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E-book Data Power : Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance

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Penilaian

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One step after another, each recorded and located by the Global Position-ing System (GPS) and shared with the world. Sequential steps repeated daily in our morning run or commute become part of an economic cycle of digital tracking, extracting our location data and serving parts back to us as directions, as ads, as insurance rates. And also as egregious privacy violations which set off, like clockwork, another cycle—a media cycle. In 2018, Nathan Ruser revealed that Strava’s Global Heatmap of users’ exercise routes had inadvertently revealed the locations of several nominally secret military bases. A parade of news articles followed that ranged from how-to pieces on managing the fitness application’s privacy settings (Pardes 2018) to more widely questioning the very concept of privacy and informed consent (Tufekci 2018).The problem with this media cycle is not with any individual piece of content. Pardes’ WIRED article is an excellent guide to navigating Strava’s privacy and security settings. Rather, the problem lies in how each data scandal is framed as separate and surprising, seemingly unforeseeable even as each extraction of data for the purpose of profit inevitably sets up the conditions for exactly this kind of event (Thatcher 2018). Even a cursory glance at recent technology news reveals the cyclical nature of such spatial (geographic/location) data abuse narratives: before Strava there was Microsoft’s Avoiding the Ghetto patent (Thatcher 2014), and before that, Girls Around Me leveraged the Foursquare and Facebook data to help men stalk women (Bilton 2012). Examples of outrage, and even congressional and European Union (EU) court hearings (Jacobson 2020), abound, but policy is slow and at times reversed or co-opted by the companies it is meant to regulate. As with running for exercise, the destination of this data cycle isn’t the point; maintaining the cycle is. Continuing to extract our data themselves,1 and spatial data in particu-lar, is profitable. While an individual application or feature might change due to a data scandal, the overarching cycle of spatial data creation, extraction, and exchange with little regard for the users producing the data or other consequences continues apace.This is a book about what we can do to change that.Non-fiction narratives about technology tend to be either utopian or dystopian: eschatological visions of mobile applications ending pandemics or of drone strikes silencing political dissent. Accounts of Google’s attempted smart-city neighborhood in Toronto or Cambridge Analytica make for great stories, but they miss the forest for the trees. Both tropes oversimplify complex processes and contexts, hamstring-ing attempts to understand how individual cases reflect broader systems. Processes of profit-seeking and capital accumulation frame recent dis-cussions around technology, delimiting what is thought possible and desirable for technology to do. That need not be the case. More alter-natives are possible. We explore hopeful tactics and strategies for living amidst and moving beyond the ruins created by an ideology of tech-nology which “move[s] fast and break[s] things” (Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, quoted in Taneja 2019). In recent decades, technology firms sought to “disrupt” existing social relations and remake them in their own image: Facebook with friend-ship, Uber with movement, Google with knowledge. In so doing, ever greater parts of daily life, of personal identity, become the playground of this speculative form of capitalism.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

004 THA d

Penerbit

: Pluto Press., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

177 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781786805560

Klasifikasi

004

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Data Processing, Computer Science

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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