Seminar 2 Position Statement: Prof.Helen Kennedy (Sociology)

Understanding Internet Users' Thoughts and Practices

The expansion of data mining practices quite rightly gives rise to a range of concerns relating to privacy, security, surveillance, trust and transparency. These concerns are entirely justified when it comes to the spectacular forms of data mining that have hit the headlines in recent years, as carried out by the NSA (National Security Agency) in the US and GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) in the UK, as well as governments, law enforcers and other major corporations. However, we are currently experiencing many more forms of data mining than these. Writing specifically about one data mining space, social media, van Dijck and Poell (2013) assert that all kinds of actors (for example in education, politics, arts, entertainment, the police, law enforcers, activists) are increasingly required to act within what they call ‘social media logic’. Such logic is constituted by the norms that underpin the incorporation of social media activities into an increasingly broad range of fields, and one such norm is data mining. Because of this and related phenomena, there is today a diverse range of data mining practices, carried out by a variety of actors, in distinct contexts, for distinct purposes. Arguably, some of them are more troubling than others. In this context, it is important to consider whether we need to differentiate the types of data mining practices which we would want to subject to transparency and other regulatory measures. Should we treat a resource-poor public sector organization like a museum or local council, which uses data mining in order to understand, engage and provide services for its publics, in the same way that we view the activities of the NSA or Facebook? These more under-the-radar forms of data mining might be considered as mundane or ordinary; I suggest that we need to think about how to think about them.

On this subject, I think that, whilst it is important to direct attention to the issues raised by the activities of the NSA and the like, because of the spread of data mining that I talk about here, we do also need to attend to data practices on this ‘ordinary’ plane. How can we engage people doing what might be considered ‘ordinary’ data mining (a museum interested in visitors’ responses to an exhibition, a local council wanting to know what people think about cost efficiency measures) in debates about the ethics of data mining?  

What do ‘ordinary’ internet users think about privacy, security, surveillance and trust in relation to their data and its mining? In another post on this blog, Lina Dencik argues that many people do not connect with these terms. One solution to this problem that she suggests is to connect resistance in this domain to ‘broader ecologies of political activism’. Another important strategy is to identify what terms people do connect with, and how they talk about their thoughts and feelings about dataand data mining practices. This is important in order to be able to engage in conversation with ‘ordinary people’, in their terms, about the problems with data mining that have been well-documented. In research that I have carried out in order to explore this (Kennedy et al forthcoming), I found that the language of fairness was commonly used to express varying viewpoints on distinct data mining practices.

So I’m arguing for inflecting debates about data, transparency, privacy, security, surveillance and trust with attention to the ordinary – to ordinary data (mining) practices and ordinary people’s views on and language used in relation to these practices.

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Mark Hanna (Journalism)

The Press and the Right to be Forgotten

 

Is the internet becoming an unforgiving, perpetual panopticon or should it help us discover if a paedophile has moved into the house next door? 

My research interests include the impact of, and factors behind, the creation in the 2014 Google Spain judgment of the so-called legal ‘right to be forgotten’(RTBF) in EU states; the news media’s reaction to it; and whether it might be extended to erase some content in news media archives accessible to the public.  How should media organisations react ethically to the apparently wide variety of RTBF-type requests made directly to them for the erasure of material they have already published online legally for years?

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Craig Hamilton (Media)

Popular Music, Big Data and Ethics

 

Many of the ways in which popular music is produced, distributed and consumed have altered considerably over the last two decades, and largely as a result of digital and internet technologies. We are by no means at the end of this 'digital revolution' in popular music, with much still in a state of turmoil and flux as businesses, artists and consumers alike grapple with the new and emerging landscapes. It's an exciting time to be researching in this field. My PhD focusses primarily on music listening in the digital age, and does so through the collection of user data through The Harkive Project. This is an on-line, crowdsourced method of gathering stories from music listeners about the detail of their everyday music consumption that I developed as part of my MA studies at Birmingham City University. Since 2013 the project has gathered over 7,500 stories, from people all over the world.

