KPFA - UpFront Tech

Facebook’s privacy PR implosion began on Friday, March 17th,  when the company tried to pre-empt forthcoming reports in The New York Times and the Guardian by announcing that it had banned a political consulting firm named Cambridge Analytica for misappropriating Facebook user data on some 50 million people. Just hours before that announcement went out, David Carroll had filed legal papers in Britain to find out just what, exactly, Cambridge Analytica knew about him.

Guest: 

David Carroll (@profcarroll [1]) professor of media design at Parsons, preparing to sue Cambridge Analytica in Britain, raising funds for that suit here [2].

Like this? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [3] , or paste our feed link [4] into any podcast app that doesn’t have us listed.

Music: “Scuba [5]” by Simun Mathewson, under Creative Commons – Attribution [6] License

[1] https://twitter.com/profcarroll?lang=en

[2] https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/scl/

[3] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kpfa-upfront-tech/id1281302523

[4] https://kpfa.org/area941/program/tech/feed/

[5] http://freemusicarchive.org/music/simun_mathewson/Circuit/Scuba

[6] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In the space of a few days, Facebook's gotten itself back in the spotlight over its role in the 2016 election, dropped over $50 billion from its market valuation, gotten called on to testify in both the US Congress and the UK Parliament -- all because it let data on 50 million users slip into the possession of a shady political firm, and did precious little to fix that situation.

Guest: 

April Glaser writes about tech for Slate, where she's been covering new revelations about Cambridge Analytica's harvesting of data from 50 million Facebook users. She also hosts the new tech and politics podcast, If Then [1]

Like this? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [2] , or paste our feed link [3] into any podcast app that doesn’t have us listed.

Music: “Scuba [4]” by Simun Mathewson, under Creative Commons – Attribution [5] Licens

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then.html

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kpfa-upfront-tech/id1281302523

[3] https://kpfa.org/area941/program/tech/feed/

[4] http://freemusicarchive.org/music/simun_mathewson/Circuit/Scuba

[5] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Once, the internet was a utopia, a new intellectual commons. Then it was a goldmine, where new businesses would stake their claim. For the past couple years, we’ve been been covering it as a swamp – a convening ground for trolls and Nazis, a platform for disinformation and and fake news, an impressive tool for fragmenting our national conversation so we can’t even be sure we and our neighbors are looking at same world any more. But before any of that, the internet was a military project, conceived and funded by some of the darker arms of the US military – designed from its inception not just to enhance military communication in the atomic age, but also to conduct massive surveillance when the theater of war shifted from battlefields to jungle insurgencies. That is the broad arc of our next guest’s new book, which traces the internet’s military entanglements from its origins –  straight through to some of the services today that promote themselves as protecting privacy.

GUEST: Yasha Levine, investigative journalist who’s spent years covering the tech industry, its entanglements with the national security state, and also post-Soviet Russia. His new book is Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.

Like this? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [1] , or paste our feed link [2] into any podcast app that doesn’t have us listed.

Music: “Scuba [3]” by Simun Mathewson, under Creative Commons – Attribution [4] License.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kpfa-upfront-tech/id1281302523

[2] https://kpfa.org/area941/program/tech/feed/

[3] http://freemusicarchive.org/music/simun_mathewson/Circuit/Scuba

[4] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Last fall, the tech world was a-twitter over a post by Google employee James Damore suggesting the company’s gender diversity problem might have more to do with women’s genetics than the company’s culture, and complaining that the company was too politically correct to engage his arguments. That post—and the fact that he eventually got fired over it–made Damore an icon for the alt-right. And a network of online trolls started an online harassment campaign a handful of Google employees who are not straight white men like him. We spoke to one of the targets of that online harassment campaign, recently fired by Google, now bringing his own lawsuit against the company alleging he faced discrimination, harassment, and retaliation over speaking up for diversity and inclusion.

 

 

Guest: 

Tim Chevalier, former software developer and site-reliability engineer at Google

More: Call-ins on diversity in tech after the Damore memo came out, from our live show.  [1]

Like this? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [2] , or paste our feed link [3] into any podcast app that doesn’t have us listed.

Music: “Scuba [4]” by Simun Mathewson, under Creative Commons – Attribution [5] License.

[1] https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-august-10-2017/

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kpfa-upfront-tech/id1281302523

[3] https://kpfa.org/area941/program/tech/feed/

[4] http://freemusicarchive.org/music/simun_mathewson/Circuit/Scuba

[5] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Since the 2016 presidential election, Facebook’s drawn charges of amplifying fake news, selling political ads to Russia-associated accounts, and failing to enforce its own terms of service when it comes to bots, trolls, and harassers on its platform. Now, it turns out Facebook’s not only been serving as a platform for extremist political movements – but actively advising them. The company's consulting arm has worked with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu Nationalist; Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who’s urged on a wave of extrajudicial killings, Germany’s new nationalist, anti-immigrant party, the AfD, and, of course, the campaign of Donald J. Trump.

Guest: 

Sarah Frier, technology reporter for Bloomberg, and author of this report [1] on Facebook role helping tyrants and demagogues consolidate their influence.

