Being discreet online

I know some friends that have closed their Facebook accounts because they supposedly don’t want to leave any kind of information for Facebook to track, however I believe they are a bit too late. Facebook has already used their information to train their algorithms and keep on using its user’s information.

As detailed by this article written by Zeynep Tufekci, these algorithms can already make accurate predictions through the use of previously available data in order to gain more information about you. Even though your profile is gone, most of the information Facebook gathered about you is probably still stored in their servers and was used to make predictions and create a more accurate profile of you.

The amount of users Facebook has allows their platform to use these algorithms to create profiles of their users so that they can possibly be targeted by advertisers. The article even mentions the possibility of Facebook targetting young teenagers that may suffer depression or “need a confidence boost”. These can lead to serious ethical issues, I mean, all these data gathering seems pretty unethical in the first place, but now targetting your depressed users with special ads for them seems borderline illegal and abusive. A lot of people say “lmao just get off the internet”, however young people today, including myself, have become quite dependent on the internet, be it to stay connected to our friends, to do homework, etc. so it can actually be a bit difficult to “just get off the internet”. There are also people literally addicted to social media, the attention and dopamine they get from people reacting to their new pictures and submissions.

Tufekci suggests as a solution to create mobile devices that are more privacy oriented. However if the companies selling you these smartphones are the same ones that want to collect all of your information, I don’t see a reason for these companies to actually go ahead and do it if they aren’t forced to. There needs to be a government regulation of how much access companies have to our devices and our information.

My One Assignment

One assignment to finish it all, One assigment to stress them; One assignment to bring them all and to graduation guide them.

This semester I had a course about Smart Cities, which I then discovered was better named Smart Citizens, according to my professor Ken Bauer. I could not agree more, making a city smart while keeping the citizens dumb sounds like a very unfortunate dystopia for us citizens. Having a smart city doesn’t do too much good if their citizens are not actually smart.

Talking a little bit more about the class, at the beginning my team, which is Hermes, Miguel and I, were supposed to work with a team from the University of Alberta in a joint project, however we came into a disagreement because all we were going to do was the front-end part of their project, which we didn’t really feel like doing and the three of us weren’t very familiarized with front-end developing.

With this I learned about the differences there can be when working as a team in the professional environment, of course in this case our professor Ken was nice enough to support us in our decision of not working with the UA team, however in other circumstances or perhaps with another professor, things could have been different. If this was a project the company we work at put us in charge of doing we probably could not have said no that easily, we may have even been fired for refusing to work on the project, since it is supposed to be our job. I hope I don’t get stuck in a job working with technologies I am not even interested in using, although I believe it is quite possible it happens at one point or the other of my professional career.

Since this happened, we decided to work on our project which still involved gamification, which was the aspect the UA team wanted to work with from the beginning, but focused for the Tec community. What we decided to was an app where Tec students can earn badges for assisting to events and participating in sports team and cultural activities, creating a resume of extracurricular activities. Since there are a lot of companies that look forward to applicants having passions other than academic stuff, we believe this could be useful. We would also like to get Tec involved for possible rewards to outstanding students.

Something that makes me sad is that when thinking about smart citizens is that when I think about a citizen being smart, I think about a citizen being smart enough to not be taken advantage of, be it by other citizens or by the government in charge of the city. This semester I wrote an essay about the ethical aspects of government surveillance in the modern days through the use of technology, particularly in communications, including phone calls and internet traffic. In it I talk about how government surveillance has become a necessary evil to mantain national security in this complex world we live in, however a limit must exist in how much of our privacy we are willing to give up and check if all these surveillance is really giving the results we would expect in exchange for the constant breaches to the privacy of millions of people. External institutions that regulate how much access the government has to our private information must exist in order to try and preserve as much of our privacy as possible, you can read my essay (in spanish) here.

