Do we really need to sacrifice privacy for health in the fight against covid-19? The DP-3T protocol can save lives without furthering surveillance capitalism.

• Originally published at n.case.me.
• Download this comic as a .zip!
• Sources: DP-3T, TCN Protocol, Ferretti & Wymant et al

The post How Contact Tracing Apps Can Foil Both COVID-19 and Big Brother appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Description

Bernard Lietaer calls for three paradigm shifts – With specific actions by individuals and leaders

With unsuitable means we half-heartedly try to repair the complicated clockwork of our world. This gets us nowhere. It won’t get us out of the crisis, because it will not result in a sustainable world.

The time has come to lead ourselves and our world through “three paradigm shifts”.

This is what Bernard Lietaer demands in this book, which he dictated on his deathbed.

First: Recognize and adhere to the law of sustainability

The book shows that in our world we are dealing with “living systems” that are linked in many ways. With forests, our money, our society, and .. and .. and. Our well-being depends on the future sustainability of these systems.

The “Law of the Sustainability of Living Systems“, developed with other experts, explains and specifies the principles of sustainability:  

It says that living systems are only sustainable if they achieve a balance between productivity and elasticity. Balance, therefore, between short-term benefits of long-term existence. Just like that of Yin and Yang – not an “either – or”.  

We violate this law criminally. We have driven most living systems out of balance, making them non-sustainable.. Monocultures of all kinds, for example, emphasize short-term benefits and are not even sustainable in the short term without massive additional costs, as Lietaer shows with the example of forests and today’s monetary system. 

The book calls on readers to ensure that this law of sustainability is recognized and complied with. Both as individuals and as leaders in business and politics, readers are challenged to balance the short-sighted overvaluation of rapid return with the preservation of resilience.

Second: Balance matrifocal and patrifocal values

In order to view our society within the framework of the law of sustainability, Bernard Lietaer uses the terms “matrifocal” (“give and maintain”) and “patrifocal” (“take and have”). Both men and women follow this pair of values, each person according to their personal orientation. 

From this point of view it becomes clear that here, too, we are violating the law of sustainability. All over the world we live by patrifocal (“have”) values and neglect the matrifocal (“give”) side of balance, as we can see in our dealings with education, the elderly, people in need of care and with each other. 

Even though Lietaer sees signs of improvement, he does not only demand a fundamental change in our values in this area. He invites his readers to become aware of these values in themselves and to achieve their personal balance. Leaders must also establish and maintain a matrifocal/patrifocal balance in their areas of responsibility.

Third: Make personal information personal again

An extremely important system for the sustainability of mankind is the flow of human information. It enables learning and solving problems together. This is also why the “General declarations of human rights” declares unhindered flow of information a principle human right. 

The book shows that this system, which is essential for survival, is completely out of balance. Companies have centralized flow of information and exploit it to their advantage. We individuals have thus been dispossessed of our information and, from the point of view of the law of sustainability the information system has deeply slipped into the “productivity corner”. 

The answer is to make this system of human resources sustainable by restoring personal ownership of our information. This must be achieved jointly by both IT companies and governments

A convincing message

Despite addressing  at first glance a seemingly complex matter the book creates a convincing message – in simple and clear descriptions, examples and pictures.

Find out more in the book’s website.

Lead image: * Planet * by pareeerica on 2009-02-01 16:05:33

The post Book of the Day: Three Paradigm Shifts Towards a Sustainable World appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Meet people who are doing it. Learn how to do it. Build it together.

Internet of Humans is a track within our annual Edgeryders festival. It is dedicated to bringing together existing projects into a demo of a Next Generation Internet that supports values of openness, cooperation across borders, decentralisation, inclusiveness and protection of privacy.

Edgeryders is a company living in symbiosis with an online community of thousands of hackers, activists, radical thinkers and doers, and others who want to make a difference. We believe that a smart community outperforms any of its members; this is the result of people working together, improving on each other’s work.

We are on a journey to help one another navigate the changes that are happening in different parts of the world.

• How are we building good lives against a backdrop of massive social, economic, ecological and political challenges?
• How are we creating opportunities for ourselves and where can we support one another better? In work, health, family, community life?
• How are we building the evolution of the Internet and our digital technologies so that they support these efforts?

We are interested in what participants already are doing in different parts of the world, and what we can do together.

