Data ethics and privacy

The McKelvy Scholars will host a discussion led by Shirley Liu ’23 and Nat Schmit ’22 on Sunday at 6 p.m.  Email the group for the Zoom link. The group also will host a Netflix party on Saturday at 6 p.m. to watch The Great Hack. Email Shirley to join in. Shirley and Nat provide background for the discussion:

Do you ever feel like your Facebook feed is reading your mind? Are you convinced Alexa’s been listening to you? Phones and other technology are able to make predictions about you through extensive data collection on you and millions of others.

Below are some mandatory and optional readings to prepare for our discussion. Please take the time to complete these readings before Sunday as they will provide depth and substance to our conversation. Additionally, we’ve included some questions we will be discussing.

Mandatory readings

• How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps
  • A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people’s personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military.
• Digital Contact Tracing Poses Ethical Challenges
  • The necessity of and ethical concerns raised by digital contact tracing.
• Facebook and discriminatory ads
  • Facebook’s system for targeting ads is under fire for gender and ethnic bias.

Optional

• If you aren’t watching The Great Hack, consider reading this summary of the Facebook privacy hearings: What you don’t know about how Facebook uses your Data
  • The Great Hack shows how data is being used to hijack our elections and our democracy and how the internet is being used not only for information but as a weapon.
• Data graphic
  • How much data is generated per day?
• How to Track (Ex)President Trump
  • Take a look at the animation at the beginning of the article to see how easy it is to deanonymize location data.
• You’re Tracked Everywhere You Go Online. Use This Guide to Fight Back.
  • Skim this to see the measures you can take to protect your data privacy.
• Experience Machine Learning: How Normal Am I & How Bad Is Your Spotify?
  • Explore how computers use data to analyze your face and roast your music taste. (Just for fun, of course!)

Questions

1. How do you interact with data (e.g., social media, Google searches, location tracking) in your daily life?
2. What do we give up when we share ourselves in the digital age?
3. Are there any benefits to big data?
4. How should times of crisis (e.g., a global pandemic) affect our rights to data privacy? (Think of using phones to track individual movement for the sake of tracing the virus.)
5. How do you think this can be resolved? What reforms do we need? Who is responsible for protecting our data privacy?