Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
articles in the
Guardian
online, one can choose from a suite of effective Firefox add-ons
including TACO and Beef TACO (targeted advertising cookie opt-out); BetterPrivacy;
Ghostery; CookieSafe; and CookieCuller. As Panopticlick, the Electronic Frontier Foun-
dation's browser-fingerprinting algorithm, reveals, however, privacy tools such as spoof-
ers and plugins paradoxically make the browser more distinct and thus facilitate device
fingerprinting.
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Panopticlick further reminds us of the difficulty of demarcating an
absolute difference between the means of tracking and the means of circumventing that
tracking; another case in point would be browsers in which the facility for private
browsing is built into the browser itself.
To understand the significance of software design both to mine and to obstruct, one
has only to consider the role that computer models have played in what Andrew Leyshon
and Nigel Thrift describe as “the capitalization of almost everything,” which is to say in
the creation of the explosive development of financial capitalism that led up to the
recent global financial crash. In short, “new forms of expertise, fuelled by computing
power and software” have been necessarily constitutive.
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For example, the consolida-
tion and centralization particular to “Shared Services” would not have been possible
without the development of a single operating system to aggregate a range of different
activities and income streams into a single entity. “As in the case of ground rent, what
made the mining of these new seams of financial value [subprime lending] apparently
possible is the development of computer software that enables individuals to be assessed,
sorted and aggregated along dimensions of risk and reward.”
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Software design did not
simply enable the creation of new financial instruments; software design was the essen-
tial condition of possibility for these new financial instruments. So, too, the scale and
complexity of the data structures at issue—“petabytes”—is such that they cannot be
processed by human intelligence alone but rather require machine intelligence in the
form of database management systems and algorithms that structure data collection.
Combating or otherwise responding to a control system dependent on computing
power requires the design of a counter-system, a rather modest example of which is
Diaspora, an open-source, privacy-aware, distributed do-it-yourself social network that
eliminates the hub of a social media conglomerate in favor of a peer-to-peer network in
which each individual is a node.
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Without a hub or central server, data encrypted with
GNU Privacy Guard is sent directly to one's friends rather than stored and hence mined.
True peer-to-peer communication—that is, that which is not routed through a central
hub—would need to move to a network such as Diaspora because the controlled appli-
cation programming interface (API) of social networks such as Facebook means that
