else 12.16: “It’s not entirely rational”

This week, Google is on our minds and in the news, cookies are used for surveillance, the ephemeral web isn’t so ephemeral, and we’ve got more friends thinking about our emerging Data Society.

As always, if you want to keep up with what we’re reading/thinking about on a weekly basis, the best way is to subscribe to the “else” feed, either as an email newsletter or through RSS. And tweet us links!

Google’s Road Map to Global Domination – NYTimes
A long read on Google’s continued efforts to map the world. We’ve seen how important the map is to the success of the self-driving car. But is this a question of the map and the territory? “It’s not entirely rational to build a map like Google has.” Includes obligatory Borges reference, of course.

Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots – NYTimes
Google is acquiring Boston Dynamics, robotics firm responsible for animal-like robots in BigDog. The company also has ties to DARPA. And the autonomous plot thickens…

Google Removes Vital Privacy Feature From Android, Claiming Its Release Was Accidental – EFF
Seems like a privacy-enhancing feature that blocked apps from collecting personal data like location information was accidentally released in a recent version of Android.

NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking – Washington Post
Slides suggest GooglePREFID cookies are used to identify surveillance targets. And that seemingly innocuous advertising use of cookies bleeds into more problematic uses.

4 Reasons Why Apple’s iBeacon Is About to Disrupt Interaction Design – Wired
Bluetooth Low Energy will bring us contextual information, tying content to the physical world around us.

State of Deception: Why won’t the President rein in the intelligence community? – The New Yorker
Details the political challenge weighing privacy and security against each other. The interesting takeaway for me was about the illusion of oversight: “People get on this committee and the first thing the intelligence community tries to do is get them to be ambassadors for the intelligence community rather than people doing vigorous oversight. The intelligence community basically takes everybody aside and says, ‘Here’s the way it works. . . .’ There’s no discussion about privacy issues or questions about civil liberties—those usually get thrown in afterward.”

Surveillance: Cozy or Chilling? – NYTimes
This piece explores the bodily metaphors we use to understand legal precedents for surveillance. “This framing question of ‘expectation of privacy’ is how courts currently determine what government behavior is permissible. And surely our metaphors for new technologies are vital to explaining what we ‘expect’ in terms of privacy.”

On Second Thought … Facebook wants to know why you didn’t publish that status update you started writing.  – Slate
The status updates you abandon are still being watched – if not the content then at the very least the occurance. A new study reveals self-censorship patterns on Facebook.

Disruptions: Internet’s Sad Legacy: No More Secrets – NYTimes
Even the services we thought were bringing us the emphemeral web are not as temporary as we might have expected. It is safer to assume everything is stored.

Computer Algorithm May Soon Be Picking Hipsters Out Of The Crowd – Red Orbit
Visual sorting algorithm tells the difference between hipster and goth style, binning “urban tribes.” Even if you wouldn’t call yourself a hipster, this algorithm can spot your beard.

Data & Society
danah boyd et al. are launching Data & Society, a new think/do tank addressing “social, technical, ethical, legal, and policy issues that are emerging because of data-centric technological development.” We’re excited to see more activity like this—keep an eye on this space!