That this article talks up (and uncritically repeats) purported advantages of surveillance and only briefly acknowledges privacy concerns is a real failure. Reporting needs to do better so that we can walk back surveillance instead of sleepwalk into more of it. Gift link

Flock continues to suck.

Very happy for Linkletter, but it’s shameful that Proctorio got away with as much nonsense as it did.

Another suspected use of generative AI, another decision that I still won’t subject my students to surveillance and policing, another step towards complete grading nihilism.

Sometimes blocking external images in my email clients is worth it just because the alt text makes me chuckle. “Drone over corn” could be a good band name.

What. The. Hell.

Wish I’d made more of a stink about Lexington adopting Flock cameras. It’s a creepy-as-hell technology, and we need to get rid of them.

5,000 cameras?! What the heck?

Surprised that more isn’t made of the fact that Anthropic was surveilling users’ conversations for its research. Are professors and students thinking about the company’s ability to read everything they type?

Did not realize that dashcam surveillance was a thing. I hate that it is, and I hate that Flock is going here.

Good article. I’m not here to defend CEOs who have affairs with executives in their companies, but the tech ecosystem that allowed for this will do more harm to everyday people than it will ever hold CEOs to account.

C’est bien inquiétant, cette idée de social scoring. Jacques Ellul trouverait beaucoup à critiquer. Et ce n’est pas le seul—j’ai beaucoup aimé ce resumé des critiques d’Adam Knight, à l’Université de Leyden:

En réduisant les personnes à des profils algorithmiques, cela menacerait la vie privée, l’égalité et les procédures régulières. Ce n’est pas juste la surveillance qui est à craindre, mais également une “discrimination automatisée”, estime le chercheur.

So scary, so gross. Lexington needs to ditch Flock now.

Lots of good observations in here, and I need to think through the implications for digital methods research.

I spent a lot of the morning anxious about generative AI after reading about other professors’ struggles with how the technology has upended how we teach. It’s long been frustrating to me that teachers and others bear the burden of adapting to a world that big tech companies have created, seemingly with the goal of enriching themselves. Later in the morning, I read a worrying story about how a company called Flock is building tools that will let customers of their automated license plate readers (including Lexington, the city I live in) do even more invasive surveillance of the people they pick up on their cameras.

C’est du n’importe quoi, ça. Quelle honte, ce pays.

Surveillance sucks, and here’s the latest example.

This weekend, I visited family and complained to myself that their Amazon Fire sticks were emphasizing ad delivery over being a TV. I guess that’s the future for my Roku stick, too? What a sucky future we live in.

I’ve been a Mozilla fan for a long time, but this sort of default behavior is why I’m souring on the organization (and why I abandoned Firefox a few months ago).

What gross software.

Uggggggh, ALPRs suck.

Modern cars are creepy.

We’re getting to the end of the semester here at the University of Kentucky, which is my traditional time to get overly introspective about grading. There’s a lot on my mind at the end of this semester, but one thing that has popped into my head tonight and that I think will be quick to write about is a dilemma that I’m facing this semester, when I’ve had faced more suspicions about student use of generative AI than in any previous semester. By way of context, my class policy is to: 1) discourage student use of generative AI, but 2) begrudgingly allow students to use it, but 3) require that they disclose its use.

For the past couple of years, my colleague Dr. Meghan Dowell and I have been working on a paper on students’ awareness of what data the Canvas learning management system collects (and subsequently makes available to certain stakeholders). I’m a fan of Nick Proferes’s paper [Information Flow Solipsism in an Exploratory Study of Beliefs About Twitter] and have long wanted to do something similar related to LMSs. This is even more Meghan’s area of specialty than mine, though, so I was grateful that she was also interested in the subject and took the lead in turning this idea into reality.

Duolingo is one of those apps I really loved once but now can’t see as anything but creepy adware. It’s hard to complain when it’s teaching kiddo more French than I ever managed to, but I still worry I’ve sold her soul to that little green owl.