Categories
technology

Amazon Panopticon: the Data Tesseract

Context: A look at the intimate details Amazon knows about us It is not entirely inaccurate to assert that the most effective prison is one which is totally transparent and masquerades as freedom of choice and that, I suggest, is precisely what has happened here. There’s certainly some malfeasance or ethical impropriety of decision-making but […]

Categories
technology

Managerial Surveillance

Context: Bosses putting a ‘digital leash’ on remote workers could be crossing a privacy line I wonder if it would be all that difficult to demonstrate that each extra technical and surveillance-oriented component in a system of management and governance is actually more of a burden and cost than is the uncertainty invoked by remote […]

Categories
Philosophy

Synthetic Biases

Context: What Is Synthetic Data? …and yet, with this – the bootstrap into virtualised abstraction becomes all but complete. Fascinating and clearly intersects with some of Jean Baudrillard’s observations on simulation, semiotics and reality. Training machine intelligence on data generated in virtual worlds solves some tricky problems but at what cost; where does the “real-world” […]

Categories
Philosophy

Personal Data, Privacy and the Normative Ubiquity of Technological Self-Surveillance

An introspective taxonomy of labels and the grammatical order of participatory technology in – and as – systems of knowledge and control has always been the nature, kernel and subjective essence of personal identity. It is difficult to identify a particular inflection point at which this Linnean, categorical game evolved from constructive personal boundary and […]

Categories
technology

Private Lives, Public Spaces

Of course there is really no such thing as privacy any more. We are all kidding ourselves if we believe that there is. Ironically, privacy is never so highly valued or placed at such an institutional or commercial premium as when it no longer exists.

Categories
Philosophy technology

The Dream Police

Context: ‘This is not science fiction,’ say scientists pushing for ‘neuro-rights’ Dystopian authoritarian visions notwithstanding, there is a strong philosophical argument to be made that consciousness, sentience or intelligence only possesses the value (and, indeed, the substantive reality) it does because there are aspects of self and indeed of complex systems self-organisation that are not […]

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technology

Is it Secure to Store Private Mobile Device COVID Tracking Data with Foreign-Owned Corporations ?

Context: Like many other Governments around the world, the Australian Government is seeking to use mobile device tracking technology to assist suppressing the COVID-19 virus through contact tracing. The Australian Government has found itself as a valuable pawn in a corporate game of power and profiteering. The Australian people have found themselves and their data […]

Categories
Psychology

Detecting Deception

In an era of machine learning and artificial intelligence, there may be nowhere that is not unveiled by the light of information and data measurement.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Identity Theft

Identity theft is so rampant now that the oversupply of data makes it quite cheap to purchase.

Categories
Digital

On the Presence of Absence

Sometimes the most profound truths (or at the very least – facts) emerge not from what does exist, but from what does not.