Luxury surveillance

Chris Gilliard, for The Atlantic, describes self-surveillance that people pay for in exchange for small conveniences at the expense of privacy:

The conveniences promised by Amazon’s suite of products may seem divorced from this context: I am here to tell you that they’re not. These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance“—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior. Stripped of their gloss, these devices are similar to the ankle monitors and surveillance apps such as SmartLINK that are forced on people on parole or immigrants awaiting hearings. As the author and activist James Kilgore writes, “The ankle monitor—which for almost two decades was simply an analog device that informed authorities if the wearer was at home—has now grown into a sophisticated surveillance tool via the use of GPS capacity, biometric measurements, cameras, and audio recording.”

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Visual explanations for machine learning

As part of a teaching initiative by Amazon, MLU-Explain is a series of interactive explainers on core machine learning concepts. Learn about training sets, decision trees, random forests, and more. Seems like a good way to spend a Friday night if you ask me.

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Scented candle reviews on Amazon and Covid-19

Prompted by a tweet about scented candles without smell and Covid-19, Kate Petrova plotted Amazon reviews for scented and unscented candles over time. Notice the downward trend for scented candles after the first confirmed case for Covid-19.

Interesting if true. I’m imagining a bunch of people opening their new scented candles, taking a big whiff, and not smelling anything.

But I wonder if there are outside forces (a.k.a. confounding factors) at work here. For example, Petrova only looked at reviews for the “top 3” scented candles. What do we see with other candles? Maybe a higher demand for scented candles from more people staying at home put a strain on the manufacturer. Maybe there was a shortage of some scented ingredient, which led to less potent candles. Maybe new scented candles customers have unrealistic expectations of what candles smell like.

I don’t know.

Maybe the decreasing average review really is related to Covid-19 symptoms.

Petrova put up the code and data, in case you want to dig into it.

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Looking at the Amazon fires wrong

For The Washington Post, Sergio Peçanha and Tim Wallace use maps to show why we need to adjust the common view of the Amazon up in flames. It’s about the fires on the fringes.

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Where and why the Amazon rainforest is on fire

For Bloomberg, Mira Rojanasakul and Tatiana Freitas discuss why the Amazon rainforest is on fire:

Commodities are key drivers behind the increased pace of deforestation. An analysis of tree loss from 2001 to 2015 shows that most of the Amazon was lost to commodity-driven deforestation—or “long-term, permanent conversion of forest and shrubland to a non-forest land use such as agriculture, mining or energy infrastructure.”

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Detected fires in the Amazon rain forest, monthly

The New York Times goes with monthly small multiples to show detected fires in the Amazon rain forest. Data comes from NASA satellites Terra and Aqua.

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Amazon stores voice recordings indefinitely

Alfred Ng for CNET:

Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in May, demanding answers on Alexa and how long it kept voice recordings and transcripts, as well as what the data gets used for. The letter came after CNET’s report that Amazon kept transcripts of interactions with Alexa, even after people deleted the voice recordings.

The deadline for answers was June 30, and Amazon’s vice president of public policy, Brian Huseman, sent a response on June 28. In the letter, Huseman tells Coons that Amazon keeps transcripts and voice recordings indefinitely, and only removes them if they’re manually deleted by users.

Marvelous.

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Amazon Rekognition for government surveillance

Amazon’s Rekognition is a video analysis system that promises to identify individuals in real-time. Amazon wants to sell the systems to governments for surveillance.

From the ACLU:

Amazon is marketing Rekognition for government surveillance. According to its marketing materials, it views deployment by law enforcement agencies as a “common use case” for this technology. Among other features, the company’s materials describe “person tracking” as an “easy and accurate” way to investigate and monitor people. Amazon says Rekognition can be used to identify “people of interest,” raising the possibility that those labeled suspicious by governments — such as undocumented immigrants or Black activists — will be seen as fair game for Rekognition surveillance. It also says Rekognition can monitor “all faces in group photos, crowded events, and public places such as airports,” at a time when Americans are joining public protests at unprecedented levels.

Given the millions of Alexa-enabled devices in people’s homes and customer purchase histories available on-demand, this feels like a bad idea. Also, creepy. Probably because of the ‘k’ in Rekognition.

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Using Amazon’s $5 button for personal data collection

Huggie push

Ted Benson used a straightforward hack to repurpose Amazon's quick-order button. Its intended use is to automatically order an item from Amazon when you push the button. Benson avoided that part, and instead used a button press to trigger other things.

A lot of people made fun of Dash Buttons when Amazon launched them on the day before April Fool's Day. But regardless of what you think about Dash as a consumer product, it's an undeniably compelling prototype of what the Internet of Things is going to look like.

If you have the right setup, you could be up and running with a button data collector in about ten minutes.

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