Critical Data Studies
introductory course (4/5)
Data collection & privacy
You thought you were collecting data about your news sources...
while in reality they were gathering data about you.
Who has been tracking you?
What the news might know about you?
How news can learn about us?
website stats
cookies
trackers (e.g. Facebook Pixel)
browser fingerprinting
Check your browser's fingerprint
What your phone knows about how you interact with news?
What the news might know about you?
What one could infer about you from your news data set?
Why a mobile phone has truly been revolutionary?
it's personal
it knows a lot about us
it extends your body
it changes our perception of space
Ubiquitous computing paradox
1. By getting smaller, mobile phone offloads our data to the cloud,
but the cloud is far from being immaterial, which you might expect.
2. Being practically indispensible,
mobile phone has become a perfect spying tool.
In 2009, Spitz went to court to obtain the data that Deutsche Telekom gathered (and kept) about his activity
How easy it is to track the U.S. president
Postscript on the Societies of Control
by Gilles Deleuze
From data acquistion to visualisation – data workflow in practice