The Trillion Dollar Platform in Your Pocket?
The average person has over 40 different applications on their mobile device and each app has about 18 different third parties or Software Development Kits (SDKs) that harvest and share our data. Not surprisingly, Google and Facebook feature in the majority of apps, though users have little access to who is accessing our data, why, or how it is supercharging their profits. The lecture will show how platform monopolisation is spreading through mobile apps, and will open up SDKs to show how digital giants are controlling your data.
Biographies
Marc Coté
Mark Coté, Reader in Data and Society, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London
Dr. Mark Coté is a cross-disciplinary research-led academic exploring both the human and technical objects in order to critically understand the societal dimensions of data, computation and AI. He has been PI or CI on EPSRC, H2020, and AHRC grants valued at more than £10 million. He collaborates with computer scientists in social data analytics and cybersecurity, social scientists and policy experts and legal scholars. He is a PI and Strategic Board member of REPHRAIN, the UK’s national research centre for online harm mitigation and data empowerment, and a PI on SoBigData, the European research infrastructure for social data analytics. His work has been published widely in leading journals across disciplines including Big Data & Society and the IEEE Computer. His innovative leadership in research-led teaching and curriculum development is demonstrated in the MA Data Culture and Society.
Jennifer Pybus
Jennifer Pybus, Canada Research Chair in Data, AI and Democracy, Department of Politics, York University
Dr. Jennifer Pybus is a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Data, Democracy and AI, and Director of York’s new Centre for Public AI. Her interdisciplinary research intersects digital and algorithmic cultures by exploring the capture and processing of personal data. Her research contributes to an emerging field of datafication, a process that is rendering our social, cultural and political lives into productive data for machine learning and algorithmic decision-making. Her focus engages communities to open up new explainable approaches for understanding the impact of using personal data in AI technologies.