Are you our next Fellow? Tell us what you would like to build, explore or learn about building a Human-Centric Internet!

Fellows will receive bursaries of up to 10,000 EUR, a travel budget of up to 1,000 EUR, and the opportunity to learn from and connect the next generation of working solutions in building a human-centric internet.

Internet of Humans is a gathering of contributors to the Next Generation Internet, a 3 year research project that engages hundreds of original initiatives. The fellowship program offers participants an opportunity to explore, learn from and connect with people building working solutions for an Internet that supports our ability to thrive as individuals, communities and societies.

As an Internet of Humans Fellow, you commit to :

1. Read what other participants are working on and share your own experiences/work.
2. Arranging and documenting a series of online calls to which you invite people from whom you wish to learn or collaborate.
3. Engage the people you invite to join us at activities for project matchmaking, partnership building and fundraising.
4. Articulate a burning question to move everyone’s work forward, and turn it into a proposal for a research theme and track of a distributed festival.

We are looking for Fellows who are passionate, curious and driven, as well as willing to collaborate using online platforms and community building methodologies. If this is you, we want to hear from you!

Questions or nominations? Create an account on edgeryders and post them in a comment below.

About the program, process and selection criteria

Internet of Humans is a track in a highly participatory, distributed festival showcasing working solutions and demos produced by community members, as well as pathways for working together towards their sustainability and scaling. It will take place in November, 2019 in a number of cities and brings together the broader Edgeryders scene that involves hundreds of original initiatives.

Aiming to deepen community collaboration, during May – November 2019, Edgeryders will appoint 3 “students” to support research, community building and content curation for the Internet of Humans community. We use “students” in the Latin sense, of people that will apply themselves to the subject, as fellows of a Internet of Humans Alliance, and not in any sense as an indication of career status.

What you will get if selected:

• A bursary appointment: Up to 10,000 Euro to reimburse your working time, distributed on the basis of winners’ financial needs
• A travel budget: Up to 1,000 Euro, to be authorized in advance by due justification.

Process and timeline:

• April 12 Mar – May 30. We collect submissions in the form of published proposals for Human Internet Festival.
  • Review of submissions
  • Announcement of winners
• May 30 – June 30. Fellows host online calls and invite
• June 30 – November 30. T.b.d with each fellow so as to not disrupt their other activities.

Who can participate?

Anyone with a story relevant to building working solutions for an Internet that supports our ability to thrive as individuals, communities and societies. You need to be interested in learning and collaborating with others online and offline.

Selection Criteria

We will consider individuals who have demonstrated an interest in and alignment with building a Human Centric Internet in the folllowing ways (each item will receive a score from 0 the minimum, to 5 the maximum, which will be summed to define the final score used to choose the winners):

• are registered on edgeryders.eu 8 and have introduced themselves in the Internet of Humans online community workspace: Tell Your Story! 6
• are operating at the grassroots level or are heavily interacting with such groups
• Are open in their work, use of methodology, technology, results (public and transparent communication, open processes for participation, commons licensing, open source code etc.)
• their contribution is validated in positive responses by their peers in the Internet of Humans community (as seen from the Comments section)
• have storytelling and content production skills for presenting the initiatives they come across to various community groups and audiences
• demonstrate willingness to collaborate with others and use online environments for communication, engagement, documentation of work and social media

What happens if I am selected?

You will be working closely with the Edgeryders team to build the Internet of Humans community conversation and together with it’s members, put together the program for it’s track of sessions and events within the Edgeryders Festival which convenes our global community.

What happens if I am not selected?

You eligible to get a symbolic 200€ reward for your contribution if it meets the selection criteria. More information about this here: http://bit.ly/2LbQvyD 1

How to get started?

Join the process of building the Internet of Humans sections of our festival program

1. Interview a person relevant to your burning question.
2. Transcribe interview and have the interviewee post it here 7. You will need to create an edgeryders.eu 8 account to do this.
3. Comment in depth on at least one other transcribed interview.

Once you are done use #internetofhumans and #edgeryders to draw our attention to your comments, story and proposal for the program. This will encourage others to get in touch and build support for your work!

The deadline for applications is May 30th 2019 , but the sooner you start and complete your application, the higher your chances!

For more information come to our weekly online community gatherings every Wednesday in May at 16:00 GMT+2 (CST Brussels time) or sign up on the Edgeryders platform and leave a comment below.

