KPFA - UpFront Tech

David Carroll is taking Cambridge Analytica to court

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/

Extra: April Glaser on Facepocalypse

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/

Yasha Levine on Surveillance Valley

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/

Tim Chevalier is Suing Google

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/

Why does Facebook consult with xenophobes and nationalists?

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/