Jan 2019

Security Isn't Enough. Silicon Valley Needs 'Abusability' Testing

wired.com

While designers and technologists are all obsessed with usability (and rightfully so!), this little-observed topic of “abusability” deserves more attention.
Ashkan Soltani plans to give a talk centered on an overdue reckoning for […]
2019

Exclusive Design

exclusive-design.vasilis.nl

The first time I heard about Vasilis van Gemert’s experiment, in the lead-up to his talk at beyond tellerrand Berlin 2017, I openly admit it took me a moment to get my head around the idea. The thinking he applies to challenge and extend prevailing […]
2019

Collective aspects of privacy in the Twitter social network

epjdatascience.springeropen.com

This paper tickles my brain not just in the privacy domain, but neatly ties it into my interest in . The researchers test the so-called shadow profile hypothesis: “the data shared by the users of an online service predicts personal information of […]
2019

The week in quotes (2019W04)

Free speech vs. attention, moral blindness, life without Amazon, GDPR fines, and climate change.
2019

The era of sociopaths is over

webdevlaw.uk

The web can no longer be a career choice for people who want to work in a field where there are no obligations, no ethics, no rules, and no constraints.
Heather Burns once and for all dismissing the legend of the martyr techie […]
2019

Life Without the Tech Giants

gizmodo.com

Addressing the widespread concern with the big tech giants taking too much control over people’s lives, Kashmir Hill enrolls in a self-experiment:
The common retort to these concerns is that you should “just stop using their services.” […]
2019

WhoTracks.me - Bringing Transparency to Online Tracking

whotracks.me

The makers of the Ghostery tracking blocker plugin use data from that plugin (on an opt-in basis) to analyze and present who web users are being tracked by.
2019

Beyond the interface

thomasbyttebier.be

In this thorough and historically grounded analysis of “sameness” in design (a write-up of a conference talk), Thomas Byttebier discusses various aspects of why a lot of things look alike, what might be problematic aspects of that, but also the […]
2019

Technology Is a Branch of Moral Philosophy | L.M. Sacasas

thefrailestthing.com

“Whether or not it draws on new scientific research technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.”
L. M. Sacasas ponders over this 1969 quote by Paul Goodman. He highlights Goodman’s position on […]
2019

The week in quotes (2019W03)

Accessibility personas, privacy in open source, dignity, selfish intimacy, and learning exhaust.
2019

NYT axed behavioural ads in EU - a case of privacy UX paying off?

Cutting back on privacy-invading ad tech, the NYT managed to increase their EU ad revenue. A significant finding - and proof for privacy-centred UX thinking to pay off?
2019

The World Is Choking on Digital Pollution

washingtonmonthly.com

An incredibly good, and equally important, essay on why the by-products of digital business are even more toxic than the pollution caused by the industrial age. It’s a challenge at societal scale and needs to be treated like that.
The […]
2019

Project Alias

bjoernkarmann.dk

An interesting hack project: a “teachable parasite” device (open source), feeding smart home assistants noise unless the user really wants to interact with them. It’s a small, remote-controlled device sitting on top of the home assistant […]
2019

Colonised by data: the hollowing out of digital society

hiig.de

A summary of Nick Couldry’s Nov 2018 lecture “Colonised by data: the hollowing out of digital society” at the Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft (HIIG) Berlin. The lecture builds on the comparison of today’s digital economy with […]
2019

Reply to a post by Jeremy Keith

adactio.com

I full-heartedly agree with Jeremy: print stylesheets are one more feature of universal website design, and they go together rather well with QR codes ...no matter how ugly, abused and underused they are.
2019

Twitter Demetricator

bengrosser.com

This is a neat project: Ben Grosser’s browser extension “Twitter Demetricator” strips the Twitter UI of all displayed metrics such as likes, retweets etc. to inspire reflection on how these numbers affect us as we use the […]
2019

The week in quotes (2019W02)

Toxic metrics, ethics of performance, e-mail tracking, research questions, financialised humans, silence, and user stories.
2019

Video of my talk at WUD Hamburg (in German)

The video recording of my talk on privacy as UX from Nov 2018 ("Datenschutz als User Experience") is now available online.
2019

Design Ethics and the Limits of the Ethical Designer

viget.com

This essay is an important contribution to the discussion of what exactly is "ethical" design and how it affects the design profession.
2019