By gathering (what I hope is) useful data from music listeners, I am engaged in much the same activity that media companies and rights holders involved in the music industries are currently focussing a large amount of attention and resources on. Data collection and analysis is rapidly becoming a key element in the business of popular music, as illustrated by the recent acquisition by Apple of MusicMetric in a deal reported to by worth US$50M. This raises ethical concerns on my part, in that the data I collect has potential uses beyond the purely academic, and is one of the two main reasons why I am keen to attend this seminar.

The other reason is that due to the scale and voracity of industrialised data collection in a wider societal sense, issues and questions related to data protection, use, monetisation, ownership, access, surveillance, storage and archives are of growing interest to academics in a number of fields. The realm of data is of particular interest to scholars of Popular Music because of its growing influence on matters related to the production, distribution and consumption of music, and it is here that my own area of research intersects with the wider debates. As such I am very much looking forward to hearing what the panel and delegates have to say on these matters.

In terms of my position, I would start with Sterne (2012) and Milner (2010), who, in their explorations of the development of recording and audio technologies, have argued that the idea of a recording, however advanced, being capable of capturing a true representation of reality, is a fundamentally flawed one. For Sterne (2006), the gaps between the zeros and ones in digital recording - its flaws, in other words - are precisely where the interesting questions lie.

The affordances of zeros and ones are exactly what the service offered by Shazam uses to do its work in telling millions of listeners each day the name of the song they are listening to. Shazam is one such company that is heavily influencing music production and distribution through the monetisation of the data it collects via its relationships with industrial clients such as record companies. This represents a further rationalisation of process in the music industries as it chases increasingly granular revenue streams with increasingly granularised techniques. However, a similar service, HitPredictor, armed with both granular data and an algorithm that analyses the ‘hit potential’ of a song, entirely failed to predict the success of All About That Bass, one of the biggest hits of 2014. Building on Sterne’s observation above, is it possible that the failures and blind spots of Big Data are more interesting than its successes?

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Richard C Gomer (Electronics & Computer Science)

The Web is a Surveillance Tool

Today's web is funded primarily by advertising; the sub-millisecond delivery of targeted advertising alongside content of genuine interest to users. Networks of content providers, advertising brokers and advertisers allow private companies to record extensive amounts of web browsing history from individual web users.  Our research indicates that after visiting only 30 search results there is a 99.5% chance that an individual user has been tracked at least once by each of the top ten third party tracking domains.

These private digital dossiers allow the inference of many pieces of personal information; both in practice (for the purposes of delivering targeted advertisements) and in theory (were the data to be obtained by a fourth party and put to new uses). 

Through the research that we are conducting in the Meaningful Consent Project, we observe that even people in the small minority of web users that understand the mechanisms through which third party tracking operates are surprised when we demonstrate the extent of third party tracking that they are subject to.  When asked to suggest information that Facebook holds about them, no participants in any of our focus groups or interviews (n ≈ 35) have mentioned data about their browsing history, which is collected via the “Like” and “Share” widgets that Facebook provides to site operators.  This undermines, among other things, the notion that web users give up information as “payment” for service usage – most have never considered the data that is being collected, let alone balanced this against the value of the service that they receive.  First party websites and advertisers themselves become complicit in the process of tracking their users and customers, often without a full understanding of the implications or mechanism through which the advertising networks operate.

Unlike state surveillance, which is typically intentional, deliberately engineered and subject to oversight, the development of this private surveillance infrastructure has been driven by commercial ends and without any oversight, direction or regulation.  Yet, there is an unclear relationship between this organic but pervasive surveillance and the more deliberate, structured surveillance of nation states.  Individual users (particularly those outside the US to whom most of the USA's legal privacy safeguards do not apply) are left wondering about how porous the relationship between the primarily US-based third party tracking companies and the US secret services really are.

The technology that underpins this third party tracking is often either undetectable – the stateless 'device fingerprint' – or functionally ambiguous, by virtue of being the very same technologies that support end-users' own legitimate aims – the stateful browser cookie that stores your shopping basket.  These properties of the technology make it virtually impossible to determine the extent of the tracking that a particular user is subject to and limit the feasibility of technical countermeasures to block it. Given the ubiquity of third party tracking on today's web, this provides a very real limit to the technical feasibility of online privacy. 

