Digital waste is something that I actually have thought about from time to time for quite a few years. I grew up hearing that you shouldn’t just throw away your old electronics, but I never knew what happened to any of it after you handed it over to people who would take care of it for you. I kind of assumed it went to factory-type places where they’d break stuff down and process parts and stuff, but I guess that wasn’t right. It’s not fair that we dump all this garbage on developing countries and that their people are endangered because of it.

I used to work at Office Depot and we would take people’s old electronics for recycling, and this week’s article makes me wonder if the company actually recycles the stuff or if they ship it overseas. It makes sense that dumping the stuff in places like Ghana is cheaper than recycling, but it hurts to know that corporations are more worried about money than contributing to a cleaner environment (although it is not surprising in the least). Yay for corporate greed!

Since this is the last required post for the semester, I thought I’d reflect a little on the class. I have really enjoyed this class and I think everything we have talked about is pretty interesting. I’ve gained a whole new insight and perspective on data and Google and everything else we’ve talked about. I no longer think of Google as this heavenly entity that I love with all my heart. The things I’ve learned in this class I have been able to discuss and apply to other parts of my life in ways I didn’t expect coming into the class.

Ever since we started talking about accessibility in this class and in my DTC 206 class I’ve been paying more attention to the accessibility of websites I visit and content I view. In one of the readings for this week, Mischa Andrews says, “While it’s easy to get discouraged, it’s worth noting that making accessible websites isn’t hard and doesn’t take a huge amount of time.” This reminds me of a quote by Jesse Hausler: “[Accessibility] design constraints will give you new ideas to explore that will lead to better products for all of your users.” Accessibility should not be something that is seen as just another thing designers and developers should have to worry about.

As common as disabilities are, it’s not something most people think about in day to day life. Here at WSU, I’ve noticed that a lot of content posted on blackboard or used in class by my teachers are not very accessible. My history teacher posts a ton of PDFs of scans of books and articles that have tiny print and are unable to be used with text-to-speech technologies. For most videos that we watch in most classes, the teacher doesn’t turn on captions or turn the volume up enough so that everyone is able to understand. It’s never something I really noticed before, but now that I’m aware of these issues I see the problems more and more.

In the inaccessible web article I like the advice the author gives to clients and also developers and designers. People need to think about accessibility when they are designing or pitching projects. Clients need to realize that accessibility takes time and money but that it is really worth it. I agree that developers should encourage clients to consider accessibility because I feel like it’s something that people would be more inclined to do if they were more aware of these things.

I really like the very first paragraph of the ‘Accessibility, Usability, and Inclusion’ page. It says, “Accessibility, usability, and inclusion are closely related aspects in creating a web that works for everyone. Their goals, approaches, and guidelines overlap significantly. It is most effective to address them together when designing and developing websites and applications.” I think a lot of people think that those three things are the same; I know I wouldn’t have known the difference not too long ago. As an able-bodied person I never thought about website accessibility, that is, until recently. There was a story going around in the news about a man who was suing Dominos because their website wasn’t usable for him as a blind man. That raised my awareness on the issue, and then just a few days after I heard about this we started talking about accessibility in my Digital Inclusion class. We read articles on accessible and inclusive website design and we evaluated the accessibility of Blackboard. This made me think a lot about how the Internet isn’t very disability-friendly a lot of the time. Things I take for granted most of the time, like video captions, aren’t always available or accurate, which causes problems when users can’t hear or have trouble hearing. I’ve seen brief discussions on how to incorporate picture and video descriptions for people with vision impairments, but I think that’s something that is going to take a lot more work than captioning for hearing-impaired people. One of the things we read for Digital Inclusion was an article called “7 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about Accessibility.” I think it could be a good addition to the readings for this class. It gives a few simple suggestions on how to make websites more accessible, and my favorite thing about it is that the very first concept is “Accessibility is not a barrier to innovation.” The author goes on to say that making something accessible simply gives you constraints to think about while you’re working on your design, and I think that’s a great way to put it. As with ethics in algorithms and the discussion of moral/ethical training for programmers and other people, I think it would be a good idea to just train or teach everyone to always automatically incorporate accessibility features when designing new things instead of thinking of them as a setback or something extra they have to do.

I know we’ve talked about it in class, and I think I’ve posted about it before, but I can’t remember for sure; the idea of the right to be forgotten online is interesting to me. I’ve always thought of my data being collected and staying online forever as inevitable. I’ve never really wanted that bad to remove my data from any one company or website, except for the occasional email subscription I never actually signed up for. When I delete accounts online I kind of just assume that they’re going to keep my data on the back burner and never get rid of it, and that’s something that I don’t really care much about. Like other stuff we’ve talked about in this class, I know there are a lot of people that do care about their online privacy. I think the EU is definitely on the right track with the General Data Protection Regulation law they passed. It makes sense that people should be able to request that their data be completely removed from a company’s databases. I also think that it’s an amazing idea to make the terms & conditions everyone always skips over more understandable. I think that if more people could understand exactly what they were giving companies permission to do then they would care more and be more cautious and advocate for more change here. I know that I, personally, would pay more attention to what I was agreeing to.

