PROTECT YA NECK FROM BIG TECH

In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference , researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage:

• Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it—leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance.

• Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google’s ad-targeting algorithms.

• Conscious data contribution, which involves giving meaningful data to the competitor of a platform you want to protest, such as by uploading your Facebook photos to Tumblr instead.