101 research outputs found
Intelligent Personal Assistants and the Intercultural Negotiations of Dataveillance in Platformed Households
The platformization of households is increasingly possible with the introduction of “intelligent personal assistants” (IPAs)
embedded in smart, always-listening speakers and screens, such as Google Home and the Amazon Echo. These devices exemplify
Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” by commodifying familial and social spaces and funneling data into corporate networks.
However, the motivations driving the development of these platforms—and the dataveillance they afford—vary: Amazon appears
focused on collecting user data to drive personalized sales across its shopping platform, while Google relies on its vast dataveillance
infrastructure to build its AI-driven targeted advertising platform. This paper draws on cross-cultural focus groups regarding IPAs
in the Netherlands and the United States. It reveals how respondents in these two countries articulate divergent ways of negotiating
the dataveillance affordances and privacy concerns of these IPA platforms. These findings suggest the need for a nuanced approach
to combating and limiting the potential harms of these home devices, which may otherwise be seen as equivalents
Affordances-in-practice:an ethnographic critique of social media logic and context collapse
Drawing on data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, this article shows that social media users actively appropriate online platforms and change privacy settings in order to keep different social spheres and social groups apart. Keeping different online social contexts distinct from each other is taken for granted as a way of using social media in Mardin. By contrast, social media scholars have extensively discussed the effects of social media in terms of context collapse. The article highlights how context collapse is the result of patterns of usage within Anglo-American contexts and not the consequence of a platform's architecture or social media logic. It then suggests a theoretical refinement of affordances, and proposes the concept of affordances-in-practice
On violating one’s own privacy: N-adic utterances and inadvertent disclosures in online venues
Purpose: To understand the phenomena of people revealing regrettable information on the Internet, we examine who people think they’re addressing, and what they say, in the process of interacting with those not physically or temporally co-present. Design/methodology/approach: We conduct qualitative analyses of interviews with student bloggers and observations of five years’ worth of their blog posts, drawing on linguists’ concepts of indexical ground and deictics. Based on analyses of how bloggers reference their shared indexical ground and how they use deictics, we expose bloggers’ evolving awareness of their audiences, and the relationship between this awareness and their disclosures. Findings: Over time, writers and their regular audience, or “chorus,” reciprocally reveal personal information. However, since not all audience members reveal themselves in this venue, writers’ disclosures are available to those observers they are not aware of. Thus, their over-disclosure is tied to what we call the “n-adic” organization of online interaction. Specifically, and as can be seen in their linguistic cues, N-adic utterances are directed towards a non-unified audience whose invisibility makes the discloser unable to find out the exact number of participants or the time they enter or exit the interaction. Research implications: Attention to linguistic cues, such as deictics, is a compelling way to identify the shifting reference groups of ethnographic subjects interacting with physically or temporally distant others. Originality/value: We describe the social organization of interaction with undetectable others. N-adic interactions likely also happen in other on- and offline venues in which participants are obscured but can contribute anonymously.postprin
Participant Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics
Social computing systems such as Twitter present new research sites that have provided billions of data points to researchers. However, the availability of public social media data has also presented ethical challenges. As the research community works to create ethical norms, we should be considering users’ concerns as well. With this in mind, we report on an exploratory survey of Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research. Within our survey sample, few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use tweets without consent. However, we find that these attitudes are highly contextual, depending on factors such as how the research is conducted or disseminated, who is conducting it, and what the study is about. The findings of this study point to potential best practices for researchers conducting observation and analysis of public data
Social media for health promotion and weight management: A critical debate
© 2018 The Author(s). Background: In 2016 an estimated 1.9 billion adults world-wide were either overweight or obese. The health consequences of obesity are responsible for 2.8 million preventable deaths per year. The WHO now considers obesity as a global epidemic and recommends population-wide health promotion strategies to address this issue. Weight gain is caused by increased energy intake and physical inactivity, so treatment should focus on changes to behaviour regarding diet and physical activity. Discussion: The WHO has also recognised the importance of social resources as a valuable agent for behaviour change in health promotion. Social resources are translated at the community level as support provided by significant others such as family, partners and peers, in the form of information, material aid and encouragement. Social support has been shown to improve health and well-being, whereas social isolation has been shown to have a negative impact on health outcomes. Social support provided by peers has been shown to be a useful strategy to employ in weight management programmes. The documented increased use of ICT and social media has presented health promoters with a potentially useful medium to increase social support for weight management. Conclusion: While the use of social media for health promotion is an emerging field of investigation, preliminary research suggests that it increases participant engagement, and may provide a cost-effective tool to provide social support for individuals participating in weight management programmes. With stringent privacy protocols in place, social media may be a useful, cost-effective accompaniment to multifactorial weight management programmes. However more research is needed to identify how to make the best use of social media as health promotion tool
Americans’ willingness to adopt a covid-19 tracking app
The COVID-19 global pandemic led governments, health agencies, and technology companies to work on solutions to minimize the spread of the disease. One such solution concerns contact-tracing apps whose utility is tied to widespread adoption. Using survey data collected a few weeks into lockdown measures in the United States, we explore Americans’ willingness to install a COVID-19 tracking app. Specifically, we evaluate how the distributor of such an app (e.g., government, health-protection agency, technology company) affects people’s willingness to adopt the tool. While we find that 67 percent of respondents are willing to install an app from at least one of the eight providers included, the factors that predict one’s willingness to adopt differ. Using Nissenbaum’s theory of privacy as contextual integrity, we explore differences in responses across distributors and discuss why some distributors may be viewed as less appropriate than others in the context of providing health-related apps during a global pandemic. We conclude the paper by providing policy recommendations for wide-scale data collection that minimizes the likelihood that such tools violate the norms of appropriate information flows
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Characterizing the use of browser-based blocking extensions to prevent online tracking
© 2018 by The USENIX Association All Rights Reserved. Browser-based blocking extensions such as Ad blockers and Tracker blockers have provisions that allow users to counter online tracking. While prior research has shown that these extensions suffer from several usability issues, we know little about real world blocking extension use, why users choose to adopt these extensions, and how effectively these extensions protect users against online tracking. To study these questions, we conducted two online surveys examining both users and non-users of blocking extensions. We have three main findings. First, we show both users and non-users of these extensions only possess a basic understanding of online tracking, and that participants' mental models only weakly relate with their behavior to adopt these extensions. Second, we find that that each type of blocking extension has a specific primary use associated with it. Finally, we find that users report that extensions only rarely break websites. However when websites break, users only disable their extensions if they trust and are familiar with the website. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for designing better protections against online tracking and outline directions for future work
Americans’ willingness to adopt a COVID-19 tracking app: The role of app distributor
The COVID-19 global pandemic led governments, health agencies, and technology companies to work on solutions to minimize the spread of the disease. One such solution concerns contact-tracing apps whose utility is tied to widespread adoption. Using survey data collected a few weeks into lockdown measures in the United States, we explore Americans’ willingness to install a COVID-19 tracking app. Specifically, we evaluate how the distributor of such an app (e.g., government, health-protection agency, technology company) affects people’s willingness to adopt the tool. While we find that 67 percent of respondents are willing to install an app from at least one of the eight providers included, the factors that predict one’s willingness to adopt differ. Using Nissenbaum’s theory of privacy as contextual integrity, we explore differences in responses across distributors and discuss why some distributors may be viewed as less appropriate than others in the context of providing health-related apps during a global pandemic. We conclude the paper by providing policy recommendations for wide-scale data collection that minimizes the likelihood that such tools violate the norms of appropriate information flows
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