1,424 research outputs found
Theories that Refute Themselves
Many philosophical positions wholly undermine themselves because to possess the truth that they claim for themselves they would have to be false. These are the theories that in one way or another reject the meaningfulness or attainability of objective truth
Understanding the social in a digital age
Datafication, algorithms, social media and their various assemblages enable massive connective processes, enriching personal interaction and amplifying the scope and scale of public networks. At the same time, surveillance capitalists and the social quantification sector are committed to monetizing every aspect of human communication, all of which threaten ideal social qualities, such as togetherness and connection. This Special Issue brings together a range of voices and provocations around ‘the social’, all of which aim to critically interrogate mediated human connection and their contingent socialities. Conventional methods may no longer be adequate, and we must rethink not only the fabric of the social but the very tools we use to make sense of our changing social formations. This Special Issue raises shared concerns with what the social means today, unpicking and rethinking the seams between digitization and social life that characterize today’s digital age
Proximity Tracing in an Ecosystem of Surveillance Capitalism
Proximity tracing apps have been proposed as an aide in dealing with the
COVID-19 crisis. Some of those apps leverage attenuation of Bluetooth beacons
from mobile devices to build a record of proximate encounters between a pair of
device owners. The underlying protocols are known to suffer from false positive
and re-identification attacks. We present evidence that the attacker's
difficulty in mounting such attacks has been overestimated. Indeed, an attacker
leveraging a moderately successful app or SDK with Bluetooth and location
access can eavesdrop and interfere with these proximity tracing systems at no
hardware cost and perform these attacks against users who do not have this app
or SDK installed. We describe concrete examples of actors who would be in a
good position to execute such attacks. We further present a novel attack, which
we call a biosurveillance attack, which allows the attacker to monitor the
exposure risk of a smartphone user who installs their app or SDK but who does
not use any contact tracing system and may falsely believe that they have opted
out of the system.
Through traffic auditing with an instrumented testbed, we characterize
precisely the behaviour of one such SDK that we found in a handful of
apps---but installed on more than one hundred million mobile devices. Its
behaviour is functionally indistinguishable from a re-identification or
biosurveillance attack and capable of executing a false positive attack with
minimal effort. We also discuss how easily an attacker could acquire a position
conducive to such attacks, by leveraging the lax logic for granting permissions
to apps in the Android framework: any app with some geolocation permission
could acquire the necessary Bluetooth permission through an upgrade, without
any additional user prompt. Finally we discuss motives for conducting such
attacks
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