Keeping an Eye on the Panopticon: Workshop on Vanishing Anonymity
posted by:Veronica Pinero // 08:54 PM // April 12, 2005 // Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference (CFP)
Good afternoon! Many members of the research group On the Identity Trail are participating in a whole day workshop at the Computer, Freedom, and Privacy Conference that is being held in Seattle (U.S) and that was organized by Stephanie Perrin, another team member.
Val Steeves and Ian Kerr have just presented their research, Virtual playgrounds and BuddyBots: a data-minefield for tinys & tweenies. By the way, this research is already available at www.anonequity.org.
Valerie highlighted the need to address how children are being targeted as web consumers: “the net is a place in which children spend a lot of time, and it is also a place where much of their private life is collected.” She noted that children are “vulnerable population” and that current model of “informed consent” does not address this characteristic. She also pointed out how all these websites that focus on children try to manipulate them by reinforcing the discourse of “friendship between the child and the product.”
Ian presented his interaction with a NativeMind Bot, “affective computing”, in an attempt to present to his audience how to understand and model emotional experience in machine behaviour.
Many interesting questions followed their presentation. While addressing one of them, Valerie noted that, with regard to how to protect children from these intrusive techniques of data-collection, the key point is to promote child-education material to let children know how they are manipulated. She also noted that members of the research group are already doing research in this area.
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