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The Digital Tattoo Project Podcast raises questions, shares stories, speaks with experts and encourages us to consider our digital lives.
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In the News: Facebook Pushes for Facial Recognition Software
Despite facing legal trouble in the US for violating state privacy laws by misusing biometric data [1], or the ongoing investigation into the data mining practices of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook recently announced plans to implement facial recognition software in Canada and the European Union. This software was originally introduced within the United States […]
Guest Blog Post: Predictive Policing in the Nation’s Capital
On October 24th 2016, the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) launched the Ottawa Police Strategic Operations Centre (OPSOC), an initiative to “use crime information to improve public and officer safety” [1]. A February 2017 article appearing on Motherboard, a Vice News channel, instead labelled OPSOC as a manifestation of a larger movement in police forces […]
Digital Rights Now – Sign the Petition
A few months ago, we proposed a bill of rights for learning data. While the need for reform within the context of our university systems is still real, events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal—which occurred in the interim—highlight the need for all Canadians to have a bill of rights to protect their digital identities. Today, […]
New on the Podcast: The City with Eyes
The Digital Tattoo Podcast – Episode 5 As the government of Canada slowly prepares to embrace the future of city building, a small plot of land races ahead to become the nation’s first smart city. Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., is developing a proposal for 12 acres on the downtown […]
How to Access Information Collected From Your Digital Accounts
Terms and Conditions – TL;DR: Take My Data Terms and conditions of use often bind users to agreements in unsuspecting ways about the use, storage, sale, transfer, and deletion of their account, data, or identity. Examples include popular software such as Twitter, which stipulates that they can profit from selling your pictures without prior […]
Technology companies are updating their privacy policies for their benefit, not yours
You may have noticed that a lot of companies are updating their privacy policies. It’s not a coincidence. And these major corporations haven’t suddenly begun caring about the privacy of their users; in fact, many are still profiting from exploiting the information that they collect. These companies are updating their privacy policies to protect themselves. […]
#DeleteFacebook? An Investigation into the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Part 2
As we learned in Part 1 of this series, Global Science Research (GSR), Facebook, and Cambridge Analytica have each been the subjects of recent controversy for their respective roles in mining data from over 50 million Facebook profiles. While we can investigate how each company contributed to this event, we must also examine our […]
#DeleteFacebook? An Investigation into the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Part 1
On March 17, 2018, Cambridge Analytica came under fire and amassed international attention as news broke of the company’s role in harvesting data from over 50 million Facebook profiles [1]. While the unfolding story has outraged many, it has also presented numerous questions: how did this happen? How much trust are we putting in our […]
The Data Detox Challenge
We all know that familiar feeling of having too much clutter; whether it’s in our physical or mental spaces, it can be hard to function efficiently when we’re weighed down by disorder. For this reason, when the Digital Tattoo student team heard about the Data Detox – an 8 day online challenge to […]
Did Canada just get the ‘Right to be Forgotten’?
Links: Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Draft Position on Online Reputation. Michael Geist’s article in the Globe and Mail and on his blog.
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