I’ve just put up a longish thought piece on how Canadian telecommunications companies can practically move to improve the transparency of their corporate practices. Sometime in the next few weeks I intend on writing up how governments can develop accountability reports, and the importance in distinguishing between corporate transparency and government accountability as it relates to state surveillance.
Category: Links
We take a look at how Android Wear works, and even manage to break some stuff.
This is the most in-depth analysis that I’ve seen of the Android Wear API and functionality. I have doubts that predicating most/many of the ‘active’ uses of the Wearable through voice is going to be a super popular thing: I can’t recall the last time that I saw someone ask Siri a question, or used Google’s voice-based search. I’m sure that some people do engage in such behaviours, but I’ve never once seen it while riding public transit or walking around the cities I’ve visited or lived in. As a result, I’m left wondering: who is actually using voice-based commands to control their devices? And will expanding the kinds of devices that can receive such commands actually lead to mass changes in how people engage with technologies?
Source: In-depth with Android Wear, Google’s quantum leap of a smartwatch OS
I can take issue with an awful lot of academia, but was fortunate to have an incredibly supportive dissertation supervisor who did (and continues to do) his best to ensure that I landed either in a good academic, government, non-profit, or corporate position. And there’s never been a stigma attached when I’ve pursued these various options (really: there’s just been support and encouragement!)
But I know that my experiences aren’t common. The series that Karen is running over at her website on leaving academe is useful in just exposing what it’s like to leave an academic ‘life’, and the baggage that is often associated with that choice. Allesandria Polizzi’s pieces, in particular, strike me as explaining to academics and non-academics alike what it’s like to straddle academe and corporate life, and the difficulties that a lot of people face in simply trying to explain themselves to their academic and corporate colleagues.
Source: How I Left Academia: A Recovering Academic’s Introduction – Polizzi 2
Categories
2014.3.18
If you find yourself wishing your province had a competitive fourth provider, you could move to friendly Manitoba or set up shop under Saskatchewan’s living skies. But you wouldn’t have to stay for long. It’s hard to believe, but this is the truth: it’s cheaper to buy a roundtrip plane ticket to Regina or Winnipeg, subscribe to one of these plans and then use it back home, than it would be to sign a contract in Toronto or Calgary.
For the Telus 1GB plan, you could fly roundtrip from Calgary to Regina for $369 and save yourself $350 (after paying for the plane ticket) on a two year 1GB plan.
For the Rogers 10GB plan, you would save a whopping $1,180 dollars after the price of airfare if you flew from Toronto to Winnipeg and signed up for service there.
It might sound crazy, but check for yourself. If you decide to fly to Winnipeg, look me up. I’ll even pick you up at the airport.
Aside from pushing up demand for air travel, it’s hard to see how this kind of pricing is beneficial to anyone but the wireless carriers’ shareholders and management. Canadian carriers like Bell, Telus, and Rogers are supposed to be affected with the public interest – not opposed to it.
We as a country won’t even get close to having a fair market until you can walk, not fly, to a provider offering reasonably priced service.
Ben Klass, “Wireless Carriers’ High Flying Prices”
Ben’s written a nice, punchy, piece about the new cellco price hikes. You should go read it.
Categories
2014.4.18
In that “Binders Full of Women” program we did, we learned some of the reasons why it’s so hard to find female guests. For example, if we’re doing a debate on economics, 90% of economists are men. So already you’re fishing in a lake where the odds are stacked against you. And unfortunately, it’s the same for foreign affairs, politicians, the sciences, labour issues, and the list goes on. The vast majority of “experts” in the subjects we cover are men.
But we’ve also discovered there also seems to be something in women’s DNA that makes them harder to book. No man will ever say, “Sorry, can’t do your show tonight, I’m taking care of my kids.” The man will find someone to take care of his kids so he can appear on a TV show. Women use that excuse on us all the time.
No man will say, “Sorry, can’t do your show tonight, my roots are showing.” I’m serious. We get that as an excuse for not coming on. But only from women.
No man will say, “Sorry can’t do your show tonight, I’m not an expert in that particular aspect of the story.” They’ll get up to speed on the issue and come on. Women beg off. And worse, they often recommend a male colleague in their place.
Steve Paikin, “Where, Oh Where, Are All the Female Guests?”
People are (fairly) critiquing Paikin’s language in his blog post. In particular, his comment that “we’ve also discovered there also seems to be something in women’s DNA that makes them harder to book” is drawing significant ire.
