2019-02-05T17:30:36+01:00

Feb 5, 2019 · 1 min read
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Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet announced a new tool for urban planners to use. Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Privacy, Technology, and Surveillance Project sees it as a good example of surveillance capitalism. Read the full article of The Intercept.

“Replica is a perfect example of surveillance capitalism, profiting from information collected from and about us as we use the products that have become a part of our lives,” said Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Privacy, Technology, and Surveillance Project. “We need to start asking, as a society, if we are going to continue to allow business models that are built around exploiting our information without meaningful consent.”

Surveillance
Wouter Van Rossem
Authors
Wouter Van Rossem
Wouter Van Rossem is a researcher on the intersection between social science and computer science. He previously worked on the European Research Council (ERC) funded project, Processing Citizenship, where he investigated how data infrastructures for population processing co-produce citizens, Europe, and territory. He completed his PhD at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and is still working on publications stemming from these impactful projects. In addition to his academic pursuits as a PhD at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, he brings a diverse background as a software engineer, having worked in various companies and at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy. His diverse background, spanning both theoretical and hands-on knowledge, reflects his keen interest in exploring the intricate interconnections between technology and society.