Classic theory-driven piece by Phil Agre

Today's students will become tomorrow’s software engineers, technology entrepreneurs, and professionals in other fields integral to the digital realm. Their attitudes toward data privacy will shape the policies and practices that govern the internet. Society needs to better understand college students' attitudes, expectations, and behaviors regarding data privacy.

Such organizations often deal in sensitive issues, like mental health, addiction, and reproductive rights—and many are feeding data about website visitors to corporations

In the midst of a pandemic and a national uprising, Teeth Logsdon-Wallace was kept awake at night last summer by the constant sounds of helicopters and sirens.  For the 13-year-old from Minneapolis who lives close to where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, the pandemic-induced isolation and social unrest amplifed his transgender dysphoria, emotional […]

Surveillance as a security threat

A new research paper written by a team of academics and computer scientists from Spain and Austria has demonstrated that it’s possible to use Facebook’s targeting tools to deliver an ad exclusively to a single individual if you know enough about the interests Facebook’s platform assigns them. The paper — entitled Unique on Facebook: Formulation […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new opportunities and new tensions         related to workplace surveillance. Monitoring workers via digital tools to analyze         everything from keystrokes to email and social media to the websites they visit is         increasingly common, and the shift to remote work in the early days of the pandemic led many         employers to consider new ways to monitor their employees while working from home. In this         paper, we consider how the pandemic has affected office workers’ experience of surveillance,         focusing on the types of monitoring they currently experience and their concerns related to         future forms of surveillance. In particular, we unpack the sociotechnical implications of         shifting work surveillance practices due to COVID-19, focusing on how evolving and emergent         workplace surveillance practices may impact workers. Using factorial vignettes, survey         respondents (N=645) read and responded to 35 scenarios about future workplace surveillance         practices. Each scenario randomly varied four factors about workplace monitoring: the type         of data being collected, the purpose for data collection, the actors who can access the         data, and the transmission principle guiding data collection. For each scenario, respondents         assessed both the appropriateness of each scenario and how concerning they found it. We         evaluate this data, as well as data about respondents’ work environment before and during         the pandemic, using Nissenbaum’s framework of privacy as contextual integrity. We also         consider the potential harms associated with different types of monitoring.

In 2019, federal investigators in Wisconsin were hunting men they believed had participated in the trafficking and sexual abuse of a minor.