Digital Democracy

As Swartz fought for, what we ideally need is government information in the public domain and people’s personal data being secret.

https://thewire.in/tech/aaron-swartz-and-his-legacy-of-internet-activism 

Aaron Swartz died 10 years ago, driven to suicide by prosecutorial overreach of US attorneys trying to convict him for 35 years in jail for downloading scientific journals in bulk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Swartz was a technology genius, who championed the cause of open knowledge and open internet. He helped create Rich Simple Site and Creative Commons, and was the co-founder of reddit and digital rights organisation Demand Progress. Beyond the technology contributions, Swartz helped liberate tons of information from government databases and create open access libraries and projects.

In Swartz’s words:

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitised and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.”

Across the world, at present, tech companies have taken over control of the information and internet infrastructure. They have co-opted words of internet communities to suit their narratives. In the name of openness and building Digital India, personal information has been commodified. This commodification of information is what Swartz was warning against, how the powerful are taking control of information that should belong to the people. People who understood this fought back against this very idea of gatekeepers of knowledge and information.

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by  Srinivas Kodali

Elon Musk Is Destroying the Myths of Silicon Valley in Front of Our Very Eyes BY LUKE SAVAGE https://jacobin.com/2022/11/elon-musk-twitter-silicon-valley-myth

Extracts: the roughly one-month period that has elapsed since his takeover of Twitter has probably done more damage to his image — and to the fraudulent and self-serving myths of Silicon Valley it draws on — than any of these things ever could...even the most devoted Musk sycophants will have to ask what the master plan is beyond erratic public behavior and lazily trolling the libs.

there’s no great promethean genius, elaborate game of multidimensional chess, or modern day philosopher king hiding behind the Mars talk, product recalls, and epic bacon memes. All that exists behind the curtain is a garden-variety capitalist doing the kinds of things that capitalists have always done — in this case very badly.

DIGITAL DISCOURSES TOTAL TRANSPARENCY? - PRIVACY IN THE AGE OF DATA CAPITALISM

Large parts of our lives are captured in the data trails we leave online. Who tracks them and how are they monetized? What is this data worth? Are we drawing the short straw when we trade our data for free in exchange for digital services and the conveniences of the internet? Or are we better off if we embrace a post-privacy world?

More than 1.6 billion people log into Facebook across the globe in a single day. Hundreds of millions use shopping platforms, email providers, file sharing services, mobile payment apps, and other digital tools to go about their daily lives.

Many of these tools are free to use. The companies that created them find value elsewhere: in the stream of signals users produce as they navigate their digital lives. The digital stream allows corporate brands and governments to target people by interest, background, and behavior. And it turns private data into a commodity that can be traded for profit, that can enable control and is sometimes even used for purposes far beyond the intention or knowledge of its original owners.

What rules should be in place for commercial and governmental use of this data? Can we as users regain control over our data trails? The second instalment of the Digital Discourses conference series dives deeply into the complicated relationship between our right to privacy and our desire to browse, communicate, shop, and access services with seamless ease.

https://www.goethe.de/ins/id/en/kul/mte/ddd/dd2/21846526.html  

Alia Y. Karunian, Katharina Nocun, Michael Seemann, Jun-E  Tan

The stream of signals users produce as they navigate their digital lives opens the door for various use cases and exploitations. The digital stream allows corporate brands and governments to target people by interest, background, and behavior. Further, it turns private data into a commodity that can be traded for profit, that can enable control and is sometimes even used for purposes far beyond the intention or knowledge of its original owners.

The moderated panel discussion will be looking at the mechanisms of personal data extraction, storage, analysis, and commercialization. Several scenarios and use cases are explored: user data on shopping and entertainment platforms, in political micro-targeting, in financial services platforms, and in state surveillance. 

https://www.goethe.de/ins/id/en/kul/mte/ddd/dd2/21850313.html 

Ingo Dachwitz, Sutawan Chanprasert, Wahyudi Djafar, Tony Seno Hartono

The moderated panel discussion will focus on various aspects of regulating commercial and governmental use of data. In this context, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is often seen as a benchmark with several nations drawing inspiration from it. But what have we learned so far about how these new rules hold up in practice? What is Southeast Asia's stance in the debate? In the global flow of user data, does it matter where data is physically stored? And are there any alternative models to data ownership and access?
 

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