the difference between how people choose when given the stats as opposed to when it’s simply a blind choice—particularly in the context of a NCAA tournament bracket. Every March, thousands of people join online bracket-picking tournaments, often relying on picking the favorites in each first-round matchup (especially for games involving schools no one’s ever heard of). I imagine that, rather than blindly guessing, most people would lean toward the team that has, say, 71% of users picking them, rather than the underdog with 29% on their side. What intrigues me about this is the possibility of a snowball effect, where people disproportionately favor the team with 52% support, which pushes the number higher to 53%, which makes users even more likely to pick them, and so on. And then there are the aforementioned rogues, who intentionally pick an underdog they know nothing about simply because of the thrill of contradicting the mainstream opinion. Once the data on users’ choices is available to the users themselves, decisions can quickly change—in video games, bracket pools, and surely other fields as well.

Image credit: Kawakami, Mark. “Using YUI 3 to Build the Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em Game.” 19 Mar. 2010. Web. Accessed 18 Feb. 2015. <http://yuiblog.com/blog/2010/03/19/tourney-pickem/>

I’ve always understood our democratic system of governance as a trade off.  For example, we pay taxes to the government but in exchange we expect protection from external threats.   This perspective is how I attempt to validate the NSA’s snooping habits.  Tuesday’s in-class questions/fishbowl exercise had me wondering what such a trade off would look like in this current situation.  Maybe its because my emails, facebook posts and tweets are so mundane and boring that I really don’t care if the government sees them, but if I choose to accept that I’m possibly being surveilled then I absolutely expect something in return.  I expect to feel completely safe wherever I go, be it through airports or Times Square, and anything less than a guarantee of my safety is unacceptable.  I think this would possibly be the only thing worth an invasion of my privacy because its hard to object to the goal of national security.

Even following this logic, sometimes I’m still trying to convince myself that I could live with this deal.  In class on Tuesday, Richard raised the point about third party contractors having access to people’s data and using that privilege to creep on their exes.  This bothers me more than the NSA simply collecting a database of my phone calls or texts or tweets or whatever, and makes me reconsider my logic.  I would like to assume that I could trust the government to prevent this, but I’m not sure that I can make that assumption.  This abuse of privilege worries me more than the actual collection of my data.

As a final point, after reading The Guardian article and watching so many talking heads passionately discuss this issue, all I could think about was how lucky I am to be a citizen of a country where this discussion is possible.  So many people have completely different opinions about the extent of the government’s reach, but others aren’t lucky enough to have even that option.  I spent my semester abroad in Shanghai, and had a similar situation happened in China nobody would be talking about reining in the government’s snooping programs or establishing new oversight because they don’t have power to affect change in their government.  Consent of the governed is not a reality in China.  If the PLA was conducting the same kinds of data collection and analysis, which they likely are, the Chinese would have no way of protesting it.  In my opinion, not being able to act on the knowledge of governmental spying would be a worse scenario than the one we find ourselves in today.

In “Developing an Opinion on Edward Snowden’s Leaks”, the author describes some of the negative consequences of privacy violations. I think he hits three important points, but I want to highlight some of my thoughts on the posted Ted Talk by Glenn Greenwald.

1. Throughout the presentation, Greenwald attempts to legitimize the importance of privacy in our lives. He says that humans will inherently act differently when they know they are being watched and that people everywhere will refuse to give up private information even when they have nothing to hide. I completely agree with this statement, but I think a problem arises when humans are under undetected surveillance. Does their behavior actually change without them knowing? And does surveillance make human nature inherently bad or unnatural and which is worse?

2. Greenwald also makes reference to the social characteristics of humans. People interact with others everyday and peoples’ actions are often influenced by others around them. Does the fact that our behavior is molded by our environment in some way similar to the change in behavior brought about by a privacy breach?

3. Lastly, people do have the option to fight back against privacy breaches by limiting their internet use or using private search engines (see link below), but many people do not. Does this mean that they are not worried about their privacy or just too lazy to do something about it?

Overall, I think we are in an ever-changing battle with technology. In order to gain the benefits of today’s connected world, people must display their “private” information for others to see. Snowden’s file breach has made people realize the consequences of surveillance, but whether people will actually change their actions is a different question entirely.

 

Time Magazine Article “11 Simple Ways to Protect Your Privacy”

http://techland.time.com/2013/07/24/11-simple-ways-to-protect-your-privacy/

Both Klein and Kaufman wrestle with the idea of transforming archives into information that is quantifiable, visual and meaningful. This approach to interpreting the data available in their respective archives serves to illuminate the nuances of the information that otherwise goes missed.  For Klein, this was the significance of the relationship between Jefferson and James Hemings. She accomplishes this through a novel arc-graph depicting Jefferson’s communications with those closest to him and distantly connected to him. Kaufman, comparatively, illustrates the big topics, timeline and the players that made up Kissinger’s foreign policy through various force-directed diagrams and line and bar graphs. Both strategies, however, beg the question: How can these tools be of use to us if they are not “user friendly” or easily interpreted?

Upon first look, these visualizations have the potential to be detrimentally misinterpreted, even insofar as to negate their purpose. This is especially the case when the conclusions illustrated by the visualizations are not well conveyed or illustrated. In the case of Klein’s arc graph, one could see the person farthest connected to Jefferson, with the “widest” arc diameter, as the person with whom Jefferson most frequently corresponded regarding Hemings. Similarly, without understanding the meanings of the groupings, distances, lines and colors in Kaufman’s force-directed diagrams, the information provided by the visualization is rendered as meaningless as the overwhelming archive itself.

Even if these clarifications cannot be made apparent endogenously, they merit a key or an explanation outside of the visualization. While both Klein’s and Kaufman’s work serves to make large archives more user-friendly and meaningful, they have not gone far enough. Their insights are only as meaningful as they are accessible. We interacted with this idea in ‘The Library of Babel,” where information was existent albeit useless due to its disorganization and lack of availability. Data historians to come will have to discover new ways to not only visualize data but make the user experience as clear, aesthetic and evocative as possible.

Does dataveillance let companies know more about ourselves then we know about ourselves? Everyone knows that Google tracks their users searches and emails to create targeted advertisement, but Amazon is taking to the next level. Amazon applied for a patent in August of 2012 that was approved in December of 2013 for an idea called “Anticipatory Shipping”. The theory behind this is that through tracking of peoples Amazon.com searches, previous buys, and wishlists, Amazon will expect you to buy a specific item as a certain time. Their computers would run their algorithm, based off their calculated probability of buying the product, and would then ship your product. If the computers found a very high certainty of a future buy, Amazon.com would ship the product to your doorstep automatically. For those will a little lower certainty, Amazon would ship the product to your area’s local distribution center, so the wait time on the product in minimal.

Now, obviously, this will only work for people they have collected enough data on, so the buyer would have to be a frequent shopper at the site. It is also important to note that any pre-shipping has not yet commenced, and they are still working on the program but wanted to make sure their idea was protected first. If only I could patent my privacy. This would be dataveillance you could avoid by just avoid Amazon; but if it works for Amazon, and considering american patents only last twenty years, how soon before other companies use programs like this? Do you think that other corporations would be willing to buy rights to the patent from Amazon in return for the ability to do this? Twenty years is a long time for business owners to let competitors get ahead.

You can find out more about Amazon’s anticipatory shipping here:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/