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Data Leverage Roundup

What's Data Leverage?

Powerful data-dependent technologies rely on the public (including you and everyone you know) to fuel them with data. This means collective action that involves withholding, deleting, manipulating, and/or transfering data can help the public exert data leverage against technology companies, potentially pushing for meaningful change (which could range from taking privacy more seriously to making changes to the data economy).

For more info, see the paper or this recent coverage of data leverage.

The goal of this repository/document is to provide a roundup of tools, news, social movements, civic initiatives, and resources related to data leverage.

This is by no means complete and we welcome contributions! See "Contributing" at the bottom of this document.

How is this different from initiatives related to data protection, privacy, obfuscation, surveillance, etc.?

As we hope to show you below, data leverage draws heavily on tools, movements, initiatives, and research related to all the above topics. Data leverage focuses on gaining leverage to win concessions for the public from large powerful organizations. In other words, many (if not most) efforts related to data protection, privacy, obfuscation, and surveillance can also help to advance data leverage. We've also tried to highlight some active research in these areas below.

In short: this document is not just about "tools developed for data leverage"; it is about "tools (developed for many purposes) that support data leverage".

Is Data Leverage About Bringing Down All Data-dependent Technologies?

Not necessarily! While some data levers (specifically, data strikes and data poisoning) involve lowering the performance of a data-dependent technology, data leverage can also involve boosting up a data-dependent technology and contributing to knowledge artifacts (conscious data contribution).

There is active research on identifying the harms of different technologies. See, for instance, work in the ACM FAccT Conference. This research can help us to navigate the ethics of data leverage: which technologies should be harmed and which should be helped? These are tough, inherently contextual and political questions that will require deep societal conversations involving many perspectives.

That said, there is some overlap between data leverage and active movements aimed at mitigating the impacts of harmful technologies (with harm, of course, being contexually defined). See below for more.

Tools that Support Data Leverage

Data Strikes

Web browsing

  • PrivacyBadger - "stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web"
    • This tool has explicit concessions in mind: companies can avoid being blocked if they comply with Do Not Track headers.
  • Firefox Containers - "lets you separate your work, shopping, or personal browsing without having to clear your history, log in and out, or use multiple browsers"
    • anything you do in one container will be kept separate from other containers
    • Can be set to automatically open specific websites in their own container, to make it harder for companies to track you across the web
  • Cover Your Tracks - "Test your browser to see how well you are protected from tracking and fingerprinting"
  • Ghostery - "Ghostery demystifies online privacy by exposing the forces that lurk behind your screen and enabling you to block them."
    • Free suite of tracking blockers, with paid upgrades such as customization, VPN, etc.
  • DuckDuckGo's Mobile App - "Seamlessly take control of your personal information, no matter where the Internet takes you."
  • Tor - "Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship."

Advertising

Deletion Requests

  • Mine - "Discover where your personal data is and manage your digital footprint."
    • a tool for finding which companies have data about you and submitting deletion requests
    • website includes a table with statistics about how quickly and frequently companies complete deletion requests

Data Poisoning

Ad Targeting

  • AdNauseam - "clicking ads so you don't have to."
    • Browser extension that "clicks" every ad your browser sees, as a form of obfuscation.

Search

  • TrackMeNot - "With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view."
    • See this paper about the project.

Images

  • LowKey - "Prevent your images from being used to track you."
    • Upload your images to get a perturbed copy.
  • adversarial.io - "easy-to-use webapp for altering image material, in order to make it machine-unreadable. "
  • Fawkes - "Image 'Cloaking' for Personal Privacy"

Phone Contacts Data

  • fake_contacts - "feeds fake data to any apps or companies who are copying our private data to use or sell it"

NLP

Conscious Data Contribution

build personal data infrastructure now

  • Building data liberation infrastructure - "How to export, access and own your personal data with minimal effort"

    • highly comprehensive post covering design principles and practical technqiues for managing many sources and types of data

  • Promnesia - "Promnesia is a browser extension (Chrome/Firefox/Firefox mobile) that serves as a web surfing copilot by enhancing your browsing history, improving your web exploration experience, and integrating with your knowledge base."

  • Solid - "Your data, your choice. Advancing Web standards to empower people."

Downloading Data from Tech Companies

Motivating Data Leverage

Many tools have focused on showing how our data is used and how pervasive data collection systems are. These may be very useful for convincing people to join data leverage movements.

Data Leverage in the News

A roundup of movements and initatives with connections to data leverage and news coverage of data leverage-related events.

Data Related Social Movements and Civic Initiatives

Related Movements

There are many ongoing social movements with goals that are very aligned with data leverage (e.g. addressing negative impacts of computing, reducing power imbalance between the public and tech companies).

Surveillance

Harms of Facial Recognition

Harms of Social Media

Important Areas of Active Research

This is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather provide some helpful starting points anyone interested in the research in this space.

Contesting Optimization Systems

  • Protective Optimization Technologies - "POTs provide means for affected parties to address the negative impacts of systems in the environment, expanding avenues for political contestation."

Data Rights in Practice

Reproducible Research on Data Poisoning

Data Portability

Data Poisoning and Crowdsourcing systems

Choosing Alternative Products

Contributing

This is an incomplete list and we welcome contributions! Feel free to use email, Github issues, or pull requests to suggest additional tools, news, movements, and resources to include.

Some general goals for this page:

  • Let links mostly speak for themselves. To start, we've include a brief quote from each link that tries to give a high-level summary.
  • For each link, we also include a very brief summary and highlight unique strengths
    • Was the tool designed with explicit concessions in mind? In other words, are users of the tool already actively working to exert leverage?
    • Does the tool work well for collective action?
    • etc.
  • Emphasize tools that are particularly easy to use. We're eager for people to share their experiences using these tools.

In addition to content contributions, we're also in interested in feedback about what kinds of structured information would be useful. In particular, we hope to eventually create structured data (for instance, a CSV file) that describes data leverage tools. What attributes (i.e. columns) would you like to see?

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License:MIT License