Laura Kalbag @laura@mastodon.laurakalbag.com

Also featuring some Mastodon love, of course! ❤️

Also including a festive sprinkling of Site.js, which is making my development life much easier.

https://sitejs.org

I wrote an ode to personal websites for one of my faves,
24ways. Featuring inspiring (and rights-respecting) websites from people whose work I love and respect.

https://24ways.org/2019/its-time-to-get-personal/

“[W]hat Spotify calls ‘streaming intelligence’ should be understood as surveillance of its users to fuel its own growth and ability to sell mood-and-moment data to brands.”loca

https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly

“This [(Spotify Unwrapped)] is the steady wearing down of defenses, the slow transformation of corporate creepiness into cultural complacency, that allows rampant high-tech surveillance to progress.”

https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2019/12/06/who-listens-to-the-listeners/

Another video of me speaking has gone up today! 8 Unbelievable Things You Never Knew About Tracking at ffconf. I felt really lucky to be invited to such a (deservedly) legendary event so tried to cover all the things I always want to say to other devs:

https://youtu.be/WkeGGNdOv4g

I’m really grateful for the work the Accessibility Scotland team put into their event and again in making the talks accessible online. I wrote this talk especially for the event, because these are the things that keep me awake at night.

Accessible unethical technology: https://noti.st/laurakalbag/9GG02Z/accessible-unethical-technology

“We need to de-exoticize these users if we are going to genuinely have a healthy global digital culture. They need to be humanized, understood, and kept in mind when designing inclusive platforms. The internet is a critical public resource that is meant for all users—and that includes the world’s poor.”

https://qz.com/1669754/tech-companies-misunderstand-the-next-billion-internet-users/

”A central promise of [artificial intelligence] is that it enables large-scale automated categorisation… This ‘promise’ becomes a menace when directed at the complexities of everyday life.”

https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/11/26/ai-thinks-like-a-corporation-and-thats-worrying

Can’t write anything without it turning into an overdramatic existential crisis. Is that redundant? Why am I even writing this? Who am I to write this? Whyyyyyy?

“The advancement of robotics, AI, and other ‘futuristic’ technologies has ushered in a new era in the ongoing struggle for representation of people with disabilities in large-scale decision-making settings.”

https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/11/autonomous-technology-ai-robot-delivery-disability-rights/602209/

“The technology behind the internet is not incompatible with our rights, but the business model Facebook and Google have chosen is.”

Yep, that’s Amnesty International saying that.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/11/google-facebook-surveillance-privacy/

“In short, if left unaddressed, conscious or unconscious emotional bias can perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions at an unprecedented scale.”

https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-risks-of-using-ai-to-interpret-human-emotions

“By rooting out bias in technology, these Black women engineers, professors and government experts are on the front lines of the civil rights movement of our time.”

https://www.essence.com/feature/these-black-women-are-fighting-for-justice-in-a-world-of-biased-algorithms/

“It's a complete anomaly -- a solidly performing, decently priced device that just isn't suited for anyone because of the privacy concerns and increasingly alarming issues plaguing the social networking site.”

https://www.cnet.com/news/no-one-should-buy-the-facebook-portal-tv/

If you were at #ffconf on Friday and you missed the link to my slides. They’re at: https://noti.st/laurakalbag/Y4Q95l/slides

There’s also all the resources I referenced in my talk:

https://noti.st/laurakalbag/Y4Q95l/8-unbelievable-things-you-never-knew-about-tracking

Spotted at Gatwick (annotation my own)…

Ah Brighton, you’re exactly as I remember you. Dark, wet and with terrible mobile signal. Very glad to be back ☺️

“We need lawmakers and regulators to help protect our children, our cognitive capabilities, our public square and our democracy by creating guardrails and rules to deal directly with the incentives and business models of these platforms and the societal harms they are causing.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/04/i-worked-political-ads-facebook-they-profit-by-manipulating-us/