Karen Levy

When open data is a Trojan Horse: The weaponization of transparency in science and governance

Openness and transparency are becoming hallmarks of responsible data practice in science and governance. Concerns about data falsification, erroneous analysis, and misleading presentation of research results have recently strengthened the call for new procedures that ensure public accountability for data-driven decisions. Though we generally count ourselves in favor of increased transparency in data practice, this Commentary highlights a caveat. We suggest that legislative efforts that invoke the language of data transparency can sometimes function as “Trojan Horses” through which other political goals are pursued. Framing these maneuvers in the language of transparency can be strategic, because approaches that emphasize open access to data carry tremendous appeal, particularly in current political and technological contexts. We illustrate our argument through two examples of pro-transparency policy efforts, one historical and one current: industry-backed “sound science” initiatives in the 1990s, and contemporary legislative efforts to open environmental data to public inspection. Rules that exist mainly to impede science-based policy processes weaponize the concept of data transparency. The discussion illustrates that, much as Big Data itself requires critical assessment, the processes and principles that attend it—like transparency—also carry political valence, and, as such, warrant careful analysis.

Digital Technologies and Intimate Partner Violence: A Qualitative Analysis with Multiple Stakeholders

Digital technologies, including mobile devices, cloud computing services, and social networks, play a nuanced role in intimate partner violence (IPV) settings, including domestic abuse, stalking, and surveillance of victims by abusive partners. However, the interactions among victims of IPV, abusers, law enforcement, counselors, and others --- and the roles that digital technologies play in these interactions --- are poorly understood. We present a qualitative study that analyzes the role of digital technologies in the IPV ecosystem in New York City. Findings from semi-structured interviews with 40 IPV professionals and nine focus groups with 32 survivors of IPV reveal a complex set of socio-technical challenges that stem from the intimate nature of the relationships involved and the complexities of managing shared social circles. Both IPV professionals and survivors feel that they do not possess adequate expertise to be able to identify or cope with technology-enabled IPV, and there are currently insufficient best practices to help them deal with abuse via technology. We also reveal a number of tensions and trade-offs in negotiating technologys role in social support and legal procedures. Taken together, our findings contribute a nuanced understanding of technologys role in the IPV ecosystem and yield recommendations for HCI and technology experts interested in aiding victims of abuse.

Digital surveillance in the hypermasculine workplace

ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20 Digital surveillance in the hypermasculine workplace Karen E. C. Levy To cite this article: Karen E. C. Levy (2016) Digital surveillance in the hypermasculine workplace, Feminist Media Studies, 16:2, 361-365, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2016.1138607 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1138607The two essays collected here consider the gendered dimensions of shifting cultures of work in response to the growing demands of the technologized/mediated workplace. Karen Levy’s essay explores the impact of new digital surveillance technologies on constructions of masculinity in the male-dominated US long-haul trucking industry. Jacquelyn Arcy draws upon feminist theories of ‘women’s work’ to consider gender in relation to digital immaterial labor, focusing specifically on emotion management. While looking at very different examples, both scholars illustrate how new technologies throw into sharp relief traditional constructions of gender and gendered labor.

Designing Against Discrimination in Online Markets

Platforms that connect users to one another have flourished online in domains as diverse as transportation, employment, dating, and housing. When users interact on these platforms, their behavior may be influenced by preexisting biases, including tendencies to discriminate along the lines of race, gender, and other protected characteristics. In aggregate, such user behavior may result in systematic inequities in the treatment of different groups. While there is uncertainty about whether platforms bear legal liability for the discriminatory conduct of their users, platforms necessarily exercise a great deal of control over how users’ encounters are structured—including who is matched with whom for various forms of exchange, what information users have about one another during their interactions, and how indicators of reliability and reputation are made salient, among many other features. Platforms cannot divest themselves of this power; even choices made without explicit regard for discrimination can affect how vulnerable users are to bias. This Article analyzes ten categories of design and policy choices through which platforms may make themselves more or less conducive to discrimination by users. In so doing, it offers a comprehensive account of the complex ways platforms’ design choices might perpetuate, exacerbate, or alleviate discrimination in the contemporary economy.

“A Stalker's Paradise”: How Intimate Partner Abusers Exploit Technology

This paper describes a qualitative study with 89 participants that details how abusers in intimate partner violence (IPV) contexts exploit technologies to intimidate, threaten, monitor, impersonate, harass, or otherwise harm their victims. We show that, at their core, many of the attacks in IPV contexts are technologically unsophisticated from the perspective of a security practitioner or researcher. For example, they are often carried out by a UI-bound adversary - an adversarial but authenticated user that interacts with a victim»s device or account via standard user interfaces - or by downloading and installing a ready-made application that enables spying on a victim. Nevertheless, we show how the sociotechnical and relational factors that characterize IPV make such attacks both extremely damaging to victims and challenging to counteract, in part because they undermine the predominant threat models under which systems have been designed. We discuss the nature of these new IPV threat models and outline opportunities for HCI research and design to mitigate these attacks.

The surveillant consumer

We argue that modern technical and social infrastructures of surveillance have brought a novel subject position to prominence: the surveillant consumer. Surveillance has become a normalized mode of interpersonal relation that urges the person as consumer to manage others around her using surveillant products and services. We explore two configurations of this model: the consumer as observer, effectuated through products for use in the supervision of intimate relations as a component of a normalized duty of care; and the consumer as manager, effectuated through capacities for the customer to manage the labor of workers providing services to her. These models frequently intersect and hybridize as market logics overlap with intimate spheres: the surveillant consumer thus acts as an emotional manager of the experience of everyday surveillance. In turn, this managerial role reifies the equation of financial wealth with moral weight in a hierarchy of oversight, giving the wealthiest the most control and least accountability.