At this point I’ve given hundreds of interviews to journalists from all mediums, and from all over the world. What I’ve learned is that it is critical to simply be direct with a producer (who is often who you’ll be initially speaking with) to suggest how you could contribute to a given piece. A significant element of the interview process is the producer ascertaining if you’re a good ‘fit’ for the medium, if you have something interesting to contribute, and how to shape the story in question. Sometimes you’ll run into a producer who is very explicit about what they want: the narrative has been arranged before to speaking with you and you’re unlikely to change what’s in place very much. Other times you can shape the story as an expert.
I don’t know precisely how TVO tends to generally develop their stories, but in my very anecdotal experiences producers have tended to come with pretty specific stories or narratives in mind and are unable to significantly re-structure the discussion based on my input. The result has been that despite my willingness to do what Paikin suggests – do some side research to get caught up on the specifics of a topic that’s in my field of study – it’s often the case that I cannot ‘fit’. It may just be that I’ve always been a tertiary possible guest (as opposed to the headliner person(s) who might be more successful in shaping the story), or something common with how TVO conducts their operations. I don’t know.
In general, people are sometimes reluctant to deal with the media because the production timelines tend to be compact (e.g. get called in the morning, to appear on live television a few hours later and often with the guest incurring travel or child-care expenses) and people who aren’t used to – or don’t want to accommodate – this kind of chaos and expense might justifiably refuse to participate. Given that women in the workforce are routinely underpaid and expected to engage in equivalent or greater degrees of ‘productive’ work than their male counterparts, there is very practical workplace (to say nothing of home care duty) rationales for waiving off media interviews that have little to no clear benefit, and piles of possible downsides.
If TVO really wants to improve their female guest selection they should simply refuse to run shows where they cannot book at least X% female guests. And then do aggressive outreach with the employers of the women whom they want to have on the show: prove to employers that being on the show matters so that employers free up their female employees to speak on a given topic. It’s not enough to just target high-qualified women, you also have to ensure that the structures limiting their participation are also actively engaged and alleviated. Expecting women to just behave like men both ignores the contributions women can provide (i.e. they’re not men!) and the challenges that women have to overcome on a daily basis as compared to their male counterparts. Paikin should know that, and I suspect he does, but the tone of the post almost entirely devoid of such sensitivities.
In the interests of disclosure: I’ve been interviewed as a possible person to appear on The Agenda a few times, though never ultimately been selected to appear. The Agenda is one of the very few show’s I’ve actively watched for years, and I really really like it and generally respect Paikin and the entire crew. And I routinely suggest female colleagues that TVO (and other journalistic mediums) should speak with. I don’t know the ‘success’ rate of booking those colleagues.
Categories
2014.4.18
If the going metaphor of the startup is that male hackers are stars whose physical characteristics are a source of status and power, the role of women in startups often becomes tinged by differently sexualized and submissive ‘groupie’ expectations. Because even though employers might imagine that startup slogans like “who’s your data” are denatured of their original sexual meanings, they aren’t. Deploying terms for engineers that invoke sexual dominance signals that the startup at some subconscious level wants to emulate a model of power where men perform while others watch and wait, intent on servicing their needs. Some startups even make the desired correlation between women workers and selfless service explicit, as in the app “Geisha” which served links to web designers in the guise of a red-cheeked, submissive female product mascot. The Geisha app deploys fetishized racial stereotypes towards an all-too-common model of tech culture in which men are centered and powerful while women serve them from the position of exotic ‘other.’ The Geisha app’s deployment of racial and gender stereotypes was so blatant that it even received criticism on Hacker News, which prompted the app to change its name.
Kate Losse, “Sex and the Startup: Men, Women, and Work”
Kate Losse, once again, doing a terrific job critiquing the masculine and sexist working conditions in Silicon Valley. You should really read her book The Boy Kings to understand what it was like working at Facebook; it’s an absolute eye-opener.
Categories
2014.3.17
We agree that Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things, and Big Data analytics are all trends that may yield remarkable new correlations, insights, and benefits for society at large. While we have no intention of standing in the way of progress, it is essential that privacy practitioners participate in these efforts to shape trends in a way that is truly constructive, enabling both privacy and Big Data analytics to develop, in tandem.
There is a growing understanding that innovation and competitiveness must be approached from a “design-thinking” perspective — namely, viewing the world to overcome constraints in a way that is holistic, interdisciplinary, integrative, creative and innovative. Privacy must also be approached from the same design-thinking perspective. Privacy and data protection should be incorporated into networked data systems and technologies by default, and become integral to organizational priorities, project objectives, design processes, and planning operations. Ideally, privacy and data protection should be embedded into every standard, protocol, and data practice that touches our lives. This will require skilled privacy engineers, computer scientists, software designers and common methodologies that are now being developed, hopefully to usher in an era of Big Privacy.
