revision

Title

• What is the title of your presentation?

Introduction

• Introduce yourselves. You can choose to use a pseudonym if you like.

• What is the focus of your group, and what research question are you going to answer for us today?

• Why is this an important thing to know about – i.e., so what, why should I care, etc.? This might be a good place to talk about power and/or social justice.

• A clear thesis statement that summarizes your key claims

• A preview of what the sections/chapters will be

Body

• Section/chapter 1 (including the following elements - not necessarily in this order)

◦ Question/focus and why it matters

◦ Key findings with citations

◦ Some kind of concrete example from your research to make it real for the audience

◦ A review of key findings at the end

• Section/chapter 2, etc.

Conclusion

• A reminder of the focus and RQ for the group

• A re-iteration of why this is an important thing to know about

• A clear thesis statement that summarizes your key claims

• A review of what the sections/chapters were and the smaller claims that they each made

• A concluding statement about the state of knowledge on this question and what we should think about it in relation to our lives

Questions

• You will end with a period for audience members to ask questions of the group. Aim for around 2-4 minutes.

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Project Draft

• Hello, My name is (Whoever wants to do the introduction), (Everyone introduce yourself) and thank you for joining us today as we discuss the topic of Data Mining. We’re going to be covering a few different key points regarding data mining which include: explaining what it is, ethics, social media, and and the greater societal narrative.

• We seek to answer a greater question which is: What is data mining and free labor and how does it relate with our personal privacy as well as shape our democracy, and changing the narrative of society?

Stay tuned.

• You’re probably asking yourself: why should I care about data mining?

◦ Well, We often do not question our online presence because it is practically expected of us. We are mandated by our jobs, school, our social obligations, etc. to have an online presence. We should be thinking more critically into what our online presence really means and the consequences of it. With this being said, it is inescapable how we must all give up our personal information to entities who have the ability to misappropriate it for their own personal gain. Through this we provide a free gift or service to these entities in which we are not compensated for. We are socially conditioned to be okay with this because giving away our information at the drop of a hat because it looks as harmful as liking a friends post. However, beneath the surface, there are a myriad of consequences.  

• Chapter 1: What is data mining? (First team memeber)

◦ The phrase data mining is exactly what it sounds like. Companies collecting consumer data from visited websites, and using it to memorize your information to make checkout for online shopping easier, and to target the consumer for ads depending on what their collected data set is. Data mining algorithms work by surveying a set of data and finding commonalities and patterns. This allows sites like Google to gather data based on your searches and use that for marketing gain for them and/or other companies.

◦ According to InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, Google personalizing your searches is essentially taking every search you’ve had before, and using that data to generate results for all future searches that will give the results that people want. So essentially, Google’s personalization allows the website’s cookies to track your data and use that to help your future searches be more accurate to what you’d like. It also allows the company to be able to calculate which ads will be the best for which consumer (Author, 2018).

◦ So although Google personalising your searches to make your life easier seems like an amazing development, the scary thing is the data that they have collected from you voluntarily using their service. It’s sort of crazy to think about how big Google’s database is, due to the data it collects from its millions of users with their millions of searches.

• Chapter 2: Ethics in Data Mining & Digital Labor - (Second person)

◦ The world wide web is synonymous with largest data best that has ever existed. Data trails are created when we click on things online that we show interest in, and in a business context, this information can be used to gain market intelligence and with this given information, these businesses can profile us. (Wel, L. V., & Royakkers, L., 2004). It seems so benign right? On the surface level it appears that the more we interact on the internet the more it learns about us, and therefore it is better able to create a more streamlined and more taylormade experience for us as a user.

◦ I once had an experience where I was shopping online, and I was putting stuff in my cart and all of a sudden, the website sent me a code to my phone because i had shopped with them before, I confirmed it, and it automatically put in all my information for me and sent the items directly to my home without me confirming anything.

◦ I find it bizarre that they hold onto all of my very personal information. Although it made my shopping experience very quick, I don’t feel comfortable with them hanging onto it in the meantime.  

◦ This is an example of the danger that lurks behind this seemingly convenient phenomenon. Privacy concerns are a pressing issue when it comes to data and usage mining. This becomes problematic when the process of data mining slowly strips away our individualism when it begins to judge us based off of the information we provide and lump us into groups that it thinks we belong to.

Chapter 3: How is the implementation of misappropriated data by corporations negative? (Third)

• Do we really know where our personal data were used, just think about why we can see the advertisements on facebook? Have you ever think about those commodities are not their platform that can be used without charges? They rather sell those advertising space in combination with access to users. (Birkinbine, B. J., Gómez, R., & Wasko, J. (2017)) But why we always see those advertisement we searched or try to search?