I don’t understand the technical side of how the internet really works and what the Ted Talk was talking about, but I think the idea of an internet/network that people can use without interference form government or corporations is cool. I do think, though, that if these networks become more popular, someone will eventually decide to monetize it and they’ll become more like our internet that we have now. This is something that should still be closely watched.

This reading was a LOT to get through and I’ll probably have to go through it a couple more times because I barely processed any of it. One thing I did notice, however, was the very brief mention of social media activism. The author mentions a critic who referred to it as “slactivism, as opposed to the real activism taking place on the ground.” I know this wasn’t a main focus, but I think that view is a dangerous one. Like Christen says, “technology becomes the revolutionary figure.” Technology, and more specifically social media, plays a huge role in social activism today. This article was written a while ago, but even back then there was important things happening on social media. Social media gives people that may not be able to physically go out and participate in “real” activism a way to still be a part of something and make an impact. Big movements and issues like Me Too and the DAPL and March for our Lives would not have gotten as big as they were without technology and social media.

There’s a brief mention of Google and the “blind faith” people have in and their practices amidst a conversation about open access on the internet. I just liked that because that’s what I’m doing my final project and paper on. I think the idea of complete open access is interesting. In theory, it sounds great, everyone having the ability to access and endless stream of knowledge. I can’t think of a specific example as I’m writing this, but I do think that there are definitely some things that not everyone should have access to. At this point in time you can find almost anything by doing a quick Google search, so we almost have this unlimited knowledge, but just not quite. I have sufficient access to things that I need, so it’s not a subject I think about very much.

I think this unit will be interesting, because I’m one of those people that doesn’t really care about online privacy and where all my data ends up. I like it when my online experience is tailored to my interests and I don’t mind that companies are creating profiles on me based on the data I produce. I do know, however, that there are people out there that care a lot about their privacy, so I know that digital sovereignty is an important topic to discuss.

I thought that A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was interesting. I know it was the point, but it almost sounded like someone from early colonial American was writing it, which made it cool since it was talking about cyberspace. I loved the line “You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.” This puts into words a feeling that a lot of the older generations have about the Internet and online privacy. I think having control over privacy is a lot more important for older people because being online is something that is relatively new for them, as opposed to millennials and Gen Z that have grown up with it. Us younger people know that data collection and monitoring behavior online and that sort of stuff is pretty much expected and inevitable, but the older generations tend to not understand or trust these things as much as we do. And it’s completely understandable. This is kind of a dumb example, but to me it’s almost like this: I spent a lot of my formative years (middle school, high school) using Vine. Now Vine is gone and Tik Tok has taken its place. I don’t use Tik Tok and don’t want to because I don’t know much about it and I don’t trust it as much as I did Vine.

New concepts, like digital sovereignty, are scary for some, and simply daunting for others. With every new mass idea or product comes the need for regulation and attention from lawmakers and activists. Like Story says in ‘From Digital Sovereignty to the Web of Nations,’ it’s hard to create digital sovereignty laws and regulations because of how widespread it is. Different countries and regions have different laws and things already in place that make it impossible to have rules that govern all digital data. Instead, different places have to come to agreements with their neighbors and other places that try to regulate data as well as they can while respecting the others’ differing laws. People in certain places may be a lot more protected than people in other areas, and that is a little worrisome when it comes to digital equality – but then again, when has anything ever really been equal?

After the first chapter of Noble’s book, it’s been a lot easier for me to get through it. I found Chapter Four really interesting. I hadn’t ever thought about the possibility that some regular people out there might not want their information taken off of search engines. I know that politicians and other public figures sometimes want things hidden if they’ve done something bad, but I didn’t think about the effects certain Internet findings could have on regular people. I didn’t even know that you could petition Google to have content removed! It seems like a nice concept, but from what is mentioned in the book it doesn’t seem very reliable or helpful.

Back in middle school and around then, I had heard about teachers getting fired for people finding past ‘adult film’ work that they had done, but it was before I was “woke” as the kids would say, so I didn’t find any issue with it. Now, I think it’s ridiculous that people’s past things could affect their lives so much. It’s like when people will go back on celebrities’ social medias and find something racist or insensitive that they said when they were twelve. We all said dumb stuff when we were twelve, but people change. I don’t think it’s fair to use the past against us, so I completely understand why people would want personal information and things ‘erased’ from search engines. I think it’s interesting that the “right to be forgotten” laws Noble talks about “generally ignore the record keeping that Google does on individuals and organizations that are archived and shared with third parties beyond Google’s public-facing search results.” I don’t think that Google should be keeping too much information on individuals, let alone selling it to third parties inside the law.