Far from its initial purpose as a tool for academic collaboration, or the grand vision of an egalitarian, pro-human interchange of ideas, the Web that we have today is (at least quantitatively) primarily a surveillance tool.

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Dr Madeline Carr (International Politics)

From Micro to Macro: PSST in International Relations

Advances in information and communications technology over the past two decades have contributed to a tension in many societies between expectations of privacy, security, transparency and accountability. We see this demonstrated clearly at an individual or societal level. At the same time as we object to the intelligence community’s access to our personal data, the parents of three young British girls who absconded to Syria protest that Scotland Yard should have picked up on Twitter messages that could have alerted them to their children’s plans. We are conflicted about our expectations of privacy and security, about appropriate behaviour for a range of social, political and security actors and about how to balance the opportunities presented by ‘big data’ with the potential pitfalls.

This societal tension is reflected in international relations where we have seen some real struggles to apply existing international law and also to reassess norms of state behaviour in this regard. Debates about appropriate levels of state surveillance of civil society as well as political actors have arisen in several contexts recently. The Arab Spring uprisings that made such effective use of social networking media also revealed the extent to which authoritarian regimes used surveillance technology (often provided by Western firms) to track the movements of protesters, identify them and collect data for subsequent prosecutions. This ‘dual-use’ technology leads to questions about export bans and qualitative judgements about which governments should have access to these tools and which should not. And who should make those decisions.

Of course, these debates are not limited to authoritarian states. Both Wikileaks and the Snowden leaks raised questions about the relationship between the state and civil society in the West which speak to the themes of sur/sous/veillance. Wikileaks prompted debate about foreign policy transparency and state accountability. Julian Assange encouraged us to consider a world in which foreign policy was constructed and practiced without secrecy. He challenged the long held assumption that diplomacy is most effective when conducted in some degree of privacy and he opened space for considerations of how more transparency might transform international relations.

The Snowden revelations have suggested that oversight of the intelligence community has been lacking through the recent technological transition. While we may wish law enforcement and intelligence agencies to be able to make full use of data to protect us, there remains a strong expectation that these powers will not be abused and it is clear that we do not yet have mechanisms in place to ensure that. Loopholes that have facilitated states spying on their own citizens contravene legal and normative frameworks and threaten to undermine trust in the state. However, in a context of globalisation and post-Cold War conflict, the distinction between domestic and international becomes somewhat less distinct.

All of this has to be considered within the context of the role of the private sector – the receptacle of most of our personal data that ends up online. The unrestrained and ungoverned collection of data by private corporations which is then commodified and distributed for profit is at the heart of these tensions of privacy, security, transparency and accountability. While much of the focus of these discussions is on state actors (as it should be) much less attention is paid to private actors which operate without transparency and with accountability to their shareholders only. Private sector led mechanisms like the Global Network Initiative, established to provide guidance to online data services facing requests from governments seemed to have been entirely ineffectual in the West. Concerns about geo-location services, excessively liberal terms and conditions, and an almost complete lack of access to information about how our data is repurposed seems to be consistently ignored in favour of ‘free’ applications and services and ultimately, profits. Essentially, if the law enforcement and intelligence communities require more oversight, certainly one could argue that the private sector does as well.

All of these questions can and should be considered within the context of the recently adopted UN Resolution on the Right to Privacy in the Digital Age. This Resolution provides a framework for the way that norms in international relations are developing to accommodate and adapt to the rapid increase in personal data available online and the challenges this poses to our expectations of privacy, security, sur/sous/veillance and trust.

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Prof.Carole Brooke (Computing & Social Responsibility)

Faith, values and the trajectory of ICT

I have more questions than answers!  My questions are located around the role of personal faith, values and beliefs.  In particular (but not restricted to) the influence that spiritual-religious beliefs play in decision-making processes around ICT, its use and development. 

‘Religious’ and ‘spiritual’ aspects of life are not usually represented within ICT discussions as a core concern. Whilst much more can be said about operational definitions for these words (Brooke and Parker, 2009), for the purposes of this position statement, I am referring to the deep presuppositions about the nature of reality that influence our life-and-world-views (Basden et al, 2011).  The relationship between these presuppositions and ICT is usually invisible until exposed, which explains why many have assumed that technology can be neutral.