We must be careful not to naively trust data users, or unnecessarily expose individuals to new harms, unintended consequences, power imbalances and data paternalism. A “trust me” model will simply not suffice. Trust but verify — embed privacy as the default, thereby growing trust and enabling confirmation of trusted practices.
Ann Cavoukian, Alexander Dix, and Khaled El Emam, “The Unintended Consequences of Privacy Paternalism”
I’m generally sympathetic to the arguments made in this article, though there are a series of concerns I have that are (I hope) largely the result of the authors trying to write an inoffensive article that could be acted on by large organizations. To begin, while I understand that Commissioner Cavoukian has developed her reputation on working with partners as opposed to tending to radically oppose corporations’ behaviours I’m left asking: what constitutes ‘progress’ for herself and her German counterpart, Dr. Dix?
Specifically, Commissioners Cavoukian and Dix assert that they have no intention to stand in the way of progress and (generally) that a more privacy-protective approach means we can enjoy progress and privacy at the same time. But how do the Commissioners ‘spot’ progress? How do they know what to oppose and not oppose? When must, and mustn’t, they stand in the way of a corporation’s practices?
The question of defining progress is tightly linked with my other concern from this quoted part of their article. Specifically, the Commissioners acknowledge that a ‘positive-sum’ approach to privacy and progress requires “skilled privacy engineers, computer scientists, software designers and common methodologies that are now being developed, hopefully to usher in an era of Big Privacy.” That these groups are important is true. But where are the non-engineers, non-software designers, and (presumably) non-lawyers? Social scientists and arts and humanities scholars and graduates can also contribute to sensitizing organizations’ understandings of privacy, of user interests, and the history of certain decisions.
Privacy isn’t something that is only understandable by lawyers or engineers. And, really, it would be better understood and protected if there were more people involved in the discussion. Potential contributors to the debates shouldn’t be excluded simply because they contest or demand definitions of ‘progress’ or come from a non-lawyerly or computer-development background. Rather, they should be welcomed as expanding the debate outside of the contemporary echo chamber of the usually-counted disciplinary actors.
OTTAWA – An investigation at Canada’s secretive eavesdropping agency has uncovered misuse of public assets and “serious breaches” of the spy outfit’s values and ethics code.
…
the agency took “various measures” with regard to the employees in question.
CSEC spokesman Ryan Foreman said that for privacy reasons he could not release any information about “specific employees involved in this disclosure of wrongdoing.”
Foreman also refused to discuss the number and type of employees implicated, whether anyone was disciplined or fired, what kind of public assets were involved or their value.
Nor would he say when the matter came to CSEC’s attention, or when were the corrective steps were taken.
“They basically tell you nothing,” said Liberal public safety critic Wayne Easter.
NDP defence critic Jack Harris said the response “shows an unwillingness to be up-front with the public.”
“It just seems to me to be a public-relations response which doesn’t do much to inspire trust and confidence, frankly,” Harris said in an interview
My money is that in terms of misuse, facilities were being used to store, access, or download copyright infringing materials. And, in terms of asset misuse, I have at least one very good idea what that might have encompassed…
Source: Canada’s electronic spy agency uncovers wrongdoing, ethics breaches
The earliest computer programmers were women and the programming field was once stereotyped as female
One of the best books I’ve read about the transition from computing as a female- to male-dominanted area of work is Ensmenger’s The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise.
It’s a remarkable book that details – with precision – how labour changes combined with new understandings of what ‘goes into’ computer work led to the defeminization of not just the people working on computers but the very tropes and language associated with the same kind(s) of work. Highly, highly recommended.
From the Globe and Mail:
Canadians have “no way of knowing for certain the number, scale, frequency of, or reasons for, such disclosures, although we understand that they are substantial.”
…
The companies that responded to Citizen Labber Christopher Parsons included Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Telus, Videotron, Cogeco, Eastlink, MTS Allstream and Distributel, with the general sentiment that the privacy of their customers is of great concern. But their responses were short on details, instead citing vagaries about legal restrictions and national security, and in some cases shifting the onus on transparency to the government instead.
According to David Fraser, a Canadian privacy lawyer and partner with the firm of McInnes Cooper, “They’re able to provide a whole lot more information than they actually are.”
Further pressure on the companies to make it clearer just how, why, and how often they share information with state agencies.
Excited Pixels 