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"The files were then downloaded through the Bitglass proxy service, in which a unique watermark was applied to each copy, so that the company could track when the data was viewed and/or downloaded from that point forward. The firm used a basic "phishing" technique to entice criminals on the Dark Web. The data had been viewed over 200 times in just a few days, and in 12 days it had received more than 1,000 clicks, and had spread across the globe in 22 different countries, in five different continents."

"O'Neill recounts an exercise to improve service to homeless families in New York City, in which data-analysis was used to identify risk-factors for long-term homelessness. The problem, O'Neill describes, was that many of the factors in the existing data on homelessness were entangled with things like race (and its proxies, like ZIP codes, which map extensively to race in heavily segregated cities like New York). Using data that reflects racism in the system to train a machine-learning algorithm whose conclusions can't be readily understood runs the risk of embedding that racism in a new set of policies, these ones scrubbed clean of the appearance of bias with the application of objective-seeming mathematics. "

"This is where Google's Project Shield comes through: sites pre-register with Google to "reverse proxy" their traffic through Google's cloud platform. By making a change in DNS, publishers can route all their traffic through Google. This means that a DDoS attack has to be sufficiently robust as to take down Google's cloud (much harder than taking down a WordPress install on a rack in a commodity hosting provider)"

"In Skinner's studies, lab rats were subjected alternately to electric shocks and treats to achieve a change in response. On social media, he says, we experience something similar. "I believe I see that people who are subject to operant conditioning online, meaning subjected to pleasant or unpleasant experiences." Approval, disapproval or being ignored, such techniques can be manipulated online as part of what is euphemistically called "engagement" and the creation of addictive patterns for individuals and then - by proxy - eventually whole societies."