Partner organisations

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825652

Reposted from Edgeryders

The post Fellowships with Bursaries for Human-Centric Internet builders! Deadline: May 30 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It’s been a rough several months for the world’s dominant social media platforms. The recent Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal was followed by a bruising congressional testimony for Mark Zuckerberg. And Twitter’s Jack Dorsey admitted earlier this year that abuse and harassment are overwhelming the platform.

As a result, users, policymakers and activists are abuzz about potential solutions. And while many talk of regulation, Sophie Varlow and Nick Wood suggest a different approach: introducing a new product from scratch, with radically different principles.

“You can’t change things by pushing against them,” Varlow says. “You need to build a new model.”

Contributors to the Commons Platform mull ideas. Photo via Rikki / @indyrikki

Varlow and Wood are the UK-based community organizers behind the Commons Platform, a nascent social media platform with core values like privacy and decentralization. The Commons Platform is participating in Mozilla’s Global Sprint, an annual, distributed hackathon taking place May 10 and 11. They’ll be working from the Redmond Community Centre in London.

Varlow and Wood began thinking about the Commons Platform long before Facebook and Twitter’s latest episodes. The idea came not from specific incidents, but larger, systemic problems with today’s social media ecosystem. Like “the impacts of not having consent within tech,” Varlow explains. “Or not owning our own data. These relate to structural inequalities within society.”

“We’ve been talking about these things for years,” Varlow adds.

So how is the Commons Platform different than the status quo? “One of the central differences is that everyone would own their own data,” Wood explains. Further, the platform itself would be owned by its members. Varlow likens it to public land: “No part of it can ever be owned by any individual or group in perpetuity.”

Contributors to the Commons Platform mull ideas. Photo via Rikki / @indyrikki

She adds: “Because it is not driven by the attention economy, advertising, and data revenue, people are not encouraged to spend time scrolling. They can curate their content to find the things that are interesting to them and connect to people, issues, and organisations that they care about quickly.”

Privacy features will be baked in from the start. And the Commons Platform is meant for communities, not just individuals. Groups will visit to organize, openly share software, and collaborate on solutions, the duo says. Developers won’t need permission to add or edit software. “We’re putting power back in the hands of communities, so they can create solutions that make their lives better,” Varlow notes.

Currently, Varlow, Wood and collaborators are finalizing the project’s values, aims, culture and ways of working. During the Global Sprint, they’re planning to work with like-minded designers and developers to take the next step forward: “The website, the technical infrastructure, the community standards,” Varlow explains.

But the Commons Platform welcomes more than just technical volunteers — any potential user or community is welcome to share feedback and ideas and co-create the platform. “We try to break down barriers between experts and nonexperts, users and developers,” Varlow says. “After all, we want to build a more equal society.”

Learn more about the Commons Platform. Learn more about the Global Sprint.

The post Social Media Decentralized: Spotlight on the Commons Platform appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Did you know that unlike searching on DuckDuckGo, when you search on Google, they keep your search history forever? That means they know every search you’ve ever done on Google. That alone is pretty scary, but it’s just the shallow end of the very deep pool of data that they try to collect on people.

What most people don’t realize is that even if you don’t use any Google products directly, they’re still trying to track as much as they can about you. Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites. This means they’re also trying to track most everywhere you go on the internet, trying to slurp up your browsing history!

Most people also don’t know that Google runs most of the ads you see across the internet and in apps – you know those ones that follow you around everywhere? Yup, that’s Google, too. They aren’t really a search company anymore – they’re a tracking company. They are tracking as much as they can for these annoying and intrusive ads, including recording every time you see them, where you saw them, if you clicked on them, etc.

But even that’s not all…

If You Use Google Products

If you do use Google products, they try to track even more. In addition to tracking everything you’ve ever searched for on Google (e.g. “weird rash”), Google also tracks every video you’ve ever watched on YouTube. Many people actually don’t know that Google owns YouTube; now you know.

And if you use Android (yeah, Google owns that too), then Google is also usually tracking:

• Every place you’ve been via Google Location Services.
• How often you use your apps, when you use them, where you use them, and whom you use them to interact with. (This is just excessive by any measure.)
• All of your text messages, which unlike on iOS, are not encrypted by default.
• Your photos (even in some cases the ones you’ve deleted).

