Tuesday (Apr 9) – Privacy and Surveillance
- Reading: Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia, “There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia,” Motherboard/Vice, 9 Mar 2018.
- Listen: How much does Google know about you? – podcast | Technology | The Guardian (2019)
- In-class: Class discussion about privacy in the digital age.
Thursday (Apr 11) – Algorithmic Culture
- In-class screening: Coded Bias
- Due next Tuesday: Online Response #4 – Coded Bias
Links people, organizations, and issues raised in the film:
- Algorithmic Justice League
- Cathy O’Neil talking about her book Weapons of Math Destruction, Talks at Google, 2 Nov 2016.
- Virginia Eubanks, talking about her book Automating Inequality, University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy, Dec 2018.
- Nitasha Tiku, “Google hired Timnit Gebru to be an outspoken critic of unethical AI. Then she was fired for it.,” Washington Post, 23 Dec 2020.
KEY TERMS FOR THIS WEEK: privacy, personal data, metadata, surveillance, disinformation, Cambridge Analytica, algorithms
For further reading & research
- Kashmir Hill and Ryan Mac, “‘Thousands of Dollars for Something I Didn’t Do’,” New York Times, 31 Mar 2023.
- Ben Smith, “How TikTok Reads Your Mind,” New York Times, 5 Dec 2021.
- Amanda Levendowski, “Face Surveillance Was Always Flawed,” Public Books, 30 Nov 2021.
- Chris Gilliard, “A Black Woman Invented Home Security. Why Did It Go So Wrong?,” Wired, 14 Nov 2021.
- Podcast – “The Metaverse Is the Ultimate Surveillance Tool,” Cyber, 11 Nov 2021.
- The Media Manipulation Casebook.
- Kashmir Hill, “The Secret Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It,” New York Times, 18 Jan 2020.
- The Great Hack, Netflix, 2019.
- Democracy Now! coverage of Cambridge Analytica and The Great Hack, 7 Jan 2020.
- Here’s How To Find Out Who Has Your Data On Facebook (2019). And here’s how to download your own data.
- Woodrow Hartzog and “Why You Are No Longer Safe in the Crowd,” New York Times, 17 Apr 2019.
- and “Mass Propaganda Used to be Difficult, but Facebook Made it Easy,” Washington Post, 14 Feb 2020.
- Luke O’Brien, “The Far-Right Helped Create The World’s Most Powerful Facial Recognition Technology,” Huffington Post, 7 April 2020.
- David Cole, “Is Privacy Obsolete?,” The Nation, March 23, 2015.
