Contributions sought for Activities and Resources pages in the new HTC website

[micheleminno]

Post here some items that according to you should be present in the Activities or Resources pages of the our new website. Consider that:

• Activities will contain:

  • List all ongoing projects at HTC
  • New ideas of projects/activities

• Resources will contain:

  • References to important / most relevant external organizations
  • List of most relevant articles, research papers, etc.
  • List of most relevant books
  • List of ‘Our Stories’ with links to some representative (tech, parent, younger generation, law/policy, etc.) forum member bio introductions excerpt

[Bozon]

Resource / Harms to society

• Title: Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life - Cracked Labs report, June 2017
  Excerpt: How Thousands of Companies Monitor, Analyze, and Influence the Lives of Billions…

[patm]

I’ve added a new issue to our GitHub page:

Issue: Movies need to be included in Resources

[patm]

This frightening article describes security appliances that are supposed to protect families but instead expose them to danger.

How Nest, designed to keep intruders out of people’s homes, effectively...

There are at least three ways in which this can be listed:

• harm to children
• harm to families
• Google’s carelessness with security measures

[patm]

What do you think about creating a repository of images, perhaps with explanatory or descriptive text?

Here is an image that has popped up in Gmail and tormented me. (Yes, I still use Gmail for certain things.) When I started to reply to a friend, this window popped up. I disabled the feature, but am outraged by Google’s latest attempt to use people to teach its machines.

[aschrijver]

It is a form of ‘dark patterns’ where the data sent to Google to “improve our services” is really sending personal info to train their AI. It is not solely a productivity feature for ‘the user’ (aka the product).

It’s like reCAPTCHA (‘I am not a robot’), where you click images of cars, fire hoses, traffic lights, etc. Here there is ‘dark behavior’ at play, where they make it near impossible to pass when you have ad-blockers installed.

Another thing related to GMail is that legit mail from non-GMail servers can end up in spam box, and there is no one to help you change that. Inaction on these issues is either intentional or laziness.

On the resource page?

I don’t know if this should be on the Resources page, but it may be a good idea to make this kind of thing part of the website somewhere. Note that there are existing sites that collect Dark Patterns (i.e. darkpatterns.org) which can be on the Resource page (btw we also collect them on the forum in Identifying dark patterns on the web).

Security appliances

This frightening article describes security appliances that are supposed to protect families but instead expose them to danger.

This is a good subject to address somewhere. There is a flood of Internet of Things appliances that offer some consumer service, but which do have the security of the consumer at heart. They go for quick market share. The RIng doorbell and security camera’s are a good example. Only one of many Hacker News threads on this: For Owners of Ring Security Cameras, Strangers May Have Been Watching Too.

[patm]

There is a flood of Internet of Things appliances that offer some consumer service, but which do have the security of the consumer at heart.

One of our MOL cohort members is Mohit Bansal, who is working on an alternative to Alexa: an “open source personal assistant.” He will be part of today’s live presentation and has put his slides online:

Dhwani-YourVoice

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Image from the cellphone carrier I use. I was surprised to see it got a good rating from EFF.