A good overall guide to the state of the field. Very easy to read and digest, so particularly useful for students less confident with academic English.

Reading this was both eye-opening, yet scary at the same time. It's weird to full realise how much we are being watched by CCTV, or how we are being tracked by the cookies on our phones or laptops. Interesting read.

Well, it’s not often that I hate and love a book in equal measure – but that’s what happened with We Are Data. On the one hand, it’s a completely fascinating, sometimes scary and often unbelievable text but on the other it’s super dry, technical and complicated. I suspect it was conceived from the embers of a Ph.D thesis – and as someone who was forced to review their partners Ph.D write up let me tell you, those things are no fun to read.

The book looks at data in the modern world – how it is created, stored, captured by third parties, analysed and ultimately put to use. That sounds quite abstract, but when you realise that the data we’re talking about is the stuff you create yourself by searching the web, using social media, reading a blog…yeah, the fact that you’re reading this right now means that you’ve left a data trail that someone, somewhere is recording. Now you’re interested, right? Maybe a little creeped out? That’s how I felt for pretty much the entirety of the book.

Because We Are Data focuses on the information created at an individual level, it suddenly makes it much more relevant to real life. For example, did you know that just by owning a mobile phone (even one that’s turned off), you create data through it’s inbuilt GPS? And that not only will your movements be tracked by your phone company, they will also know who you spend time with in real life (through your proximity to other mobile phones)? If you use a smartphone or computer, your data will also include who you talk to (via calls and texts), who you’re friends with (via social media like Facebook), what your interests are (via your web searches), where you work (via phone GPS co-ordinates and logging on to certain sites from your unique IP address during working hours) etc. Basically, everything we do digitally is monitored at some level, and is used to infer all kinds of things about us as individuals. If you don’t believe me, or think this sounds a bit far-fetched (and you have a Google/Gmail account) you can read who Google think you are by going to http://www.google.com/ads/preferences. This information hasn’t been volunteered by you – it’s been discerned by algorithms using the data the company has logged about you from your online activity. Pretty scary stuff, right?

We Are Data explores how analysis of the metadata of daily life can be algorithmically interpreted to deduce “facts” about us (gender, age, socio-economic background, income, education level etc.) and how that impacts on us. This can be seemingly innocuous, such as Facebook placing adverts in our news feeds targeted to what it believes our interests are to the utterly terrifying actions of the US military sending drone strikes to kill individuals based purely on the data they have created. I know this is all starting to sound like a dystopian fantasy novel or a crackpot conspiracy theory, but We Are Data is meticulously researched and referenced. Big Brother really is watching.

Personally, I found the information contained within We Are Data to be completely fascinating BUT it does read like a textbook. There are so many technical phrases and bits of theory used that I can easily see the book being used as a core text for a number of degree programmes, in everything from Sociology to Technology. It’s not light reading, it definitely would only appeal to a small number of people and if you’re not used to reading scholarly articles then you’ll find it a total slog to get through – but there was just enough mind blowing research contained within the pages to keep me reading to the end (well, not quite the end, as the last 15% is references). If dataveillance is your thing then you’ll love it.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1950136227

Inquietante viaggio nella realtà di Internet - il mare in cui ci immergiamo, sereni e ignari, ogni giorno, senza sapere che cosa cediamo in cambio di intrattenimento e informazioni.

WE ARE DATA by John Cheney-Lippold was published this week by New York University Press and deals with privacy and the right to be forgotten. As the subtitle notes, Cheney-Lippold is writing about "Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves." The cover is very cool, right? And the first chapter explains "algorithmic knowledge production" or "how computers create categories through patterns in data." Much of the content, though, is fairly detailed and involves complex ideas and new vocabulary (measureable types, soft biopolitics, dividual privacy, datafied subject relations and so forth). Consequently, WE ARE DATA will have most appeal for those students beyond our high school group.

We Are Roadkill

We all know that web services sell data from our use of the internet. But how do they make that data useful to anyone? That is the purpose of We Are Data. It laboriously elucidates the often arcane machinations of the Googles and Facebooks of the world. At bottom, there is an algorithm, a mathematical construct, ever tweaked to reflect new realities, so you can’t pin it down from one day to the next. Algorithms spit out decisions based on your individual clicks, searches, e-mail, contact lists and chats. They decide who you are in order to appeal to data purchasers. According to your activity and location, it might classify you as a man even though you are a woman, old though you are young, black though you are white, and so on. You could be gay one day and straight the next. Doesn’t matter. Your activity and location is just a commodity for sale in bulk.

Web services structure the raw data into algorithmically constructed data objects, according what is useful to clients. It could be ‘terrorist’ for the NSA for example. (There are two kinds of beings in the world – those without quotation marks, and those with, the latter being cyber constructs). Facebook’s ‘terrorist’ could be completely different from Google’s. It’s purely a convenience for the sake of the buyer, be it TSA or Starbucks.

Everything is monetized (but you receive none of it). The dictum is that if it is not in principle measurable, or if it is not being measured, it doesn’t exist. Individuals cease to matter. They become dividuals, the cyber distillation of the data they generate.

We Are Data is a missing link in the chain of how the world operates. it is also quite dense and dry. There are precious few examples of how real people are affected. It is however, festooned with empty when not totally meaningless references to Michel Foucault. Just name dropping, while adding zero insight. I would say he is mentioned about 40 times. In places, We Are Data reads like it was written by an algorithm. But just when you want to give up, Cheney-Lippold sends a missile across the bow: ”Almost everything that is algorithmic is a lie.”

So the bad news is privacy is non-existent. Irretrievable. Gone forever. The good news is nobody wants to know who you really are anyway. Just keep clicking.

David Wineberg

So interesting. I haven't thought about our digital data trace, but I do now!