• According to Christian Fuchs’s journal about Facebook Those corporations become “capitalismâ€�,  their essence is that stole our registration data, profile data, browsing behavior, communication content and social relation data to achieve profits by selling targeted advertising space.(Birkinbine, B. J., Gómez, R., & Wasko, J. (2017)) The capture of personal information is used to create targeted marketing campaigns,information is used directly by interactive companies to customize advertising, and sometimes it is bought and sold to marketers.(Andrejevic, pg 151,2013). Our personal data were stolen as the second use of those corporation to make profits. Web mining refers to the whole of data mining and related techniques that are used to automatically discover and extract information from web documents and services. When it used in a business context and applied to some type of personal data, it helps companies to build detailed customer profiles, and gain marketing intelligence.Web usage mining raises privacy concerns when web users are traced, and their actions are analysed without their knowledge. (Wel, L. V., & Royakkers, L. pg129, 2004) The important ethical issue with data mining is that, if someone is not aware that the information/knowledge is being collected or of how it will be used, he/she has no opportunity to consent or withhold consent for its collection and use.  Knowledge discovered whilst mining the web could pose a threat to people, our personal data will be taken to use without notice, we will not know how they use those information. So, web-data mining involving personal data will be viewed from an ethical perspective in a business context. (Wel, L. V., & Royakkers, L. pg130, 2004)

• Chapter 4: What is the role of social media in all of this? (My part)

• Nowadays social media obviously take very large parts in  individuals’ lives. There are all kinds of social media and they may be helpful for people to obtain a more convenient life. However, the role of social media are actually always changing. Under different circumstances, there are different roles for them. The role of social media in the modern business world are developing continually. It’s a development platform of client base. So they make profits from the users by data mining. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are considered as the “big threeâ€� of social media. There is supposed to be a secure environment for the users. Use Facebook as an example, the main goal is to create the pages for the users, so that they can follow those pages. The websites are getting preferences of the users, and the users will become the potential customers. And those business company can market their products to the website users. That’s how it works when the social media with the role of business marketing. However, by using the these users as free labor, there are no security at all for the users. The news of Facebook and Cambridge Analytic data mining prove that social media is lack of security. Although social media are pretty much accepted by the whole society, there are some risks for some company when they want to use social media to communicate with their customers. According to Debbie, who points out in the journal article Privacy as a Social Good , “When delving into the contemporary discourse on privacy, one is confronted by an overwhelmingly diverse array of works. The topics to which privacy is deemed relevant include: surveillance, communication, feminism, the family, internet commerce, the body, and information--media, financial, psychological, genetic, and biographicalâ€�(p.166). That’s why social media need to protect the privacy of their customers. And the role of them should also be protectors because they involve comprehensive aspects.

Conclusion: Chapter 5 - How does data mining effect democracy and the larger narrative of society?

At this point in the conversation we have covered the following topics:

Data mining and how it works in web-based services,

how data mining is used to extract free digital labor,

the ethics of collecting and storing user’s private data,

and the role of social media websites in this data collection business model.

What you may now be wondering is what this means for you.

How does data mining effect democracy and the larger narrative of society?

We know that search engines like Google and Bing use optimization algorithms to better decide personally catered search results. These engines sort our past and present search histories and clicks so that our future search results can better predict what type of information we would prefer to see.

That process of optimization is supposed to be viewed as a good quality because it promotes efficiency in search results by sorting out content that you usually never go to.

While simultaneously bringing to the front of your search results content that you formerly have expressed interest in seeing.

However, that limitation of search results is corrosive for an open and democratic society because it is a clear and obvious restriction on information. Google algorithms are essentially deciding that if a user only visits democratic-leaning news outlets, then the opposing political spectrum content is hidden from that user’s search results.

After mass amounts of aggregate user data has been collected, sorted, and analyzed, it is often sold back to consumers in the form of targeted advertisements, or sold to third-party companies for their own marketing purposes.

Companies like Facebook and Google depend almost entirely on user data to generate revenue for their services.

Traditionally, the media business model was more centralized with a small number of producers and a large number of mass consumers. In the digital age, this model has fundamentally changed, and according to Philip Napoli, “Web 2.0 has altered the terrain of the media business…and Business models based on the notion of the consumer as producer have allowed applications to capitalize on time spent participating in communicative activity and information sharing�(Napoli, 2011, p.81).�

Social media corporations are corporations at the end of the day, and they want to profit off of us consumers.

Although the Internet was once regarded as a tool of democratization for society and citizens around the world

private corporate interests have figured out a way to fundamentally alter the architecture of the Internet.

Under this current structure, citizens are treated only as consumers and their private information is at risk. Many of us know about the scandals with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica regarding users personal data;

obviously profits are more important than our information.

How we Can change this is by taking back our privacy and demanding that data companies change their ethics around how our personal information is allowed to be used.

According to Guardian Journalist Glenn Greenwald, privacy is the most important aspect of an open and democratic society. He argues that when humans know they are actively being watched, their motivations and actions lose personal agency.

In social context, that means that citizens and consumers in this digital age are losing control over their personal agency as they willingly participate in data services.

This potential for privacy invasion can have a corrosive effect on thought and information in a democratic society

because it can create a culture and society of conformity, obedience, and submission.

The lesson from this story should not be to fear the Internet or digital technologies, but rather to be educated and cognizant of the methods in which information and services are being misused in this liking, sharing digital age.