Related to surveillance, we also talked about how data is now everywhere and used by everyone, our own data is used without our permission by big corporations in order to gain more profits. “Digital intelligence is neither inherently virtuous nor corrupt; however, as efficient as these technologies may be, we must continue to critically reflect upon the type of city we want.” This is very tied to the lack of ethics in the current tech industry, most programmers, I must say that including myself, view users as some kind of dumb entity that will be interacting with our system, granting us some input for us to process and spurting out something for them. I feel there needs to be a class specifically dedicated to professional ethics in the software industry, because there are some classes that do show some code of ethics, like the ACM one, but they just turn into another topic in the course that will be forgotten by students the next semester. Companies need to realize that algorithms making decisions that affect the life of millions of people greatly, need some kind of regulation to ensure their effectiveness, as well as some kind of control that prevents bias, because no matter how impartial one as a developer tries to be, we all have biases and preferences that have grown into us as we have grown up. We must really take into account the ethical dilemma of creating new technologies that may affect the lives of people these days, as new technologies becoming more and more entangled in our daily lives.

Internet freedom is at risk, every day, tech companies gather our information left and right, they supposedly do so to make our experience using their services better, but what happens when the government orders these companies to give them full access to all of their user’s data? Privacy is violated.

I believe that there is lack of ethics in general, not only in the software community, but in all the industry that is in charge of handling user data and possibly sensitive information.

“The most overarching and important is the Kantian idea of respect for the dignity of the person. When the self can be technologically invaded without permission and even often without the knowledge of the person, dignity and liberty are diminished.”  (Marx, 1998, 21).

In the last classes we also talked about surveillance and data privacy a lot, I believe this class was very focused on this and I really liked it since I had other classes where I was also talking about these topics. I also wrote about the US government surveilling its arab communities and about how Facebook can already predict a lot of your data without having it directly available with a fair amount of accuracy.

References:

AI used to unredact FBI documents

Internet Freedom in a Surveillance World

Marx, G. (1998). An Ethics for The New Surveillance.The Information Society, MIT. Obtained from: http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/ncolin5.html

Smart Surveillance

Smart Citizens – Week 8

Should This Exist? – A question the software industry should must ask itself

 

AI used to unredact FBI documents

On this blog I will talk about how AI is being used to reveal information hidden by the FBI of a decades-long program of spying on US Muslims. There is a countless amount of evidence of the US government not being held accountable for unethical and illegal practices they incur into when they spy on their own citizens. After Assia Boundaoui won a lawsuit against the FBI, they were forced to release 30,000 documents that detail operation Vulgar Betrayal, which is focused on the surveillance of the Illinois arab community. However, as she received the documents, she realized that more than 70% of the document’s contents were redacted for the sake of “national security”.

It should come with no surprise that the US government is spying on its own citizens, it is something they have been doing for quite a long time, however people seem to be okay with being watched all the time these days. They feel like the information they post online is not very important, while it can actually be taken advantage of.

People need to be aware that nowadays they are always being watched, every bit of activity they do online, or that has anything to do with modern devices, is likely being tracked. Just carrying your cellphone around with you even without you using it, makes you leave a digital footprint of things you were doing and places you were at.

Talking a bit more about the article, since most of the documents are redacted, an AI is being used to try and “decrypt” these documents. Through the analysis of previous documents based on race surveillance and other FBI documents, there are hopes that we can get more information contained in the documents than the government wants us to see. This all helps to have a more transparent government. Having a government that is more transparent, at least in my opinion, makes the people trust the government a bit more, since we can actually know what they are doing and if anything they do is actually threatening any of us.

Week 9 – Python Unit Testing

• Screenshot image of your annotation left (using Hypothes.is with your login) on the document “Simple Smalltalk Testing: With Patterns“. PLEASE include a tc3045 tag in the annotation. See my example at the end of this document.
  • Note that you will need to login to Hypothes.is (Enlaces a un sitio externo.)Enlaces a un sitio externo. and most likely by using the Chrome browser with this. A previous assignment in the course had you set this up.
  • Note that this is on the WayBackMachine site. What is this and how is it important? Can you find an old (90s) version of a popular company and view that version of their website? Take a screenshot to include in your submission.

WayBackMachine is a website which periodically stores a website’s content for future revision, it can store many versions of the same page as years pass. It allows us to see how websites were before and view any information previously stored there in the case that in the future it is no longer there, or the website is no longer there, like it happened with the SmallTalk testing article.

 

• Your evidence (again screenshots) of using PyCharm with pyunit.

• Your evidence in the form of review/comments on the course in LinkedIn.