Midterm Blog Post
So far this term I have begun to familiarize myself with the world of digital security and personal privacy. I have conducted informational interviews with people who work in fields that are deeply intertwined with both privacy and security, and I have done several research dives into the underbelly of the hacking world, exploring topics such as Gamergate, identity theft, and how to safeguard your personal information. I’ve learned that as a society we have progressed to a point where in order to live comfortably and “normally,” it is almost necessary to sell your personal information (particularly to the “Big Five” tech companies, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook) for convenient services. Being accustomed to giving up personal information all the time leads to a culture in which we don’t treat private information as private, and adopt an “I’ve got nothing to hide” mentality. This can lead to huge personal issues such as identity theft, because the worry is not really about hiding, but rather about controlling your digital presence, and who can be you.
Aside from the research, I am also pursuing technical knowledge of cybersecurity, by following the online syllabus for Carleton’s cybersecurity course, and completing Lynda tutorials on web, server, and application security. I hope to use these skills moving forward to contribute to assessments of CMSs for our comparison project, and leverage these skills into professional opportunities in which I can learn more about the field and industry of security.
Questions on Digital Privacy and Security
Over the long winter break, I began thinking and learning about digital privacy and security. After being exposed to the surface-level issues of corporate data-mining, social engineering, and personal digital privacy, I decided that one of my goals for this term would be to deepen my understanding of how privacy works in the digital world, and more broadly just in modern life.
You don’t have to look too far to find guides written by obsessive, privacy-minded techies with titles like “Hiding from the Internet.” There are people out there who will go to extremes to be completely concealed from the public eye, going so far as to buy cars with cash through fake LLCs, using temporary, preloaded visa gift cards for purchases, and never giving out their home address to anybody. On the other end of the spectrum are people who will happily trade privacy for convenience, who enjoy the luxury of services provided by Google, Amazon, and others, who don’t care that “their data” (whatever that may mean) is being stored in the elusive “cloud” and is being sold by companies to each other so that you see personalized ads.
Privacy seems like something that is intuitively desirable, and obviously provides some measures of personal security. On the other hand, barring instances of targeted attacks, there is certainly a case to be made from the “I don’t care” point of view — it could well be worth the potentially painless loss of privacy for some people to have access to all the free services, discounts, and other conveniences made available to us when we buy in to the system. Furthermore, there are plenty of people who don’t have the privileges (be it lack of time, money, or freedom in the workplace) to pursue complete digital privacy. What happens to them? What are the implications?
This term I hope to investigate digital privacy, learn about how our data is being used in the public and corporate sphere, and determine how much control we have over it. With a thorough understanding of the business models, cultures, and processes in place that contribute to the widespread privacy violations we see today, I will be able to critically assess the risks and advantages associated with different personal privacy strategies.
Ethics in Internet Infrastructure
This term was my first term working as the Digital Scholarship Ethics intern at Carleton. After learning the ropes, I was able to dive into research in fascinating and applicable fields. This term I learned how the web works, which was an important piece of groundwork for my research into digital ethics. As part of that research, I explored topics including web accessibility, personal/consumer data privacy, and large-scale algorithmic bias.
Web Development
My primary technical focus this term was to learn, broadly speaking, how websites work. I wanted to learn how a website is constructed and displayed in browsers, how it is accessed and used by the public, and what infrastructure is involved in hosting websites of various levels of complexity. After ten weeks, I can say that I have built four websites from the ground up: a database driven web application, a third-party hosted static site, a Drupal site, and a dynamic LAPP stack site. Through these projects, I feel as though I have gained a thorough understanding of the different methods and layers of web development, although there is always more to learn. I created the following diagrams to illustrate the technological processes behind what I perceive to be the two prominent models of web development.
Dynamic Web Server
Static Site Generator
Digital Ethics
My research into digital ethics this term focused on two primary areas: potentially unethical behavior unintentionally baked into popular software, and data privacy and ownership. As part of a project with the other interns, I conducted a survey of four popular content management systems, and attempted to establish standards for ethical comparison amongst them. We learned that depending on which aspect of ethics a particular organization focused on, their software would manifest itself with different advantages and disadvantages. For instance, WordPress, whose mission is to make web publishing available to as many people as possible, is incredibly widespread, and user-friendly. However, while there are options available to make Wordpress accessible and secure, it takes a more advanced user to implement these changes. As such, for a more novice user, Wordpress sites can be more vulnerable to security breaches and may not be as accessible out-of-the-box as Drupal. Drupal, on the other hand, whose focus is explicitly on high quality software, routinely rolls out patches to fix bugs and security vulnerabilities. Mukurtu is concerned with the ethical sharing and publicizing of heritage objects, and as a result, they have a very sophisticated permissions management system that regulates exactly which visitors to the site can view and edit particular items. The strengths of any software turn out to be directly related to the values and priorities of the organization that creates it.
The negative end of this spectrum is what happens when companies are most concerned with developing and distributing cutting-edge technology quickly. Fake news being surfaced by the search algorithms of Google and Facebook, algorithmic bias in machine learning, and racist computer vision are all results of development teams rushing to deploy features without thinking deeply enough about the ethical potentials of their software.
Of at least equal concern to the ethical grey areas being coded into our software is the collection and use of personal data. This term I have researched the intersection between corporations, individuals, and governments. Some corporations view personal data as a kind of currency; Individuals view it, at best, as a bargaining chip that can be exchanged for convenience, and at worst, as an aspect of our lives that we are rapidly losing control over. Governments are playing catch-up, trying to understand the best approach to business regulation that both ensures a certain level of individual privacy (which also needs to be determined) and is actually enforceable. It is fascinating to read about this conflict playing out in real time, as corporations try to self-regulate, governments try to figure out what to do, and individuals are all over the place in their beliefs about what should be the standards for privacy and government regulation.
World Usability Day Conference
The other interns and I all attended World Usability Day on November 8th at the University of Minnesota. Presentation topics ranged from the fundamentals of accessible web design, to analyses of algorithmic bias, to the ethics of corporate data collection. It was my first time attending a conference of this kind, and it was a great experience. Many of the presentations and discussions motivated me to continue thinking and learning about the responsibilities corporations have (or should have) to their customers in terms of privacy, data protection, and social engineering. In addition to these questions about the future of our digital world, I also left the conference with a concrete set of guidelines for designing websites with accessibility in mind.
One thing that all of us interns noticed about the conference was the difference in style from a more academic conference, or a college course. The conference was much more industry focused than we were expecting, which rendered some of the information in the talks not very useful to us for the next few years. For example, one of the talks I attended was about how to conduct user testing in the most effective way. It was interesting to hear the ethical side of this discussion, (how to avoid abusing user data) but since I will not be conducting a focus group in the immediate future, that aspect of the talk was not very relevant to me. Knowing this about professional conferences will certainly help me in the future to decide which talks to attend at my next conference.
Second Blog Post!
PHP is cool, CSS is weird, but also cool! Let's see if I can make the horizontal line breaks look good!
First Blog Post
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Here is a nice picture:
