Over the holiday weekend, news that Facebook had hired a PR firm to “make claims” about George Soros dropped.

FB went after Soros because he has ties to the Freedom from Facebook Foundation, which is trying to break up FB into its component parts.

Soros says that it’s a smear campaign, and is demanding a Congressional investigation.

COO Cheryl Sandberg claims to know nothing about this, and MArk Zuckerberg can’t be reached for comment.

An outgoing executive is likely to take the fall for this.

I don’t see how anyone could be surprised by this.

One thing that gets me about some people I know. They’ve quit FB, and said that “They’re free of it”, while continuing to use Instagram. When I (or others) point out that IG is owned by FB, people tend not to react well.

Reading Habeas Data was the first time I ever thought about litigation regarding personal data. In addition, prior to this reading, I knew nothing about the security features of email, as well as the role of encryption in the email system. I was extremely fascinated to learn about Germany’s restriction on the type of data the government can collect following Nazism. One could say that Germany was ahead of the times when they created their first data privacy act in the 1970s, far before personal computing became prevalent. In addition, the fact that Germany continuously updated the law up until 2003 is a sign that they take the development of technology seriously (although, now that 2003 was 15 years ago, the law could use an update because technology and data collection has changed drastically since then). The contrast between German privacy laws regarding data and US laws is stark – even after all the court cases regarding personal data and search warrants were settled, the US still does not have a federal law restricting the type of data the government can collect on a person. This contrast between Germany and the US reminds me of another scenario with Twitter. On Twitter in the US, one can easily spread and have access to far-right conspiracy theories and the sort. In Germany, that type of propaganda is not allowed. This can be seen if a user logs onto the German version of Twitter as opposed to the US version of Twitter. It appears that the main difference between the US and Germany is that Germany is aware of its dark history – the age of Nazism – and is doing its best to prevent history from repeating itself. Some argue that the US does not have the same history of violence, or that the entirety of US history is violence, that the US government has no interest in halting the perpetuation of violent far-right rhetoric.

I was not surprised to read the Supreme Court came back 9-0 for both the Riley and the Wurie case. I think most people would be surprised that the Right leaning judges voted for the right to privacy, but most Republicans tend to prefer smaller governments and therefore limiting the powers of the government. When reading about these cases, I also did some reflecting on my relationship with my phone. People dump data about their entire day to day lives on their phones without giving it a second thought. Furthermore, most of us use applications that automatically communicate with the cloud (via Google or Amazon). At this point, it is perhaps naïve to assume the existence of any sort of privacy in the US. In addition, it is not even the data collection that is the most nefarious process of the internet – it is the personality profiling, the microtargeting, and the psychometrics developed to manipulate unassuming people into doing things for someone else’s agenda.

The Tumblr app has been removed from the Apple store

We have been focusing on Facebook, Amazon, and other entities, but we really haven’t discussed Tumblr.

Tumblr is a microblogging site. Many people use it to post fanfiction (An Archive of Our Own is another site for that), others use it to explore hobbies, or discuss politics. I have a Tumblr that consists mostly of bad jokes, things I’m interested in (mostly related to history, linguistics, and politics) and pictures I’ve taken at various museums I’ve visited.

However, Tumblr has always had a dark side. The alt-right has found a home there, for example. That isn’t what got Tumblr in trouble, though. Child pornography is. Apparently users have managed to post it on Tumblr despite Tumblr’s filters.

Tumblr is saying that it’s working on fixing this. We’ll see.

Farivar’s Habeas Data is an interesting read that discusses what happens at the intersection of technology, government, and privacy.

Perhaps the most salient point for me is that the law is just simply not keeping up with the changes in technology. I am not sure that it can, honestly. Cases take time to work their way through the legal system. Something that was an issue in, say, 2015, might be resolved by the time the case is heard in an appellate court in 2018.

The geography of the Appellate court system adds to this problem. In the United States, we have twelve appellate courts, and they frequently make decisions that contradict one another, which forces cases to the Supreme Court, which also adds time.

Part of the problem here is that sometimes it’s difficult view the technology through the lens of the relevant parts of the Constitution, say, the Fourth Amendment,

For instance, in the Riley case, the lawyers representing the police claimed that finding photos on a cell phone was just like finding those same photos in the defendant’s pocket, that they were in plain sight and, therefore, a warrant wasn’t necessary.

The Supreme Court said otherwise, and I;m inclined to agree. The phone is there, but what is on it isn’t obvious at all.