If you use Gmail, they of course also have all your e-mail messages. If you use Google Calendar, they know all your schedule. There’s a pattern here: For all Google products (Hangouts, Music, Drive, etc.), you can expect the same level of tracking: that is, pretty much anything they can track, they will.

Oh, and if you use Google Home, they also store a live recording of every command you’ve (or anyone else) has ever said to your device! Yes, you heard that right (err… they heard it) – you can check out all the recordings on your Google activity page.

Essentially, if you allow them to, they’ll track pretty close to, well, everything you do on the Internet. In fact, even if you tell them to stop tracking you, Google has been known to not really listen, for example with location history.

You Become the Product

Why does Google want all of your information anyway? Simple: as stated, Google isn’t a search company anymore, they’re a tracking company. All of these data points allow Google to build a pretty robust profile about you. In some ways, by keeping such close tabs on everything you do, they, at least in some ways, may know you better than you know yourself.

And Google uses your personal profile to sell ads, not only on their search engine, but also on over three million other websites and apps. Every time you visit one of these sites or apps, Google is following you around with hyper-targeted ads.

It’s exploitative. By allowing Google to collect all this info, you are allowing hundreds of thousands of advertisers to bid on serving you ads based on your sensitive personal data. Everyone involved is profiting from your information, except you. You are the product.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It is entirely possible for a web-based business to be profitable without making you the product – since 2014, DuckDuckGo has been profitable without storing or sharing any personal information on people at all. You can read more about our business model here.

The Myth of “Nothing to Hide”

Some may argue that they have “nothing to hide,” so they are not concerned with the amount of information Google has collected and stored on them, but that argument is fundamentally flawed for many reasons.

Everyone has information they want to keep private: Do you close the door when you go to the bathroom? Privacy is about control over your personal information. You don’t want it in the hands of everyone, and certainly don’t want people profiting on it without your consent or participation.

In addition, privacy is essential to democratic institutions like voting and everyday situations such as getting medical care and performing financial transactions. Without it, there can be significant harms.

On an individual level, lack of privacy leads to putting you into a filter bubble, getting manipulated by ads, discrimination, fraud, and identity theft. On a societal level, it can lead to deepened polarization and societal manipulation like we’ve unfortunately been seeing multiply in recent years.

You Can Live Google Free

Basically, Google tries to track too much. It’s creepy and simply just more information than one company should have on anyone.

Thankfully, there are many good ways to reduce your Google footprint, even close to zero! If you are ready to live without Google, we have recommendations for services to replace their suite of products, as well as instructions for clearing your Google search history. It might feel like you are trapped in the Google-verse, but it is possible to break free.

For starters, just switching the search engine for all your searches goes a long way. After all, you share your most intimate questions with your search engine; at the very least, shouldn’t those be kept private? If you switch to the DuckDuckGo app and extension you will not only make your searches anonymous, but also block Google’s most widespread and invasive trackers as you navigate the web.

If you’re unfamiliar with DuckDuckGo, we are an Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. We operate a search engine alternative to Google at http://duckduckgo.com, and offer a mobile app and desktop browser extension to protect you from Google, Facebook and other trackers, no matter where you go on the Internet.

We’re also trying to educate users through our blog, social media, and a privacy “crash course” newsletter.

Photo by stockcatalog , www.thoughtcatalog.com

The post What does Google know about me? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Matt Stoller of the Open Market Institute talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the growing influence of Google, Facebook, and Amazon on commercial and political life. Stoller argues that these large firms have too much power over our options as consumers and creators as well as having a large impact on our access to information.

About Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He is writing a book on monopoly power in the 20th century for Simon and Schuster. Previously, he was a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee. He also worked in the U.S. House of Representatives on financial services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Vice, and Salon. He was a producer for MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show, and served as a writer and actor on the short-lived FX television series Brand X with Russell Brand. You can follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Header photo by GrungeTextures

The post Matt Stoller on Modern Monopolies appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Theo Bass: European laws have ushered in a new era in how companies and governments manage and promote responsible use of personal data. Yet it is the city that looks set to be one of the major battlegrounds in a shift towards greater individual rights, where expectations of privacy and fair use clash with ubiquitous sensors and data-hungry optimised services.

Amid the clamour for ‘smart’ new urban infrastructure, from connected lampposts and bins to camera-enabled phone boxes, a And how do we ensure that its generation and use does not result in discrimination, exclusion and the erosion of privacy for citizens?

