"What You Should Know About Online Tools During the COVID-19 Crisis" from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) (Español)
COVID-19 and Student Privacy: Zotero Reading List from #LibrariesResist
"Coronavirus, Tracking, and Civil Liberties" from the Brennan Center for Justice
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
Dark Matters by
Simone Browne shows how racial ideologies and the long history of policing black bodies under transatlantic slavery structure contemporary surveillance technologies and practices. Analyzing a wide array of archival and contemporary texts, she demonstrates how surveillance reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines.
Data and Goliath by
Data is everywhere. We create it every time we go online, turn our phone on (or off) or pay with a credit card. This data is stored, studied, bought and sold by companies and governments for surveillance and for control. "Foremost security expert" (Wired) Bruce Schneier shows how this data has led to a double-edged Internet--a Web that gives power to the people but is abused by the institutions on which those people depend. In Data and Goliath, Schneier reveals the full extent of surveillance, censorship and propaganda in society today, examining the risks of cybercrime, cyberterrorism and cyberwar. He shares technological, legal and social solutions that can help shape a more equal, private and secure world.
Digital Privacy by
While traveling the data highway through the global village, most people, if they think about it at all, consider privacy a non-forfeitable right. They expect to have control over the ways in which their personal information is obtained, distributed, shared, and used by any other entity. According to recent surveys, privacy, and anonymity are the fundamental issues of concern for most Internet users, ranked higher than ease-of-use, spam, cost, and security. Digital Privacy: Theory, Techniques, and Practices covers state-of-the-art technologies, best practices, and research results, as well as legal, regulatory, and ethical issues. Editors Alessandro Acquisti, Stefanos Gritzalis, Costas Lambrinoudakis, and Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati, established researchers whose work enjoys worldwide recognition, draw on contributions from experts in academia, industry, and government to delineate theoretical, technical, and practical aspects of digital privacy. They provide an up-to-date, integrated approach to privacy issues that spells out what digital privacy is and covers the threats, rights, and provisions of the legal framework in terms of technical counter measures for the protection of an individual's privacy. The work includes coverage of protocols, mechanisms, applications, architectures, systems, and experimental studies. Even though the utilization of personal information can improve customer services, increase revenues, and lower business costs, it can be easily misused and lead to violations of privacy. Important legal, regulatory, and ethical issues have emerged, prompting the need for an urgent and consistent response by electronic societies. Currently there is no book available that combines such a wide range of privacy topics with such a stellar cast of contributors. Filling that void, Digital Privacy: Theory, Techniques, and Practices gives you the foundation for building effective and legal privacy protocols into your business processes.
None of Your Damn Business by
You can hardly pass through customs at an airport today without having your picture taken and your fingertips scanned, that information then stored in an archive you'll never see. Nor can you use your home's smart technology without wondering what, exactly, that technology might do with all you've shared with it: shopping habits, security decisions, media choices. Every day, Americans surrender their private information to entities that claim to have their best interests in mind, in exchange for a promise of safety or convenience. This trade-off has long been taken for granted, but the extent of its nefariousness has recently become much clearer. As Lawrence Cappello's None of Your Damn Business reveals, the problem is not so much that data will be used in ways we don't want, but rather how willing we have been to have our information used, abused, and sold right back to us. In this startling book, Cappello shows that this state of affairs was not the inevitable by-product of technological progress. He targets key moments from the past 130 years of US history when privacy was central to battles over journalistic freedom, national security, surveillance, big data, and reproductive rights. As he makes dismayingly clear, Americans have had numerous opportunities to protect the public good while simultaneously safeguarding our information, and we've squandered them every time. The wide range of the debates and incidents presented here shows that, despite America's endless rhetoric of individual freedom, we actually have some of the weakest privacy protections in the developed world. None of Your Damn Business is a rich and provocative survey of an alarming topic that grows only more relevant with each fresh outrage of trust betrayed.
The Poverty of Privacy Rights by
The Poverty of Privacy Rights makes a simple, controversial argument: Poor mothers in America have been deprived of the right to privacy. The U.S. Constitution is supposed to bestow rights equally. Yet the poor are subject to invasions of privacy that can be perceived as gross demonstrations of governmental power without limits. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality of privacy invasions on the poor, and legal scholars typically understand marginalized populations to have "weak versions" of the privacy rights everyone else enjoys. Khiara M. Bridges investigates poor mothers' experiences with the state--both when they receive public assistance and when they do not. Presenting a holistic view of just how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers' privacy, Bridges shows how the Constitution has not been interpreted to bestow these women with family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Bridges seeks to turn popular thinking on its head: Poor mothers' lack of privacy is not a function of their reliance on government assistance--rather it is a function of their not bearing any privacy rights in the first place. Until we disrupt the cultural narratives that equate poverty with immorality, poor mothers will continue to be denied this right.
Race after Technology by
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the "New Jim Code," she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.