Group items tagged

There have been a lot of posts about web tracking in light of the recent changes in Google. This is an interesting article, but one of the things I like the best is the Collusion display of who's tracking your data.

Another shrouding tactic is to use the search engine DuckDuckGo, which distinguishes itself with a "We do not track or bubble you!" policy. Bubbling is the filtering of search results based on your search history. (Bubbling also means you are less likely to see opposing points of view or be exposed to something fresh and new.) *I don't particularly care about my privacy (nothing to hide and honestly don't care whose watching), but I do care about the information being fed to me through search engines. I pride myself on doing all the research I can before supporting or criticizing a position. If google is simply feeding me what I want to hear, how do I know I have the full story? This seems like a particularly nefarious form of censorship--one that makes sense in an age of "truthiness" and pandering to ignorance. Bad google. No bubbles.

This is a pretty straightforward, simplistic article (it is How Stuff Works ... I mean, come on) that deals with tracking computer use in the workplace. While not directly related to the Kirschenbaum, I thought it connected enough to post. It seemed like a potential point to launch into discussions on the permanence of data, and it reminded me of a year or two ago when Michelle sent out an e-mail asking people to stop using the resource room computers to look at porn. 

My new favorite Firefox add on that combats all the new privacy stuff unearthed about the big internet titans.

Google spent $5.03 million on lobbying in the first quarter of the year, almost matching its entire 2010 lobbying budget of $5.2 million. In comparison, Apple spent $500,000 and Microsoft spent $1.79 million during the same quarter. If Google maintains this pace, it will outspend the entire tobacco industry ($17 million) and the combined spending of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup ($18 million).

I've only given cursory attention to this site (when I checked it out, I found it less useful than I had thought it would be), but we've talked about technology monitoring people, breaking their identity into tiny bits of data, etc. and this website encourages people to do that to themselves to live a productive life ... in some ways it is kind of like the guy who photographs all his food, combined with an OCD, capitalist mindset. See also: any website that tracks your miles run, your calories consumed for the day, etc.

Keeping track of passwords is definitely a hassle for most of us, so a service that groups all of them didn't seem far off. It will be interesting to see how this develops, and if it will catch on and be secure.

Considering how often we look at TED talks, I thought it might be worth including this fake TED talk used as a clip for the new Ridley Scott movie, Prometheus. I know this probably looks a little like getting off track, but I thought it was interesting that the author claims that humans have become gods through their acts of technological creation (in his case, "cyberkinetic individuals). Science fiction often does a great job extrapolating certain ideas or issues, and I think in some ways we can find links to the issue and use of Wikipedia in which we can freely take place in the act of creation or manipulation of a text and even the meaning behind the entries we change. Obviously this is not necessarily created in our own image the way a cyborg would be, but it is still using McLuhan's idea of the extension of man into the cyber world. The question we're left with here though, is whether or not we deserve the moniker of "creator" if we create anonymously.

Fast track to being a billionaire. (And a Facebook timeline.)

A little late in the game, but the wording here is really interesting because the censorship of bloggers by the Chinese government includes works with imagined information. In addition, they specifically cut off the comments option. We have a direct moment here where the 2.0 and call and response of online writing is considered poisonous to government action, even if the work is a fictional piece. The most important thing to note here is that China is now requiring all microbloggers to use their real names. We talked about how useful a tracked name can be, but in this case practicality loses over privacy.

McLuhan and Bogart would probably enjoy this article because it involves procedural rhetoric. It examines how "gamification strategies"--using games to change behavior in real life--can promote energy efficiency. Companies like SimpleEnergy are creating apps that let users track their energy usage, find ways to improve, and compete with friends and neighbors for spots on a leaderboard. Gamification succeeds because apparently social pressure can motivate people even more than monetary incentives, and these initiatives combine both types of incentives: An energy usage competition at the University of Hawaii led to some dorms cutting energy usage by up to 20 percent. This specific method also allows users to save money and conserve energy without "radical infrastructure changes" or the corruption and waste that often results from government subsidies to politically-connected "green" companies like Solyndra and possibly Sapphire Energy. In addition, the apps provide large-scale energy usage data that researchers can use to measure both change over time and the impact of energy usage on other variables.