While these new sources of data have the potential to deliver significant gains, they also give public institutions – and the technology companies who help install smart city infrastructure – access to vast quantities of highly detailed information about local residents.

A major criticism has been a lack of clear oversight of decisions to collect data in public spaces. US cities have deployed controversial police technologies such as facial recognition without elected officials, let alone the public, being adequately informed beforehand – something which academic Catherine Crump has described as “surveillance policymaking by procurement”.

Meanwhile the digital economy has flourished around urban centres, with new digital platforms creating rich trails of information about our daily habits, journeys and sentiments. Governments often work with app-developers like Waze, Strava and Uber to benefit from these new sources of data. But practical options for doing so in a truly consent-driven way – that is, not simply relying on companies’ long T&Cs – remain few and far between. There’s no simple way to opt-in or -out of the smart city.

Given the increasing tension between increasing ‘smartness’ on the one hand, and expectations of privacy and fair data use on the other, how can city governments respond? In Nesta’s new report, written as part of our involvement with a major EU Horizon 2020 project called DECODE, we looked at a handful of city governments that are pioneering new policies and services to enhance digital rights locally, and give people more control over personal data.

City governments such as Seattle are improving accountability by appointing designated roles for privacy in local government, including both senior leadership positions and departmental ‘Privacy Champions’. The city’s approach is also notable for its strong emphasis on public engagement. Prior to the approval of any new surveillance technology, relevant departments must host public meetings and invite feedback via an online tool on the council’s website.

Elsewhere cities are becoming test-beds for new technologies that minimise unnecessary data collection and boost citizen anonymity. Transport for New South Wales, Australia, collaborated with researchers to release open data about citizens’ use of Sydney’s public transport network using a mathematical technique called differential privacy – a method which makes it difficult to identify individuals by adding random ‘noise’ to a dataset.

Other experiments put more control into the hands of individuals. Amsterdam is testing a platform that allows local residents to be “authenticated but anonymous”. The system, known as Attribute-Based Credentials, lets people collect simple and discrete ‘attributes’ about themselves in an app (like “I am over 18”), which they can use to verify themselves on local government services without revealing any more personal information than absolutely necessary.

Not all the policy measures we came across are about privacy and anti-surveillance. Local governments like Barcelona are fundamentally rethinking their approach to digital information in the city – conceiving of data as a new kind of common good.

In practical terms, the council is creating user-friendly ‘data commons dashboards’ that allow citizens to collect and visualise data, for example about environmental or noise pollution in their neighbourhoods. People can use the online tools to share information about their community directly with the council, and on their own terms: they decide the level of anonymity, for instance.

Local authorities are more nimble, and in a better position to test and develop new technologies directly with local residents, than other levels of government. As the tides in the personal data economy shift, it will be cities that are the real drivers of change, setting new ethical standards from below, and experimenting with new services that give more control over data to the people.

Theo Bass is a researcher in government innovation at the innovation charity Nesta.

Photo by Cerillion

The post Essay of the day: Data by the people, for the people: why it’s time for councils to reclaim the smart city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Part I: Data Collection

New technology isn’t disrupting power – it’s reinforcing it

Republished from New Economics Foundation

Duncan McCann: A new economy is emerging. And this new economy is powered by a new type of fuel: data. As the data economy becomes increasingly prominent, there are troubling signs that it is worsening existing power imbalances, and creating new problems of domination and lack of accountability. But it would be wrong simply to draw dystopian visions from our current situation. Technological change does not determine social change, and there is a whole range of potential futures – both emancipatory and discriminatory – open to us. We must decide for ourselves which one we want.

This is the first of four papers exploring power and accountability in the data economy. These will set the stage for future interventions to ensure power becomes more evenly distributed.This paper explores the impact of the mass collection of data, while future papers will examine: the impact of algorithms as they process the data; the companies built on data, that mediate our interface with the digital world; and the labour market dynamics that they are disrupting.

Our research so far has identified a range of overarching themes around how power and accountability is changing as a result of the rise of the digital economy. These can be summarised into four arguments:

• Although the broader digital economy has both concentrated and dispersed power, data has had very much a concentrating force.
• A mutually reinforcing government-corporation surveillance architecture – or data panopticon – is being built, that seeks to capture every data trail that we create.
• We are over-collecting and under-protecting data.
• The data economy is changing our approach to accountability from one based on direct causation to one based on correlation, with profound moral and political consequences.