Chapter Five was kind of boring to me (although I am now kind of interested in reading up on library information systems), but I did want to mention this powerful quote: “Those who have the power to design systems- classification or technical- hold the ability to prioritize hierarchical schemes that privilege certain types of information over others.” I think this connects well to my DTC 206 class, where we’ve talked about how the powerful few influence the masses in unimaginable amounts of ways. The people making these database search systems and protocols hold a staggering amount of power over the perceptions of the masses, and that’s incredible and terrifying.

I’m not going to lie, this book has been hard for me to get through so far, and we’re only one chapter in.

I think it’s interesting that the United Nations launched a study into search engines. I always think of the U.N. as some international peace group that talks about the environments and crisis aid, but I know there’s a lot more that they do, and I guess this is one of those things. Noble says that what she finds troubling is “that the campaign also reinforces the idea that it is not the search engine that is the problem, but, rather, the users of search of search engines who are.” She obviously doesn’t think that’s true, and neither do I. I don’t know of anyone that searches any of those predictive search results that she talks about and pictures in the book.

In my DTC 206 (Digital Inclusion) class, we recently talked about how content for minorities may be harder to find because these creators aren’t usually able to keep up with the big companies when it comes to paying for their content to be seen first and most often. Noble asks a question that I think pretty well encapsulates that discussion: “If the majority rules in search engine results, then how might those who are in the minority ever be able to influence or control how they are represented in a search engine?” I don’t think that many black women are searching those questions that are on the cover of the book and also in the chapter, so how are they supposed to communicate how they feel and want to be represented if these are the kinds of things that are thought to be so ‘popular’ and mainstream?

One quote from the chapter that really stuck out to me was this: “representations of women are ranked on a search engine page in ways that underscore women’s historical and contemporary lack of status in society” and I really liked that. In general, we’ve come a along way in the journey to gender equality, but there’s still so many little things like search engine predictions that show how much work we really have left to do, and how technology may be making these things worse, instead of better. People don’t always use technology in positive ways like they should.

I had absolutely no idea that cash-strapped police departments were using predictive programs to position cops in areas where more crime is predicted to happen. This seems like a good concept, and it is in a lot of ways, but it also appears to be an almost racist system. It doesn’t surprise any of us that there are more crimes reported from impoverished, “ghetto” communities that are often filled with people of color than in wealthier areas with residents who tend to be mostly white. Like O’Neil discusses in this chapter of her book, since more crimes are recorded in these areas, the predictive programs that police departments are using predict that the next crimes will be committed there as well. This leads to more patrols and searches in these neighborhoods, leading to more arrests and recorded crimes, and thus continuing this endless circle of discrimination and “our prisons fill[ing] up with hundreds of thousands of people found guilty of victimless crimes.” A quote pretty much summarizing this discussion that I absolutely love is, “geography is a highly effective proxy for race.” This was one of those things that when you read it you kind of do a double-take and think wow.

Another thing from this reading that jumped out at me was towards the end of the chapter when O’Neil says that ‘stop and frisk’ practices widely used today “may seem intrusive and unfair, but in short time… will also be viewed as primitive.” Finding out that police in San Diego are not only doing stop and frisks and asking for IDs, they are also taking photographs of these people and uploading them to this crime cloud facial recognition system. This seems like a huge invasion of privacy stacked on top of already unfair stop and frisk practices. I think that using facial recognition softwares to probe security footage and stuff like that for suspected criminals is a good thing, but taking pictures of people on the street simply because they might seem a little suspicious is a little extreme to me; and that’s saying a lot because I’m one of those people that doesn’t really care about their privacy all that much.

Facial recognition is something that I think about as almost a fantasy. I only see it in cop shows on TV and in movies. At the same time, every time I pick up my phone, I unlock it with my face. When Apple announced FaceID on their new phones last year, I didn’t think much about it. It was basically just like when they started fingerprint unlocking with TouchID; it was just a cool new thing. It wasn’t until this class that I realized the ways Apple could be storing my information and maybe even using it without me knowing. I don’t really care all that much if they store my data, but I would care a little more if I found out that they were using my face or my fingerprint for identification purposes with law enforcement or other agencies.

Being a white woman, pretty much all technologies work for me. I know, however, that for people of color, especially black people, facial recognition can be imprecise and cause a lot of problems. The article talking about facial recognition software in Detroit brings up how much of a problem misidentifying black people is with these new softwares. There was also mention of how there haven’t been enough studies to find out if using this facial recognition software is even helping make communities safer. It’s really interesting how all these law enforcement agencies kind of just jumped into using facial recognition without any studies or prompting from the people. I think that there can be positives to facial recognition, like quickly finding people that need to be found, but only if the facial recognition is proven accurate. If there are any misidentifications it can lead to trauma from the person who was misidentified and distract agencies from actually solving the problem at hand. If we’re going to use facial recognition, it needs to be studied, tested, and improved, like any other technology out there today.