Like this? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [2] , or paste our feed link [3] into any podcast app that doesn’t have us listed.

Music: “Scuba [4]” by Simun Mathewson, under Creative Commons – Attribution [5] License.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kpfa-upfront-tech/id1281302523

[3] https://kpfa.org/area941/program/tech/feed/

[4] http://freemusicarchive.org/music/simun_mathewson/Circuit/Scuba

[5] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

According to figures from San Francisco, on a typical weekday, companies like Uber and Lyft account for about 570,000 vehicle miles logged on city streets. During rush hour downtown, they account for roughly a quarter of the traffic. And survey research from UC Davis suggests more a lot of that traffic would not exist if it were not for those companies – most of the people using them would otherwise be on foot, book, transit – or not taking a trip at all.

All of which seems kind of unfair – when you consider that these companies are making billions by pouring traffic onto public streets, and starving transit systems of rider fares. So, what to do?

Guests: 

Stuart Cohen, Executive Director of Transform [1]. He co-authored the recent report A Framework for Equity in New Mobility [2].

Anthony Flint, veteran journalist, a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the author of several books on battles over the shape of cities. The article that caught our attention is something he wrote for CityLab – entitled Uber and Lyft should Pay for the Streets [3].

[1] http://www.transformca.org/

[2] http://www.transformca.org/transform-report/framework-equity-new-mobility

[3] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/11/uber-and-lyft-should-pay-for-the-streets/546851/

Every one of us lives in two places: in the flesh-and-blood physical world, and in the sprawling collection of data that we spin off every time we open an account, use a phone, walk by a camera, or . . . click something.

That data is the bread and butter of the titans of tech – Google and Facebook aren’t selling you anything; they’re selling information about you to their advertisers.

It’s also the bread-and-butter of a shadier side of tech – the intelligence contractors that design the software the combs through data to decide who should be killed from afar.

Guest:

Pratap Chatterjee, executive director of Corpwatch [1], co-author with Khalil Bendib of Verax: The True History of Whistleblowers, Drone Warfare, and Mass Surveillance

Like this? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [2] , or paste our feed link [3] into any podcast app that doesn’t have us listed.

Music: “Scuba [4]” by Simun Mathewson, under Creative Commons – Attribution [5] License.

[1] http://www.corpwatch.org/

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kpfa-upfront-tech/id1281302523

[3] https://kpfa.org/area941/program/tech/feed/

[4] http://freemusicarchive.org/music/simun_mathewson/Circuit/Scuba

[5] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Guest: 

Sara Wachter-Boettcher [1],  a web consultant who works on designing things for people to use – and has just written a book about how that process so often goes so horribly off-track. It’s called Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and other Threats of Toxic Tech.

Like this? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [2] , or paste our feed link [3] into any podcast app that doesn’t have us listed.

Music: “Scuba [4]” by Simun Mathewson, under Creative Commons – Attribution [5] License.

 

 

[1] https://twitter.com/sara_ann_marie

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kpfa-upfront-tech/id1281302523

[3] https://kpfa.org/area941/program/tech/feed/

[4] http://freemusicarchive.org/music/simun_mathewson/Circuit/Scuba

[5] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In the past two weeks, investigations into Russian influence have hit US social media firms on two different fronts. The first was a series of hearings in Congress over the role of an alleged Russian troll farm in buying political ads on Facebook and Twitter. The second was part of the Paradise papers investigation – which showed that money from institutions with close ties to the Russian state funded major investments in Facebook and Twitter by a prominent Silicon Valley investor named Yuri Milner. It is so hard to sort out the areas of legitimate concern from the areas of anti-Russian hysteria, we decided to bring in someone who's covered Russia from inside.

Guest: 

Elizaveta Osetinskya, former editor of the RBC news site in Russia, where she published the Russian side of the Panama papers investigation. (Shortly after it was published, her entire team got fired.) She’s now a fellow at UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Project, and the founder of a new Russian-language publication, The Bell [1].

Like this? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [2] , or pate our feed link [3] into any podcast app that doesn’t have us listed.

Music: “Scuba [4]” by Simun Mathewson, under Creative Commons – Attribution [5] License.

 

[1] https://thebell.io/english/

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kpfa-upfront-tech/id1281302523

[3] https://kpfa.org/area941/program/tech/feed/

[4] http://freemusicarchive.org/music/simun_mathewson/Circuit/Scuba

[5] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

America's anti-trust laws were created after cutting-edge technologies, like rail travel, created natural monopolies. Are they up to dealing with today's tech giants?

Guest: 

Lina Khan, director of Legal Policy at Open Markets Institute. Author of this sprawling article [1] on what Amazon's actual business practices tell us about about the state of antitrust law.

Like this? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [2] , or pate our feed link [3] into any podcast app that doesn’t have us listed.

Music: “Scuba [4]” by Simun Mathewson, under Creative Commons – Attribution [5] License.

[1] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kpfa-upfront-tech/id1281302523

[3] https://kpfa.org/area941/program/tech/feed/

[4] http://freemusicarchive.org/music/simun_mathewson/Circuit/Scuba

[5] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/