This four-part series explores these areas by reviewing the existing literature and conducting interviews with respected experts from around the world.

The Facebook/​Cambridge Analytica scandal has made data gathering a front-page story in recent months. We have identified four key issues related to data gathering:

• GDPR will not save us: Although GDPR will be an improvement for data privacy, it should not be considered a panacea. Some companies, especially global ones, will structure their business to dodge the regulations.
• Privacy could become the preserve of the rich: The corporate data gathering industry may evolve to create a system where only the rich are able to afford the necessary tools and labour time to effectively maintain their privacy.
• Privacy is an increasingly unmanageable burden: responsibility for managing data falls far too heavily on the individual rather than those who want to use individuals’ data.
• Are we becoming a conformist society? Ubiquitous data collection, coupled with data never being deleted means we could be entering an era of self-censorship and ​‘social cooling’.

The Rise of the Data Oligarchs: Power and Accountability in the Digital Economy Part 1: Data Collectionn shared by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Download the report

Photo by moleitau

The post Essay of the day: The rise of the data oligarchs appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I left Facebook in 2013, less for my own sake than for what my presence on the service was doing to others. I knew that anyone who “liked” my page could have their data harvested in ways they wouldn’t necessarily approve.

Over the past five years, people have not only become aware of this devil’s bargain but accepted it as the internet’s price of admission.”So what if they have my data,” I saw a graduate student ask her professor this week. “Why is my privacy so important?”

Bully for you if you don’t care what Facebook’s algorithms know about your sex life or health history, but that’s not the real threat. Neither Facebook nor the marketers buying your data particularly care about what you do with your clothes off, whom you’re cheating with or any other sordid details you may find embarrassing.

That’s the great fiction of social media: That you matter as a person. You don’t.

The platform cares only about your metadata, from which they can construct a psychological profile and then manipulate your behavior. They have been using and selling even the stuff you thought you were sharing confidentially with your friends in order to identify your neuroses and neurotic vulnerabilities and leverage them against you.

That’s what Facebook markets to its customers. The company has been doing it ever since its investors realized that, as owners of a mere social network, they would become only multi-millionaires; to become billionaires, they’d have to offer something more than our attention to ads. So they sold access to our brain stem.

With 2.2 billion active users, Facebook knew it had a big-data gold mine. While we’ve been busily shielding what we think of as our “personal” data, Facebook has been analyzing the stuff we think doesn’t matter: our clicks, likes and posts, as well as the frequency with which we make them. Looking at this metadata, Facebook, its psychologists and its clients put us into different psychographic “buckets.”

That’s how they came to be able to predict, with about 80% accuracy, our future behaviors, including whether we’re going to go on a diet, vote for a particular candidate or announce a change in sexual orientation. From there, the challenge is to compel the lagging 20% to fall in line — to get all the people who should be going on a diet or voting for a particular candidate to conform to what the algorithms have predicted.

That’s where companies like Cambridge Analytica come in. They paid thousands of people to take psychology tests and to surrender their own and their friends’ Facebook data. Then they compared all this data to infer how each of us would have answered that psychology test. Armed with our real or algorithmically determined psychological profiles, Cambridge Analytica surmised our individual neurotic makeups. And they figured out how to terrify each and every one of us.

That’s the greater collateral damage of social media. It’s not simply that they can get us to buy a particular product or vote for one candidate or another. It’s that their techniques bypass our higher brain functions. They use imagery and language specifically designed to evade our logic and empathy and appeal straight to our reptilian survival instincts.

These more primitive brain regions respond only to primitive stimulus: fear, hate and tribalism. It’s the part of us that gets activated when we see a car crash or a horror movie. That’s the state of mind these platforms want us to be in, because that’s when we are most easily manipulated.

Yes, we’ve been manipulated by ads for a century now. But TV and other forms of advertising generally happened in public. We all saw the same commercials, and they often cost so much that companies knew they had to get them right. Television networks would themselves censor ads that they felt would alienate their viewers or make fraudulent claims. It was manipulative, but for the most part, consumer advertising was aspirational.

Facebook figures out who or what each of us fears most, and then sells that information to the creators of false memes and the like, who deliver those fears directly to our news feeds. This, in turn, makes the world a more fearful, hostile and dangerous place.

