Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. Tech, community, video games, and whatever else is next.

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October 22, 2018: Yasha Levine, author, "Surveillance Valley"

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This week: Yasha Levine, author, "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet"

Pointers to Yasha's work:

• @yashalevine on Twitter

• All EFF'd Up (Baffler, summer 2018)

• Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet

Recent Tech News

• Apple demands retraction from Bloomberg (Mercury News, Oct 19) - following the Chinese-chip story we discussed last week and the week before.

• Natasha Tusikov: "Google’s Nest Labs reveals it’s handed over smarthome data 300 times since 2015, with govt’s seeking data on over 500 Nest users. Smart devices a boon for law enforcement surveillance."

• A court upholds but curbs India’s giant biometric ID system (The Economist, Sept 27): Aadhaar is "a vast biometric identification scheme containing the personal details, fingerprints and iris patterns" of 1.2 billion Indian citizens. India's Supreme Court ruled that "Aadhaar was constitutional and could remain obligatory for those wishing to receive public benefits or file taxes. Given that a majority of Indians do one or the other, that in effect makes participation mandatory. "

• Thousands Of Swedes Are Inserting Microchips Under Their Skin (NPR, October 22): "Proponents say they're safe and largely protected from hacking, but one scientist is raising privacy concerns around the kind of personal health data that might be stored on the devices. Around the size of a grain of rice, the chips are typically inserted into the skin just above each user's thumb... One coworking space and innovation hub in Stockholm is holding a large implant party this month where a tech startup, DSruptive, is promising to reveal "the next generation consumer-level implant." The device will include 2 KB of memory, double that of earlier implants, a range of new functions and an LED light designed to improve privacy by blinking if someone tries to read or access an implant."

Who's getting chipped next? You? (Biometric ID now being rolled out in India; China requires smartphone use; here in the US, look for billionaires and prisoners to get it first, then for billionaires to abandon while chips - if Big Tech gets its way - become compulsory for the bottom 99.9%.)

• Who Will Teach Silicon Valley to Be Ethical? (NYT, Oct 21): Kara Swisher quotes Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andme: “I think it has to be our management and leaders who have to add this to our skill set, rather than just hire one person to determine this.”

• Review of three recent books on tech + rising inequality (Wired, Oct 22): "The narrative of disruption duped us into thinking this was a new kind of capitalism. The authors argue that tech companies conquered the world not with software, but via the usual route to power: ducking regulation, squeezing workers, strangling competitors, consolidating power, raising rents, and riding the wave of an economic shift already well underway."

• NoMoreGoogle.com: Privacy-friendly alternatives to Google that don't track you

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