I suggest that there are at least 3 ways in which we should recognise the relevance of these aspects to our discussions on privacy and secrecy issues (ibid).  They are:

1.     The existence of religious attitudes (e.g. Campbell, 2005)

2.     The possibility of the application of religious concepts and/or metaphors (e.g. see Bauwens, 1996; Coeckelbergh, 2010; Wilford, 2013)

3.     The deep religious presuppositions that underlie our ICT (Basden et al, 2011)

The first two types of relationship between ICT and personal values may be much more prevalent than we think. The third type of relationship means that our ICT is inherently and inescapably religious, even though this is frequently ‘unseen’.

The religious-spiritual roots of ICT:

Consideration of the religious-spiritual aspects of technology has a history within academic writings that we can draw upon for the current debate.  Some (e.g. Noble, 1997) have argued that ICT should be kept separate from any discussion of spirituality or religious attitude. Others present a compelling argument for the inextricable link between the two.  Coeckelbergh (2010, p.959) presents at least seven arguments for the ‘intimate connection’ between technology on the one hand and religion and spirituality on the other.  Another interesting statement is made by Wilford (2013) that reflects possibly at least 1 and 2 of the three ways I listed earlier:

“Through the mechanisms of data doubles and cyber lives however, we may be travelling a road that, rather than taking us forward towards greater freedom of expression and choice, may actually be having the opposite effect and leading us to reversing our freedoms in favour of social norms and expectations based on global community expectations, self-imposed censorship and the creation of social media silos.  In this way we may come to have more in common with the pre-reformation society than that of the enlightenment.”

ICTs have come a long way since the publication of ‘In the Age of the Smart Machine’ (Zuboff, 1988).  Even so, we still need a basis for differentiating between the benign and the malign opportunities and constraints, don’t we (Basden et al 2011)?

Bijker and Law (1992, p11.) said:

“Technology does not spring, ab initio, from some disinterested fount of innovation. Rather, it is born of the social, the economic, and the technical relations that are already in place. A product of the existing structure of opportunities and constraints, it extends, shapes, reworks, or reproduces that structure in ways that are more or less unpredictable. And, in so doing, it distributes, or redistributes, opportunities and constraints equally or unequally, fairly or unfairly."

This is a useful reminder for us today. To what extent are we informed about the “social, the economic, and the technical relations that are already in place” or the “existing structure of opportunities and constraints”? 

Stahl (1999) argued that a sort of ‘unacknowledged mysticism’ lies beneath much of our discussions around ICT and that this non-neutrality is religious in nature, not merely sociological. Furthermore, by not recognising this we run the risk of missing out on ethical and intellectual resources that could assist and guide us with respect to ICT’s impact upon humanity. 

If there is an "implicit religion" in ICT then this will be an important aspect of the ‘relations’ (in Bijker and Law’s terms above) which we need to recognise, understand, and take into account when considering the technical and ethical limits of secrecy and privacy.  In essence, then, my approach here is that the religious and the spiritual underlie technology and that this is not optional but inescapable. The way ICT is developed and used is, thus, shaped by ‘religious commitments’ that are of a tacit and inexplicit nature.

Data, what data?

The textual nature of computing has long been established in the literature (e.g. Wittig, 1978). Issues surrounding textual production and data are very central to privacy and security, whether that be decisions concerning what to collect, how to collect it, or what will be the end use of the collected data.  Indeed, even the very definition of what counts as ‘data’ is a site for debate.

There are also interesting possibilities for discussion around conscious (explicit, planned, and deliberate) versus sub-conscious (consequential, unintended, and disregarded) data collection, as well as the concomitant issues of remote control and representation that are entailed (Brooke, 2001).

If making a distinction between a human as a thinking being and a technological device as a non-thinking being  - a challengeable distinction in its own right if we consider ‘the second self’ and ‘cyborganization’ (Turkle, 1984/2005; Haraway, 1999) - then one might also add into this discussion aspects of  ‘unconscious’, as opposed to ‘sub-conscious’, data production?