To ask why one should care is a luxury of privilege. Data harvesting arguably matters most when it’s used against the economically disadvantaged. It’s not just in China that social media data are used to evaluate credit worthiness and immigration status. By normalizing the harvesting of data, those of us with little to fear imperil the most vulnerable.

When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, a friend of his expressed surprise that people were surrendering so much personal data to the platform. “I don’t know why,” Zuckerberg said. “They trust me. Dumb …”

We may have been dumb to trust Facebook with our data in the first place. Now we know they’ve been using the data to make us even dumber.

Reposted from the Rushkoff list, subscribe here

Photo by Book Catalog

The post How Facebook Exploited Us All appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Gabriel Wienberg:

#1 — Google tracks you. We don’t.

You share your most intimate secrets with your search engine without even thinking: medical, financial and personal issues, along with all the day to day things that make you, well, you. All of that personal information should be private, but on Google it’s not. On Google, your searches are tracked, mined, and packaged up into a data profile for advertisers to follow you around the Internet through those intrusive and annoying ever-present banner ads, using Google’s massive ad networks, embedded across millions of sites and apps.

So-called incognito mode won’t protect you either. That’s a myth. “Incognito” mode isn’t really incognito at all. It’s an extremely misleading name and in my opinion should be changed. All it does is delete your local browsing history after your session on your device, but does nothing from stopping any website you visit, including Google, from tracking you via your IP address and other tracking mechanisms like browser fingerprinting.

To keep your searches private and out of data profiles, the government, and other legal requests, you need to use DuckDuckGo. We don’t track you at all, regardless what browsing mode you are in.

Each time you search on DuckDuckGo, it’s as if you’ve never been there before. We simply don’t store anything that can tie your searches to you personally, or even tie them together into a search history that could later be tied back to you. For more details, check out our privacy policy.

#2 — Block Google trackers lurking everywhere.

Google tracks you on more than just their search engine. You may realize they also track you on YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Gmaps, and all the other services they run. For those, we recommend using private alternatives like DuckDuckGo for search. Yes, you can live Google-free. I’ve been doing it for many years.

What you may not realize, though, is Google trackers are actually lurking behind the scenes on 75% of the top million websites. To give you a sense of how large that is, Facebook is the next closest with 25%. It’s a good bet that any random site you land on the Internet will have a Google tracker hiding on it. Between the two of them, they are truly dominating online advertising, by some measures literally making up 74%+ of all its growth. A key component of how they have managed to do that is through all these hidden trackers.

Google Analytics is installed on most sites, tracking you behind the scenes, letting website owners know who is visiting their sites, but also feeding that information back to Google. Same for the ads themselves, with Google running three of the largest non-search ad networks installed on millions of sites and apps: Adsense, Admob, and DoubleClick.

At DuckDuckGo, we’ve expanded beyond our roots in search, to protect you no matter where you go on the Internet. Our DuckDuckGo browser extension and mobile app is available for all major browsers and devices, and blocks these Google trackers, along with the ones from Facebook and countless other data brokers. It does even more to protect you as well like providing smarter encryption.

#3 — Get unbiased results, outside the Filter Bubble.

When you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google. On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time from all that tracking I described above.

That may appear at first blush to be a good thing, but when most people say they want personalization in a search context they actually want localization. They want local weather and restaurants, which can actually be provided without tracking, like we do at DuckDuckGo. That’s because approximate location info is automatically embedded by your computer in the search request, which we can use to serve you local results and immediately throw away without tracking you.

Beyond localization, personalized results are dangerous because to show you results they think you’ll click on, they must filter results they think you’ll skip. That’s why it’s called the Filter Bubble.

So if you have political leanings one way or another, you’re more likely to get results you already agree with, and less likely to ever see opposing viewpoints. In the aggregate this leads to increased echo chambers that are significantly contributing to our increasingly polarized society.

This Filter Bubble is especially pernicious in a search context because you have the expectation that you’re seeing what others are seeing, that you’re seeing the “results.” We’ve done studies over the years where we have people search for the same topics on Google at the same time and in “Incognito” mode, and found they are significantly tailored.

On DuckDuckGo, we are committed to not putting you in the Filter Bubble. We don’t even force people into a local country index unless they explicitly opt-in.

#4 — We listen.