Of course, this is just the United States. Other countries have different issues.

One thing that struck me early in the piece was the conflict between Google and Germany over Google Street View. Here in the United States, we didn’t bat an eye when Google drove around recording our streets. Germany had a huge problem with it. Google eventually dropped the project in Germany.

The author states that Germans put up greater resistance to large scale data gathering because of their historical experience with the Nazi government and the Stasi in East Germany. I wonder if this feeling is not just limited to Germany, but common across Europe, which would lead to being more receptive to the Right to be Forgotten.

But, again, in the Uhnited States, we have different issues. For instance, the amount of data the Oakland Police Department collected just with their license plate photography program.

They weren’t just tracking suspects, or recent parolees, they were tracking everyone. Which leads us to the question, “Do we want our habits to be that well-known?”

I would say probably not.

Law and technology is a fascinating. scary place.

Facebook has it rough lately, and this article describes how the powers that be there have been reacting.

The word compression is used to describe a technical process that renders a mode of representation adequate to its infrastructures. Humanists and engineers, still evaluate media in terms of their ability to produce authentic effects. Sterne presented the idea of compression with a historical background. He compared the phenomenon with packing a suitcase. “You have too many clothes to fit in it,” he said, “so you roll them up, you squish them until you run out of space.” This I thought was the best way to describe the phenomena. If compression transforms representation for the purposes of technical media, it also transforms media to render them adequate to representation. This leads to the question why and how efficiency and effectiveness, along with an authenticity to get the reliable experience, is a driving concern in the theory of media. Sterne also sheds light on the importance of understanding how and why lower-definition experiences are sometimes among the most intense, significant and meaningful moments in modern life. As new communication infrastructures come into existence, aesthetic representation becomes an engineering problem. Specifically, where people make representational demands upon infrastructures that exceed the carrying capacity.

Furthermore, to sum up the media structures readings, I would say that it contributes towards the development of digital media. Its emphasis was on how digital media represents a physical, concrete and tangible infrastructure. It was a good read, shedding light on several kinds of technologies and implications of digital media infrastructures- which I would never have stopped to think about twice, including data centers, media infrastructures, cloud, and digital compression processes. Now we can easily see the several consequences of these infrastructures on society, especially in relation with media and environmental sustainability. It makes one think how much of the world of technology and data does not meet the eye.

Sterne’s “Compression: A Loose History” discusses the historical and theoretical contexts under which compression of thought and language, audio, and data have emerged. In regards to the piece, I am especially interested in the variations between the high definition media and the low definition media, especially when thinking on their potential to shape education and knowledge. When discussing the alternative high definition files that need to be compressed – low definition ‘aesthetic’ files, I was surprised to see that the author made no mention of In Defense of the Poor Image, written by artist Hito Steryerl.  Steryerl makes several points about the affordances of the poor image, one of them being that poor images are able to spread quickly and easily its low resolution is able to accommodate a variety of infrastructure, especially in places that do not have access to high bandwidth connections. She writes “The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality.”

This brings us to the discussion of verisimilitude. In this context, it means the ability for technology to portray what we perceive to be reality, what we perceive to be true. Sterne introduces his work with the sentence “this is the story of communication as being about the anxiety over the loss of meaning through a succession of technical forms. The assumption here is that progress in technology comes through its ability to produce verisimilitude” (32). However, it is important to think about whose truth technology is perpetuating. As we have discussed in our previous classes, technology and data are not all knowing apolitical machines that have the ability to be objective because the biases of the creators are built into them. As we are able to produce more and more media and construct more infrastructure to accommodate this media, whose truths are we prioritizing?

Low definition images are powerful because they are able to be spread more quickly, they can be created by anyone, and they are unusual to the vast majority of media consumers at this point. With “bootleg aesthetics”, Lucas Hilderbrand “finds these videos all the more affectively powerful because of their low definition” (34). I believe low definition images are more powerful than the ability to compress because of the context under which they exist in this day and age. When compressing a concept, image, audio byte, there is information that has to be trimmed and therefore lost during the process of compression and transmission. With low definition images, what the user captures is what is shared. The user captured their truth with the creation of that media source. In terms of information compression, if the creator is not the compressor, an outside source is determining what is and is not important. How might their biases skew the information being transmitted in an unintentional way?

Side note: It might be interesting to explore the relationship between coding and cryptography, but I don’t know enough about cryptography enough to have a coherent statement or opinion about that relationship.