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Dr Emma Briant (Journalism)

Secrecy, Security and Social Science

C Wright Mills called on his fellow social scientists in 1956 to illuminate the 'power elite' because democracy "implies that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge - not to speak of power - to hold the decision-makers accountable" (1999: 325). The responsibility is upon social science to evaluate the ethics of certain practices used by government and facilitate fuller debate of policy and practice. However, David Miller and Tom Mills (2010) argue that since 9/11 increasing numbers of what they call ‘terrorologists’ have emerged in Britain: a community of security ‘experts’ or academics who lack independence and have connections to government or contracting. There is often a resistance to social scientists offering critique from outside of security studies and terrorism studies approaches, and many academics find a problematic secrecy and exclusion from debate. A gulf was visible in my own research with academics sometimes being viewed as 'outsiders' - barriers are then sometimes produced where practitioners working on security feel their activities 'misunderstood' (Briant, 2015). In one US interview, Dennis McBride, who following a military career worked for a contractor and Washington think-tank the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, commented: “things’ve changed a little bit but there’s still this attitude that ...we get from academic social science in particular that comes across as they’re above, they’re better than soldiers and... they’re not gonna participate in what we call here ‘baby-killing’.” (Interview: McBride, 5th June 2009 quoted in Briant 2015: 180).

Those working within security often find frustration themselves in the insularity of government agencies, often referred to as 'stovepipes', acting as an echo chamber and preventing the emergence of new ideas (Briant 2015). Some stress concern about a culture towards secrecy UK Former Director of Targeting and Information Operations Graham Wright observed a popular military perception he found concerning, that discussing Abu Ghraib might ‘inflame’ criticism and ‘put soldiers at risk on the ground’ resulting in secrecy over such incidents (Interview: 1st June 2009). Likewise, in the US, former US Navy Chief of Information Frank Thorp observed that 'There were those who said ‘Why should we even talk about that publicly?’ – because if we talk about it the enemy will take advantage of it. Well that’s true, but the issue is not not to talk about it the issue is not to do it. It will become public one way or another. (Interview: 24th August 2009; quoted in Briant 2015: 59). Likewise Mackay and Tatham have criticised internal stovepipes and have observed that many of the ‘lessons’ the MoD identified in Iraq are kept in a database in Shrivenham, ‘overclassified, to prevent criticism becoming public’ (Mackay and Tatham, 2009: 27).

A gulf in perceptions results between some practitioners working in security and academic and legal judgement on security matters that have arisen since 9/11 which may feed into, in some cases, the emergence of practices (discussed in other papers at this event) that have been widely seen as unethical and their subsequent concealment even from others within government. There are degrees of removal from wider society implied by the secrecy of government organisations which have produced a gulf between some practitioners' understandings, and wider public concern and distrust. In extreme cases, the gulf between the 'outsiders' and those accountable to them has set alternate moral standards and allowed abuse. McBride further described outsider reaction to torture as 'the most overblown thing I think I have experienced'; he pointed to what he calls 'the fastidiousness of the five-sided building' and contrasted the US Defense Department approach - obeying a list of things allowed and not allowed - with what he saw as an unscientific 'judgmental' attitude of social science - 'this feels like torture' (Interview: McBride, 5th June 2009 quoted in Briant 2015: 180). Of course, the Pentagon must not be above morality as defined by those to whom it is accountable and in order to ensure this there must be greater access by independent researchers to government and greater willingness to engage in dialogue with critics.

Secrecy and exclusion can result in some of the complexity of actual practice being lost from academic enquiry through over-reliance on leaked documents. It also may reinforce a simplistic attitude of 'them' and 'us' that prevents us seeing the agency and differentiation of opinion of those in government which could actually allow scope for real change. Greater openness of government to researchers would result in academic enquiry based on strong evidence being able to inform attempts to reform systems and broader ethical debates would encourage an informed electorate. I am very keen to hear what all speakers, but particularly those with first hand 'insider' experience, think of the evidence and arguments I have presented here and welcome their ideas on the ideal way for all concerned to proceed.