IN THE FALL OF 2020, GIG WORKERS IN VENEZUELA POSTED A SERIES OF images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet.

In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.

The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence.

They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls. Yet earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups.

The photos vary in type and in sensitivity. The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level.

iRobot—the world’s largest vendor of robotic vacuums, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal—confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020.

Ultimately, though, this set of images represents something bigger than any one individual company’s actions. They speak to the widespread, and growing, practice of sharing potentially sensitive data to train algorithms, as well as the surprising, globe-spanning journey that a single image can take—in this case, from homes in North America, Europe, and Asia to the servers of Massachusetts-based iRobot, from there to San Francisco–based Scale AI, and finally to Scale’s contracted data workers around the world (including, in this instance, Venezuelan gig workers who posted the images to private groups on Facebook, Discord, and elsewhere).

Together, the images reveal a whole data supply chain—and new points where personal information could leak out—that few consumers are even aware of.

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post-entertainment society

It’s difficult to talk about technology without also addressing cybersecurity – the two are closely linked since a majority of devices, systems and solutions that people use as part of their personal and business lives are network connected devices.

Bebe Neuwirth as Avis DeVoto in episode 2x07 of Julia, "Shrimp and Grits"

By Alan MacLeod

Since Elon has now bought Twitter I think it is important to highlight how he is not some radical outsider, but a crucial part of the US surveillance and national security states. Read my investigation here.

CLOSED CIRCUIT | CD, 1994 ELECTRONIC EYE (RICHARD H. KIRK)

Industrial methods of worker control were prefigured on plantations, which sought to maximize the labor of enslaved Black people otherwise unmotivated to produce value for those who kept them captive. While the relationship between industrial and plantation worker control is foundational, it is essential to recognize that there is no easy equivalence between the terror-enforced racialized labor regimes of plantation slavery, and industrial labor processes that drew on technologies developed on plantations.5 Plantation management—and the relations of domination that structured the plantation—was anchored in a view of Black people as commodities, as something-not-quite-human. And the conditions of bondage on the plantation defined the category of “unfreedom” against which white workers could be classified as “free.”

...

In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne demonstrates that power over enslaved people was executed through bureaucratic technologies that divided enslaved workers, prescribed their routines and motions, and calibrated their movements with the goal of managing and controlling “every moment of enslaved life.”11 Her work clarifies the interplay between the strict division and quantification of life and labor on plantations, and how such segmentation served to make enslaved people observable to overseers and managers.12 The fragmentation of production, whether in the field or the factory, shifts power away from those doing the work to owners who benefit from defining and overseeing a coherent view of workers and the labor process. Such a view doesn’t emerge on its own. Rather, it is produced through records, metrics, and standardized assessments—and we must understand the term “record keeping” to be a synonym for “surveillance.” Monitoring and quantification of work and workers was the first, and arguably most important, step in populating plantation records. And these records’ demands for data and information in turn shaped how labor was divided and managed, in service of making work and workers as visible and quantifiable as possible.

...

Iskander illuminates how designations of skill—and the power that capital claims to define what is and is not “skilled”—work to produce and naturalize conditions of bondage, creating a hierarchy of “deservedness” that justifies conditions of precarity and domination for the “unskilled.”20 The concept of skill is also racialized. In a “free” labor context, “skill” is narrated as something (white) workers possess and serves as an index of the wages a worker can deduct from the profits desired by capitalists—a sum they can, in theory, negotiate or refuse. On the plantation, enslaved Black people were not ascribed the capacity for skill. They were narrated as incapable of possessing skill, and any prowess they displayed was attributed to biological differences that nonetheless marked them as inferior—animal capacity, not human ingenuity. Racial categories structure who is deemed able to possess skill to begin with, while marking a lack of skill as a condition of unfreedom and thus a condition of Blackness.21

york 09/2022

Musical inspiration: Apocryphos, "Heartsick " (album "Against Civilization", 2020)

"It was thanks to Subject Access Requests that teaching assistants and librarians were able to find out that the UK Department for Education is keeping files on their internet activity.

When the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill is passed, we might not be able to find out about such sinister practices because the Bill will make it easier for the government to refuse our requests to access the data it holds about us."

#DPDI #GDPR #ukpolitics #dataprotection

Brainstorm (1983, Douglas Trumbull)

3/17/24

x

We are joined by Antony Loewenstein — author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World — to discuss his extensive reporting on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the policing tactics and surveillance technologies that are tested on Palestinians before sold as part of lucrative global export industry, and how the dynamics of occupation never stay within their cordoned zones but always expand to capture increasingly more people and places.

This came out five months ago, so before the current conflict. It was very enlightening and shattered a lot of the perceptions I had grown up with around Israel. Particularly, Israel's history of coopering with brutal regimes and their selling their skills and technology to the highest bidder. Oftentimes as a middle-man for the United States.

thoughts on atmosphere in the portal series

i made another thing, tumblr. this is a spoken word industrial piece called 'please turn on location services' it's inspiration is probably obvious. i generated most of the imagery with AI, first time trying that - it's neat. The prison photo is from san quentin prison, unknown date, prisoners gathering for a concert. anyway, hope you dig it.

A Changing Internet Landscape

[W]hat I love and believe in the most is connection, human connection, and the technologies by which that is achieved. Those technologies include books, of course. But for my generation, connection has largely meant the Internet. Before you recoil, knowing well the toxic madness that infests that hive in our time, understand that for me, when I came to know it, the Internet was a very different thing. It was a friend, and a parent. It was a community without border or limit, one voice and millions, a common frontier that had been settled but not exploited by diverse tribes living amicably enough side by side, each member of which was free to choose their own name and history and customs. Everyone wore masks, but this culture of anonymity-through-polyonymy produced more truth than falsehood, because it was creative and cooperative rather than commercial and competitive. Certainly, there was conflict, but it was outweighed by goodwill and good feelings - the true pioneering spirit. You will understand, then, when I say that the Internet of today is unrecognizable. It's worth noting that this change has been a conscious choice, the result of a systematic effort on the part of a privileged few. The early rush to turn commerce into e-commerce quickly led to a bubble, and then, just after the turn of the millennium, to a collapse. After that, companies realized that people who went online were far less interested in spending than in sharing. and that the human connection the Internet made possible could be monetized. If most of what people wanted to do was to be able to tell their family, friends, and strangers what they were up to, and to be told what their family, friends, and strangers were up to in return, then all the companies had to do was figure out how to put themselves in the middle of those social exchanges and turn them into profit. That was the beginning of surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it. Now, it was the creative Web that collapsed, as countless beautiful, difficult, individualistic websites were shuttered. The promise of convenience led people to exchange their personal sites -which demanded constant and laborious upkeep- for a Facebook page and a Gmail account. The appearance of ownership was easy to mistake for the reality of it. Few of us understood it at the time, but none of the things we'd go on to share belonged to us anymore. The successors to the e-commerce companies that had failed because they couldn't find anything we were interested in buying now had a new product to sell. That new product was Us. Our attention, our activities, our locations, our desires - everything about us that we revealed, knowingly or not, was being surveilled and sold in secret, so as to delay the inevitable feeling of violation that is, for most of us, coming only now.

- Edward Snowden (Permanent Record, pages 4-5). Bolded emphases added.