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Content Type: Case Study
As society heads toward an ever more connected world, the ability for individuals to protect and manage the invisible data that companies and third parties hold about them, becomes increasingly difficult. This is further complicated by events like data breaches, hacks, and covert information gathering techniques, which are hard, if not impossible, to consent to. One area where this most pressing is in transportation, and by extension the so-called ‘connected car’.
When discussing connected…
Content Type: Case Study
Political campaigns around the world have turned into sophisticated data operations. In the US, Evangelical Christians candidates reach out to unregistered Christians and use a scoring system to predict how seriously millions these of voters take their faith. As early as 2008, the Obama campaign conducted a data operation which assigned every voter in the US a pair of scores that predicted how likely they would cast a ballot, and whether or not they supported him. The campaign was so confident…
Content Type: Case Study
Financial services are collecting and exploiting increasing amounts of data about our behaviour, interests, networks, and personalities to make financial judgements about us, like our creditworthiness.
Increasingly, financial services such as insurers, lenders, banks, and financial mobile app startups, are collecting and exploiting a broad breadth of data to make decisions about people. This is particularly affecting the poorest and most excluded in societies.
For example, the decisions…
Content Type: Case Study
Gig economy jobs that depend on mobile applications allow workers’ movements to be monitored, evaluated, and exploited by their employers.
The so-called “gig economy” has brought to light employers’ increasing ability and willingness to monitor employee performance, efficiency, and overall on-the-job conduct. Workplace surveillance of gig economy workers often happens without employees’ awareness or consent. This is especially evident in the app-based gig economy, where apps act both as an…
Content Type: Case Study
Police and security services are increasingly outsourcing intelligence collection to third-party companies which are assigning threat scores and making predictions about who we are.
The rapid expansion of social media, connected devices, street cameras, autonomous cars, and other new technologies has resulted in a parallel boom of tools and software which aim to make sense of the vast amount of data generated from our increased connection. Police and security services see this data as an…
Content Type: Case Study
Introduction
Online, and increasingly offline, companies gather data about us that determine what advertisements we see; this, in turn, affects the opportunities in our lives. The ads we see online, whether we are invited for a job interview, or whether we qualify for benefits is decided by opaque systems that rely on highly granular data. More often than not, such exploitation of data facilitates and exacerbates already existing inequalities in societies – without us knowing that it occurs.…
Content Type: Examples
French spy agency Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure in December 2016 for 10 million euros signed a contract buying access to Palantir’s Gotham software. French politicians have voiced concerns over the software as France pushes to become more technologically independent.
Publication: EU Observer
Date: 9 June 2017