Reflection: Leaks, Data Leaks

Enough about out project. Let's talk about something else.

 What do you think about when you hear the words “data leak”? For me personally, controversial hacks
to famous social networks and online stores come to mind. But that’s the thing, that’s not the only data
you should be worried about leaking... there’s a lot more information about you out there than you know.
There’s a lot more research going into this than you think, too. One’s presence on the Internet, trace,
contributions and records can be called our Digital Footprint. For you to be reading this, you must
certainly have one too. For an increasing majority (me included), this footprint extends way beyond
our awareness, spreading far beyond boundaries with (or without) intention.
This footprint is commonly broken down into active and passive traces, data exhaust is part of the
latter. Rather than being data that people consciously create, it’s data that people unintentionally
generate, unaware that it results as a byproduct of people’s online choices and interactions.
Some examples of this are cookies generated by web browsers and plugins, log files, temporary files,
etc.
This all comes as an interesting conflict between marketing and privacy/security, naturally. The main
objective of all this data exhaust is to identify a subject across different services and model their
behavior/tastes. This information is used for most free services (just think, what isn’t free nowadays?)
to show you the best possible product suggestions or such and such. Problem is, software designed
to be private and secure often disrupts online marketing and business models.
In 2017, Facebook allegedly told advertisers that they could predict when users were geeling
“insecure” or in need of a “confidence boost”. As this article mentions, the worrying thing is that few
people posting photos on Instagram area aware that they might be revealing their mental health status
to anyone with the right power.

The good things is, at the end of the day, a lot of it it's under our control. If we are careful about our
active digital footprint, our passive digital footprint becomes less of an issue. Just think about it, do I
really need to scrap the whole Internet for the latest gossip and memes at 2:00am?

Sources
Rouse, M. data exhaust. WhatIs. Recuperado de https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/data-exhaust
Tufecki, Z. (21 de abril de 2019). Think You’re Discreet Online? Think Again. The New York Times. Recuperado de https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/opinion/computational-inference.html

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas más populares de este blog

Team Blog Week 3

Imagen
This week, following our meeting on Monday, our communication with the Alberta team has been more constant. They've let us in some of the details we missed from our video meeting and informed us of some specific requirements their clients have. We've also been discussing with them about which technologies we've used in the past and feel most comfortable with. This has led to some agreement on the most part, deciding that (mostly) we'll be taking on the web development side of the project and them on the mobile client. We were also presented with a general idea of what this app is planned to look like: With all this in mind, we've decided as a team to go with the following system features: visualization of points of Interest in map routes creation with multiple points of interest, in order routes can be approved or dismissed by other users information about MiBici stations for routes information about points of interested can be edited by users automat
Leer más

Week 1 Planning

Imagen
This week we plan to continue researching about similar projects to what “Yeg AR” aims for, to get a better understanding of what existing products are out there already. Using the document that explains what the project is about, we identified some technologies that are proposed to be used in the project. We will research the technologies as well as how to implement them with AR. It would be great if we find sometime for us to actually chat with the students from Alberta, to agree on the requirements, specifications, tools to be used and how we’ll distribute the work. From what we’ve read in the project description, details aren’t so clear. So we’ll write down concrete questions we would like to ask them. All our team posts will be published with the teampost tag, immediately available through https://martellsmartcities.blogspot.com/search/label/teampost We created a repository for the project but depending on how we organize with the alberta team we might create a
Leer más

Plan Week 6

Imagen
This week we plan to continue developing our back-end side of the project. Mostly though, we'll be centered on figuring out how to use the Steps API previously developed by the Alberta team so that we add there additional info and media for important landmarks. The thing is, right now the Steps project is structured around "sidewalks", routes. We're not yet sure how we'll add landmarks, perhaps as routes that start and end at the same coordinates? The documentation for Steps is not very clear for where we can add this information. Hopefully we'll figure out a way, or a workaround, soon. image obtained from https://searchengineland.com/founder-openstreetmap-good-better-google-maps-already-192089
Leer más