I’ve just submitted a finalised abstract for a twenty minute paper I’ll be giving at the UNSW postgraduate symposium on Monday September 3. (Specific time and location TBA.)
The symposium theme is ‘Making Tracks’ so, naturally, I’ll be using plenty of dinosaurs in my presentation.
Title and abstract are copied below.
I might actually blog about some of this stuff one day, though the rest of the year sees me quite busy writing other things so it may take a while =/
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Stranded deviations: Big Data and the contextually marginalised
Knowingly and otherwise, we all leave traces when we use digital technologies. As social and practical interactions moved to the digital realm, facilitated by technological breakthroughs and social pressures, many have become understandably concerned about user privacy. With the increased scale and complexity of stored information, commonly referred to as ‘Big Data’, the potential for another person to scrutinise our personal information in a way that makes us uncomfortable increases.
However, it can also be argued that because there is so much personal data stored in various digital systems our privacy is retained ‒ we all become lost in the noise. Attention is a finite resource so it becomes unlikely that we will experience a privacy breach by a real person. In practice our traces are most often treated as data, computationally analysed, rather than content, scrutinised by biological eyes.
‘Security through obscurity’ may appear to be an inadequate concept here because privacy breaches occur regularly. However, ‘cyber attacks’ are directed at targets who stand out from the noise, chosen based on some form of profiling. Therefore, within any context, certain individuals become disproportionately targeted. Those regularly contextually marginalised have the most to lose from participating in a culture of Big Data, raising issues of equal access.
In this paper I bring these ideas together to argue that the privacy discourse should not only focus on the potential for scrutiny of personal data, but also the systems in place, both social and technological, that facilitate an environment where some users are more safe than others.
exhipigeonist blog 