Google is notoriously hard to get a hold of. Locked out of your Gmail account? Sorry, we can’t help you. The Knowledge Graph says you’re dead? That’s unfortunate. Unless you’re a journalist or influencer of some kind, good luck getting anyone at Google to listen.

Meanwhile at DuckDuckGo we read every piece of feedback we get. We respond on social media. In short, we listen. My DMs are open and I read all the email sent to me personally. Feel free to reach out.

#5 — We don’t try to trap you in our “ecosystem.”

It used to be that you search on Google and then you click off to the top result. Over time, Google bought more and more companies and launched more and more of their own competing services, favoring them over others in their search results. Google Places instead of Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc. Google Products instead of Amazon, Target, etc. They’re in travel, health, and soon jobs. Anywhere there is money to be made, you can expect them to get into it eventually.

Even when you do click off, Google AMP tries to still trap you you in Google. And these tactics are not just on the search engine.

On Android on many implementations there is immovable Google search widget and you can’t even change its search engine if you want to. By just installing it by default, this behavior is a direct analogue to Microsoft putting IE on Windows in the 1990s, but worse since it takes up more of the smaller screen. The same is true for other Google services on Android as well, forcing carriers to bundle and promote them. We personally have similar issues with Chrome search engine integration.

At DuckDuckGo, we aren’t trying to take over the world. We don’t have an “ecosystem” to trap you in. We just want to help you get to where you want to go as fast as possible, and protect you as much as we can in that process.

#6 — We have !bangs.

To further this point, we have a built-in feature called bangs that enables you to search other sites directly, completely skipping DuckDuckGo if you like. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you know you want to go to the Wikipedia article for ducks. You can just search for “!w duck” and we will take you right there.

The ! tells DuckDuckGo you want to use a bang shortcut, and the w is an abbreviation for Wikipedia. You can use the full name, though we have a lot of shortcuts such as !a for Amazon, !r for Reddit, etc. There are literally thousands of sites that this feature works with, and so most sites you think of will probably work. It also works with our autocomplete so you can see what’s there easily.

If you routinely search a particular site, like Stack Overflow for coding answers or Baseball Reference for stats or All Recipes for something to make, you can just go right there.

If DuckDuckGo is your default search engine, you can just type this right into your browser’s address bar, and skip loading our search engine altogether. We will just route you to the right place, without tracking you of course!

#7 — We strive for a world where you have control over your personal information.

Our vision is to raise the standard of trust online. If you share this vision, supporting DuckDuckGo helps us make progress towards it. For the past seven years, we’ve been donating a substantial portion of our profits to organizations that also work towards the Internet we want — an open Internet where you can take control of your personal information.

We believe that privacy policies shouldn’t be default “collect it all,” but instead offer a clear and compelling case as to what benefits you get by giving up your personal information. If you share this view for the future of data privacy, you can vote with your feet.

#8 — Our search results aren’t loaded up with ads.

For many Google searches, the entire first page is ads. On mobile it can be even worse, multiple pages of ads. Not so on DuckDuckGo. We keep ads to a minimum, and naturally they’re non-tracking ads, based only on search keywords and not on a personal profile or search history.

#9 — Search without fear.

When people know they are being watched, they change their behavior. It’s a well-documented behavior called the chilling effect, and it happens on Google. For example, an MIT study showed that people started doing fewer health searches on Google after the Snowden revelations, fearing that their personal ailments might get out.

“Suppressing health information searches potentially harms the health of search engine users and… In general, our results suggest that there is a chilling effect on search behavior from government surveillance on the Internet.”

Your searches are your business, and you should feel free to search whatever you want, whenever you want. You can easily escape this chilling effect on DuckDuckGo where you are anonymous.

#10 — Google is simply too big, and too powerful.

Google is GIANT, the epitome of Silicon Valley big tech, with a market cap of around 750 Billion dollars (at the time of writing), 75,000 employees, dominating search, browsing, online advertising, and more, with tentacles in everything tech, online and offline. Last year they outspent every other company on lobbying Washington.

By comparison, DuckDuckGo is tiny. We’re currently a team of about 45 people, scattered across the globe; I’m in Pennsylvania. We have a very narrow focus: helping you take control of your personal information online.

The world could use more competition, less focus on ad tracking, fewer eggs in one basket.

Join the Duck Side!

Photo by Parin S.

The post Gabriel Weinberg on why you should use DuckDuckGo instead of Google appeared first on P2P Foundation.