Inclass discussion

Song

People see surveillance capitalism now and then:

There was a time that people were really passionate about big data analysis and the benefit it can bring to our lives. Yet with its development, more are feeling uncomfortable of being watched and there is nothing they can do about it but covering their laptop camera with a piece of tape. People are being more critical about this idea and I do think there should be some policy and regulations that restrict companies stealing data from users and monitoring their behaviour without permission.

How can it be used in a better way:

When I read about behavior I immediately thought about behavioral change especially in the field of sustainable development where it requires behavioural change. Rather than generating useless ads based on user behavior, I think this data should be used in a way so that people feel motivated to change their inappropriate behaviors. For example there are many reading apps that will remind you to take a rest for your eyes after reading for 30mins.

 

Echo

The way I see dirty data is beyond noise and worthless information. When we judge something based on our previous experience, we always have some data bias. As the example in the article shows that most of people think it’s impossible that the demographic information about customers for a luxury hotel chain shows that teens from a wealthy Middle Eastern country were frequent guests. We can witness a lot of Apophenia in nowadays; people are just trying to make connection between something that is not that related. I think it’s better to get out of the box. Instead of calculate the probability that a refugee might be terrorists based on some algorithm, we should look at things and data from a more critical perspective. In addition, when we extract, mine, harvest data to find some signals, we should refuse to be biased based on our own judgement. Here is something I also resonate with about surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism accumulates not only surveillance assets and capital but also rights, concentrated within the surveillance regime, opening up an entirely new dimension of social inequality. The way big companies are profiting from individual’s personal data is a good example for that. And it’s also the main difference from now and then.

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