Planet Money #964 Billboards

Surveillance capitalism is a threat to democracy, free will, and just about everything you hold dear. If that sounds alarmist, take some time to look into it because I promise you it is not. When the data exhaust you produce is harnessed for profit, every decision you make will be the result of something you have seen or heard that was intentionally put in front of you for someone else's benefit. Saving 20% on a new pair of shoes just isn't worth the price.

https://overcast.fm/+HuIioSKgo

You Are Now Remotely Controlled

VIA: The NY Times

The debate on privacy and law at the Federal Trade Commission was unusually heated that day. Tech industry executives “argued that they were capable of regulating themselves and that government intervention would be costly and counterproductive.” Civil libertarians warned that the companies’ data capabilities posed “an unprecedented threat to individual freedom.” One observed, “We have to decide what human beings are in the electronic age. Are we just going to be chattel for commerce?” A commissioner asked, ‘‘Where should we draw the line?” The year was 1997. More [HERE]

Just a Quarter of New York’s Wi-Fi Kiosks Are Up. Guess Where.

I am not surprised.

VIA: The NY Times

When New York City announced in 2014 that a private company would replace pay phones with thousands of kiosks offering free Wi-Fi, Mayor Bill de Blasio called it “a critical step toward a more equal, open, and connected city.” More [HERE]

Car-Mounted Ads Take a New Direction: Data Collection

VIA: Citylab

Atop most New York City taxis are advertising screens—flashing LEDs hawking Lion King tickets and beer and McDonald’s. Along with the vehicles’ yellow hue, the rooftop ads once set traditional cabs apart from the Ubers and Lyfts with whom they share city streets. Rather than waste all that monetizable airspace, though, a venture-backed startup called Firefly started installing portable advertising billboards on the roofs of ride-hailing vehicles in five major cities across the country. More [HERE]

Opinion | I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering. It Worked.

While I love this project and it's goals,  redirect ads are still redirect ads that dupe you into seeing content you weren't looking for, placed there by someone who paid to influence your opinion. It may seem like a callous thing to say but I'd prefer we keep people from pursuing extremist lives by nurturing our citizenry with racial equality, economic fairness, and social justice that creates a sense that we are all in this together. I think the fair distribution of the immense wealth created by the human project would go a long way to combatting outsiderness. I believe it would inevitably come with racial and social justice as distribution would require us to face inequality. Some say that the competition which capitalism creates is what fuels our creative impulse and pushes society forward. The ingenious of humanity tied to the need to work harder and beat out your fellow man. I think that logic is a not so veiled attempt to hide the greed that undermines our social contract in its current form. While I am all for redirecting the suicidal to prevention, or extremist behavior towards the true costs of such pursuits, I wish we didn't have to do it by paying to manipulate the populous, because most manipulations just aren't that altruistic. 

VIA: The NY Times

Kevin Hines had one thought as he plummeted toward the Pacific Ocean: I can change anything in my life except the fact that I just jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.

“One sentence could have stopped me,” Kevin wrote. “Had any one of the hundreds of passers-by engaged with me, it would … potentially have showed me that I had the ability to choose life.”
More [HERE]

Selling Your Private Information Is a Terrible Idea

As the tools of manipulation become more heavily driven by the data we create through our online, social, and physical interaction with the digitized world, its incumbent on us all to think about not only our ownership of that data, but how inalienable it is to our own being.

VIA: The NY Times

“Claim Your 31st Right,” declares the #My31 app’s splash screen. “Review, share, and confirm your HUMAN right to your data as your property.”
More [HERE]

Payphone-Replacing LinkNYC Kiosks Not Generating Projected Revenue

Intersection seems to be loosing money on their LINK NYC project by failing to meet projected ad revenue targets and essentially having to pay the city to operate a public infrastructure. This yearly loss doesn't even account the initial installation cost of development and hardware. It would seem like this business deal was a bad idea. And yet, Intersection continues to rapidly expand into other markets like London, Newark, and Philadelphia. What this article fails to mention is LINK NYC was never about the ad revenue but rather the data collection and Google's long term interest in harvesting the digital exhaust produced by cities. New York and most other cities aren't foolish enough to go all Quayside and render Google ground up control, so Intersection is going at it piecemeal. If the LINK NYC towers loose a few million on advertising, that is a small price to pay for the access to NYC's streets and the behavioral data that can be collected at scale with such a massive public infrastructure deployment. And dont think that traditional advertising is the only revenue source. The sale and use of behavioral data is incredibly lucrative and probably the main source of projected income as traditional forms of consumer manipulation give way to softer forms of quiet influence that leave us wanting without a clue where the wanting came from.

VIA: Gotham Gazette

During a February 2016 press conference, Mayor Bill de Blasio made the first phone call on New York City’s first LinkNYC kiosk, stationed at the corner of 16th Street and 3rd Avenue. “It will be the biggest and fastest network in the world, and completely free of charge. And one thing I know about my fellow New Yorkers, they like things that are free of charge," said de Blasio. More [HERE]

GOOGLE’S SIDEWALK LABS PLANS TO PACKAGE AND SELL LOCATION DATA ON MILLIONS OF CELLPHONES

As an anti-advertising activist I am becoming more and more aware that the quaint methods once employed by the attention industry are becoming obsolete. In NYC the phonebooth infrastructure, once a ubiquitous form of street furniture across the five boroughs, is rapidly being replaced by digital WiFi stations. While these digital structures do have screens on either side that show advertisements intermittently between more benign content like PSA's, "public art" and fun facts about the city we live in, they are a trojan horse. If the objective of advertising is to influence your behavior, the old method of putting a picture in front of you is costly, cumbersome and largely ineffective when weighed against the capabilities made available through the tracking of our bodily motions and online behaviors. Surveillance capitalism is quickly replacing the old forms of influence with new far more insidious methods unknown and unseen to most of us. As I grapple what that means for my practice as an artist I will continue to report on new ideas and methods being developed to influence our behavior that fall outside of the typical advertising in public space dilemma.

VIA: The Intercept

MOST OF THE data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that. More [HERE]