2014 (1/2)

What is happening as we "google" something is essentially that we are telling a huge corporation what is on our mind right now and we trust that this corporation then knows to lead us to exactly what we are looking for. As people become more and more aware that a corporation knowing every one of us so well is not a good thing, the concept of the meta search engine is seeing a renaissance. For the past year, I have almost exclusively been using alternative search engines. What started out as a self-experiment soon became such routine I almost forgot to write this blog post for my "Own your data" series. Maybe not quite able to compete with the smartest of full-text indexing algorithms, their power resides in the combination of several engine's results and in the obfuscation of the user's identity [...]

Busy interacting with their media or contacts on the internet, what I call the "digitally blindfolded" barely notice the imminent danger of death as they stumble around on bike paths and between motorized traffic. The apparent trend towards total extraction from the physical space makes me uncomfortable and I can't help but wonder what is going on here [...]

The short film “Follow Me on Dead Media - Analog Authenticities in Alternative Skateboarding Scene” by Joonas Rokka, Pekka Rousi and Vessi Hämäläinen presents their research on an alternative skateboarding scene in Helsinki. It is a so-called videography - academic […]

Creating something that has not existed before is at the core of the activity named "design". Yet sometimes, not creating something is the best way to create something. The thought of "undesign" - maybe not using that term in such reflected manner - is nothing new to most designers: a designer given the task to solve a certain challenge might well come to the conclusion that creating something new is not the best solution. [...]

As sociologists, we frequently use inequality as a lens to examine various dimensions of social life. A blog post by Jenny L. Davis illustrates how the non-use of technology (in this particular instance, due to lack of access) may not only be a manifestation of the so called “digital […]

With the constantly decreasing threshold to gather, process and store more and more data points, ever more bits and pieces of information are translated into bytes and stored away on the never-ending harddrives of the so called "cloud". Undeniably, there is great potential in data. However, the question needs to be asked: How much data is too much data? In the fight to reverse the trend of excessive and uncontrolled storage of personal data and to put its human owners into focus through distributed solutions, a discussion on "data obesity" and approaches like MAD should be part of any design process involving user data. [...]

The impact of social technology’s non-use on its users is sometimes abstract to explain. But every now and then, the issue surfaces in very accessible manner as in an editorial piece by Radhika Sanghani on the Telegraph. While active social media users, through constant sharing of detailed […]

Back in November, Nathan Jurgenson, the scholar who earlier coined the term “digital dualism” to describe (and challenge) the belief that online and offline lives are separate entities, wrote an article on The New Inquiry titled “The disconnectionists”. The essay examines […]

In my January post titled Identity, content, audience and the (independent) web, I described the approach of using a self-owned website as the primary place to publish online content, while sending out (“syndicating”) copies of the content to social platforms. My motive was to reflect […]

Along with the purchase of my Android phone came the convenience of a free and easy cloud back-up of my phone contacts and seamless synchronization with Google Calendar. However, I have since become more wary about whom I want to share my data with. I decided that it was time to say goodbye to Google and try out ownCloud, the open source software package for hosting one's own cloud services. [...]

My previous post on Privacy-Aware Design ("Replacing Google Analytics with a decentralized alternative") discussed the inherent privacy issue when a private corporation is able to track users around a large part of the internet. I presented how the provision of a free service with undeniable benefits for website owners has led to a situation where Google is able to track any internet user around half of the web and that it happens without explicit consent of the end-users (who may only protect themselves from being tracked by browser privacy add-ons). Following the same train of thought, the next topic in this series are social media integration practices. [...]

In late 2005, Google started to provide free access to a web analytics product based on the previously expensive Urchin software suite. In the seven years since, this strategy succeeded to get Google Analytics tracking code included in a stunning share of websites by providing access to a powerful tool at (seemingly) no cost for everyone from big corporations to hobbyist bloggers. "Oh, and we'll of course add Google Analytics to the site" is a common phrase in the context of a web project, by large agencies and teenage family webmasters alike: Google has managed to define their product as an implicit standard for visitor analysis on the web. Adding the tracking code is easy and the data the service provides is of unquestionable quality. Yet, privacy advocates have long pointed out the serious implications of one corporation being able to track users around such a massive slice of the internet [...]

While browsing around the internet, data is not only transferred from web servers to our screens, but also in the other direction: mostly invisible to the user, code embedded in websites sends usage data back to the provider of the website and to third-party services. Working with websites, their design and technical infrastructure on a daily basis, I have always been aware of this. Regardless, the scale of this practice makes me shudder every time I activate the Mozilla Lightbeam plugin (formerly known as Collusion) that visualizes all the tracking providers outside of visited web services [...]

On January 28, Data Privacy Day encouraged everyone to make protecting privacy and data a greater priority; a good trigger to start a long-planned series on some things I have been working on over the last year. With "Privacy-Aware Design", I aim to create a discussion around privacy as encountered by interaction designers on the UI/UX level. I consider it important to acknowledge that the protection of users' information is not just rooted in the service concept (data collection, sharing, visibility) or purely an engineering challenge in the background (encryption, access control, data storage in general), but that privacy is also deeply affected by design decisions on the user-facing interfaces of internet services. [...]