Mobile Technologies: Participation and Surveillance

Mobile phones could become the largest surveillance system on the planet. These ubiquitous devices can sense and record data such as images, sound and location. They can automatically upload this data via wireless connections into systems for aggregation and analysis. But unlike traditional surveillance devices, phone sensors can be controlled by billions of individuals around the world. Are emerging mobile technologies platforms for citizen participation in research and discovery? Or new tools for mass surveillance? Location-based technologies and mobile phone applications like carbon footprint calculator Ecorio and Google’s Latitude are attracting attention and raising new questions for engineers, policy makers, and users. These systems collect and combine data in new ways, and their effects cross political boundaries. Who will build and control processes such as data storage, aggregation, sharing, and retention? What policies are required to control this data, and who sets them? And to what purposes will these systems be deployed? Humanists, social scientists, and technologists all have tools and perspectives to investigate these questions and contribute to a discussion of social issues in mobile sensing. This course brings together students from across campus to use some of those disciplinary tools and explore ethics and social challenges engendered by new technologies. Readings, discussion, design exercises and assignments will provide methods, tools, and contexts for unpacking the social issues embedded in emerging technologies. We will concentrate on the features of mobile technologies and how our worldview – specific cultural lenses, research practices, political orientations, economic pressures, popular narratives and fiction – influences how these features are imagined and built

Because privacy: defining and legitimating privacy in ios development

Privacy is a critical challenge for the mobile application ecosystem. US policy approaches to mobile data protection rely on privacy by design: approaches that encourage developers to proactively implement privacy features to protect sensitive data. But we know little about how application developers define privacy, how they decide to implement privacy features, and what might motivate them to consider privacy as a primary design value. This project identifies these factors by investigating the discussion of privacy as a professional practice within a community of mobile application developers. Analyzing posts on an iOS forum reveals that privacy is a frequent topic of conversation in this community. This paper describes how iOS developers define and legitimate privacy, and reveals a challenge: iOS developers rely heavily on a definition of privacy provided by Apple which does not reflect current empirical or theoretical understandings of how users understand privacy. Understanding this challenge can help us shape better guidelines for privacy by design, and broach challenges to the widespread adoption of privacy by design principles

Qualitative approaches to cybersecurity research

Although billions of dollars are spent each year securing network infrastructure, devices, and resources against threats, the impact of cybersecurity arrangements on individuals remains largely unexamined. Unless cybersecurity technologies, policies, and processes are built with people, and their diversity, in mind, the needs of wide swaths of society—including children and teens, the elderly, women, low-income families, and people with disabilities—are unlikely to be addressed. Though many methods are important for investigating motivations, practices, and affect, qualitative methods are particularly necessary for nuanced ways of knowing about these phenomena. But qualitative research constitutes just a fraction of cybersecurity research. This fishbowl session will focus on research to enable usable, livable, and inclusive cybersecurity by exploring qualitative ways of knowing in cybersecurity research

"That's Not An Architecture Problem!": Techniques and Challenges for Practicing Anticipatory Technology Ethics

Anticipatory technology ethics is the practice of analyzing how emerging technologies will be built, imagining how they might be used, and interpreting what their consequences might be. Information researchers and professionals are increasingly interested in understanding the possible social impacts of technologies before wide-spread deployment, and anticipatory technology ethics provides one lens through which to do so. This paper reports on two anticipatory ethics projects. These contrasting projects tested techniques for practicing anticipatory ethics, and also illuminated challenges that stem from diverse engineering work practices and the design of user-facing versus infrastructural technologies. In particular, the paper focuses on the problem of at what layer ethical issues can be found in technology design, and the ways that the material realities of design impact developers’ willingness and readiness to participate in anticipatory ethics.ye

Introduction to Values, Power, and Politics in Digital Infrastructures Minitrack

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Values as Generative Forces in Design

Abstract How do values inspire, energize, and politicize the design process? In turn, how does the process of design influence and inform our understanding of values? This workshop will explore the relationships between and amongst values, design, and creativity through a series of interactive activities, creative inquiry into the varied roles of values in the design process and design in the process of understanding values.ye

Toxicity Detection is NOT all you Need: Measuring the Gaps to Supporting Volunteer Content Moderators

Extensive efforts in automated approaches for content moderation have been focused on developing models to identify toxic, offensive, and hateful content -- with the aim of lightening the load for moderators. Yet, it remains uncertain whether improvements on those tasks truly address the needs that moderators have in accomplishing their work. In this paper, we surface the gaps between past research efforts that have aimed to provide automation for aspects of the content moderation task, and the needs of volunteer content moderators. To do so, we conduct a model review on Hugging Face to reveal the availability of models to cover various moderation rules and guidelines. We further put state-of-the-art LLMs to the test (GPT-4 and Llama-2), evaluating how well these models perform in flagging violations of platform rules. Overall, we observe a non-trivial gap, as missing developed models and LLMs exhibit low recall on a significant portion of the rules

Excavating Awareness and Power in Data Science: A Manifesto for Trustworthy Pervasive Data Research

Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such research and the relationship of pervasive data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. We suggest a way forward by drawing from the history of a different methodological approach in which researchers have struggled with trustworthy practice: ethnography. To grapple with the colonial legacy of their methods, ethnographers have developed analytic lenses and researcher practices that foreground relations of awareness and power. These lenses are inspiring but also challenging for pervasive data research, given the flattening of contexts inherent in digital data collection. We propose ways that pervasive data researchers can incorporate reflection on awareness and power within their research to support the development of trustworthy data science

The Expression of Power in ICT's Knowledge Enterprise: An Empirical Illustration of Computing's Colonial Impulse

ICT globalization continues to spread hardware, software, and accompanying technologies, so too does knowledges and trainings on those ICTs. This knowledge migration process has been linked by scholars to a ‘colonial impulse’ inherent in computing as a knowl- edge enterprise, which incorporates into broader colonizing forces. Through simultaneous explorations of dual case studies with a tribal ISP in California and an educational organization that works with indigenous First Nations communities in British Columbia, we depict how power circulates in this process, both empowering and disempowering communities. We then offer a brief argument for the need to foreground methods and approaches to disentangling these contradicting forces