An anthropologist on Facebook’s new “Ray-Ban Stories” glasses
With this product, writes anthropologist Sally Applin in MIT's Technology Review, "Facebook is claiming the face as real estate for its own technology."
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Category Identity / Privacy
The drive for privacy and the difficulty of achieving it in the digital age
People care and act to manage their privacy, but face steep psychological and economic hurdles that make not just desired, but also desirable privacy nearly unattainable. Approaches to privacy management that rely purely on market forces and consumer responsibilization have failed.
Review and insight on the behavioral aspects of cybersecurity
Since the majority of cyber incidents are human enabled, this shift requires expanding research to underexplored areas such as behavioral aspects of cybersecurity. This paper provides a review of relevant theories and principles, and gives insights including an interdisciplinary framework that combines behavioral cybersecurity, human factors, and modeling and simulation.
Understanding the human aspects of cyber security
CyberBitsEtc. is a website and blog by Ganna Pogrebna (Professor of Behavioural Economics and Data Science, Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute) and Boris Taratine (Cyber Security Architect and Visionary) that focuses a lot on the human aspects of cyber security, in particular behavioural design, psychology and behavioural sciences.
The end of privacy? Central banks plan to launch digital coins
The great irony is that the revolution that bitcoin set off could be the end of [financial] privacy with the launch of central bank-backed digital coins.
Shoshana Zuboff explains why you should care about privacy
In a wide-ranging interview with Lauren Jackson of the New York Times, the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” talks about why people should pay attention to how big tech companies are using their information.
What’s mine is ours: how consumption is changing
When customers form an emotional attachment or self-identify with a product, that sense of “mine” enhances its luster and keeps them coming back for more. As shoppers shift away from owning material things, how can marketers preserve these benefits?
[Book] Privacy is Power
The first book to call for the end of the data economy. Carissa Veliz exposes how our personal data is giving too much to big tech and governments, why that matters, and what we can do about it.
You are not your data but your data is still you
New worlds need new language. TOne of those things to name is what is happening to ourselves and our data proxies. Expanding our language from privacy to personhood enables us to have conversations that enable us to see that our data is us, our data is valuable, and our data is being collected automatically.
Covid-19 and Social Innovation: Contactless sociability and hybrid communities of place
While some optimists think there will be a lasting positive change in our well-being model, with the quality of relationships and common goods at its centre, Manzini argues that things are not necessary going in that direction. A confrontation is required.
Five short papers on online privacy by Carissa Véliz
Carissa Véliz is a philosopher and ethicist who works on digital ethics, practical ethics more generally, political philosophy, and public policy
We need to save (willful) ignorance from AI
Recently the psychologist Ralph Hertwig and legal scholar Christoph Engel have published an extensive taxonomy of motives for deliberate ignorance. They identified two sets of motives, in particular, that have a particular relevance to the need for ignorance in the…
Videos from the MyData 2018 conference
The MyData 2018 conference took place in Helsinki on August 29-31. The core idea behind the MyData movement is that we, you and I, should have an easy way to see where data about us goes, specify who can use…
Essay: On Weaponised Design
On Weaponised Design is an excellent, very well-informed essay by Cade, published in February 2018 on the Our Data Our Selves site of the Tactical Technology Collective, a Berlin-based non profit dedicated to privacy, digital security and info-activism. The lived…
[Book] The Qualified Self
The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life by Lee Humphreys MIT Press May 2018, 179 pages How sharing the mundane details of daily life did not start with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube but with pocket diaries,…
Dan Hill argues for more identity, not less
Dan Hill (Associate Director, Arup, London) reflects in a long essay on the meaning of identity in the face of Brexit and Trump and what that implies for strategic design, service design and the infrastructure of everyday life. A few…
IFTF uncovers seven new worker archetypes of the on-demand economy
Update: Read also this Fortune Magazine review of the study (as reported by BoingBoing). Institute for the Future, the Caiifornia-based independent, nonprofit strategic research group, releases a new report aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of a new breed of…
Politicians need to commit to ethnographic research if they want to understand people
Business anthropologist Simon Roberts has campaigned hard for the “Remain” side in the UK referendum and is deeply disappointed. He now explores a topic that I too have been arguing for some time now: Politicians, political parties and those in…
New book series: Connected Youth and Digital Futures
Building on research supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative, New York University Press launches Connected Youth and Digital Futures, a new series that explores young people’s day-to-day lives and futures. This series offers books – available…
Why We Post: social media through the eyes of the world
Nine UCL anthropologists spent fifteen months living in nine communities around the world, researching the role, uses and consequences of social media in people’s everyday lives. University College London just launched an enormous repository with the results of this global…