please welcome our next speaker Cornell
University's dr. Karen lady
hi everyone nice to join you all today
hi it's great to be with you all today
thanks so much for inviting me to come
speak with you
it looks like a great amazing line-up of
programming you all have for the next
few days and I'm really honored that you
let me come be a part of it
so I am a professor at Cornell
University I'm a lawyer and a
sociologist but more sociologists a
lawyer and I study surveillance and
privacy and I study surveillance in a
variety of settings but there's a common
thread that I've kind of accidentally
discovered that seems to run through
everything that I do which I didn't set
out to do research about this but it
seems like it just keeps coming back to
me and I thought I would talk with you
about it today and that common thread is
intimacy so surveillance is bound up
with our intimate lives in a bunch of
different ways and I thought I would
tell you three short stories today from
my research from different projects I'm
working on about different ways that
intimacy emerges in relation to data and
surveillance so first I thought I would
talk to you about care some work that
I'm doing with a collaborator about
surveillance in homes and in families
which I know is something that many of
you think about a lot then I thought I'd
talk with you about surveillance and
bodies in relation to some research I'm
doing about workplace surveillance
especially with long-haul truck drivers
and automation in that industry and then
finally I want to talk with you a little
bit about violence and some research I'm
doing about intimacy and abuse so let's
start with care that's kind of the most
fun one probably in some of my work
we've been looking at how surveillance
products are marketed to consumers for
surveillance of people in their own
homes and their families and their
romantic relationships in the intimate
spheres of their lives and these are
tools that many of you are familiar with
right things like in-home camera and
security systems baby monitors fertility
trackers location trackers for kids for
teenagers a lot of the new IOT devices
that many of the big tech companies are
putting out these products are all
things you can buy on Amazon they range
in price from about $40 to about $400
and can you guess what they all have in
common they're all cameras
they're all hidden cameras they're just
cameras in different decoy type shapes
so these types of things this on the
right is the sprouting that's one of
many there's a bunch of different kind
of products in this space but this is an
ankle monitor for an infant and it
monitors an infant's heart rate
temperature the ambient light and sound
in the room there's a bunch of different
products that monitor different stuff
about babies and that of course like
what we tend to think of when we think
of an ankle bracelet is the one on the
left right and so what we're suggesting
in some of this work that we're doing is
that actually more and more surveillance
is looking like the ankle monitor on the
right right and and the interpretation
we have of that is that surveillance is
becoming a really normalized mode of
taking care of one another right not
necessarily always punitive sometimes
based in care and there's a lot of this
I found really interesting because in
the privacy research sphere there's a
lot of emphasis on how a bunch of data
is being collected about all of us right
how we're all being watched but there's
less emphasis on this other dynamic
which is how we're all becoming Watchers
and that is what's for sale with
products like this right so the idea is
that surveillance is becoming
normatively essential really required to
the duties of care that you have across
the lifecycle right whether that's just
your role as a parent as a child as a
spouse and if you look at the rhetorics
that get mark get used to market the
stuff all of the rhetoric all of the
advertising language is about love and
care and protection and safety and duty
right we watch because we care you watch
out over your baby and we as a tech
company will help you do that you can
offload some of that burden of care onto
us and using that product reflects on
you in the relationship that you have
with say a child and this extends all
across the lifecycle right so I showed
you some stuff about babies there's feed
a lot of fetal monitoring that's kind of
you can read in the same sphere all the
way up to elderly adults so I have some
other work about about monitoring a load
elderly people now for someone who
studies surveillance like me I find this
to be one of the most interesting and
normatively difficult areas I have two
young children I have a two year old in
the four year old and I totally
understand the impetus to monitor them
right to collect data about them I'm
sure I will in different ways as they
grow up and they
driving and texting and doing all kinds
of stuff I probably don't want them to
do and I'm not suggesting that this
interest or this this desire to monitor
is misplaced or that these tools can
actually do a lot of good for families
but what I think is important to note
about these is this - cell protection
and care you also have to create a
reciprocal anxiety you have to sell an
anxiety about what you're being
protected from and so this is what
happens if you look at this marketing
this marketing cultivates a generalized
anxiety about the big bad world of
threats and some of those threats are
external things like worrying that your
house is going to be robbed or that
you're going to be assaulted and some of
them are internal that your baby has
some illness that you won't know about
unless you buy this device and actually
this is an old advertising trick so
we're what's for sale is not just
comfort but also the discomfort that's
relieved by the product that you buy the
packaging of discomfort and comfort
together so we tend to buy pain the
first example of us that I know of was
the toothpaste Pepsodent which was an
old tooth I don't actually know if they
even sell Pepsodent anymore but when
they started selling pepsin it was one
of the most successful early toothpastes
and the reason why is not because it
cleans your teeth any better than the
other toothpaste on the market but
because it hurt to use like it made your
mouth
I think sting I think it was like really
really minty or something so people
thought it was doing a better job than
the others right it created this pain
and then it made people believe that it
was really working right you package the
pain and and the relief together the
other thing that I find interesting
about these tools is that there's kind
of a backward compatibility to the way
we talk about surveillance in care so
increasingly we see companies and states
using this language of love and care to
justify their own surveillance so this
comes from a public university a friend
of mine took this right but there's a
bunch of examples of this of states
using this language of care okay so
that's this first little tidbit the
second little snapshot I thought I would
share with you has to do with some of my
long stay for me long-standing research
about workplace surveillance so I'm sure
you have all heard because you're all
educated people concerned about
technology but there's a lot of
well-founded concern lately about the
possibility that AI is going to bring
about massive disruption and employment
right that millions of workers are
suddenly
I lose their jobs they wanted the
ability to ache to make ends meet and
there's a bunch of discussion about
what's the extent of the disruption
gonna be what sorts of jobs face the
greatest threat now one of the prime
targets everybody seems to agree is
likely to be long-haul truck driving and
there are several reasons for this some
of them are technical right there's been
a lot of technical innovation in the
sphere of autonomous vehicles lately
autonomous vehicles are best at highway
driving which trucks do a lot of but
then there's also some other factors
which I explore a lot in my research
which have to do with the fact that
truck drivers are often varied they're
really overworked and they're really
tired based on the political economy of
the industry and so they get really
tired and they get in these expensive
and deadly accidents and machines don't
right machines don't get tired so
there's there's some kind of a push
factor there too now economists worry a
lot about this this economic impact
right there are about two million
long-haul truckers in the United States
I don't know if any of you have seen
this graphic NPR put this out about a
year ago this is showing the most common
job in every state and all of those kind
of act like the biggest one although
aqua colored states the most common job
in that state is truck driver and so the
common rhetoric they've like very common
concern about this now is what happens
if all of those jobs are lost you know I
spent the last six years studying the
role of Technology in truck driving
that's what I wrote my dissertation
about and I'm working on a book about it
now actually and there is a threat from
automation there to be sure but I
believe that the rhetoric about massive
job loss doesn't capture the whole
nature of the threat okay so I don't
think we're gonna see this discrete
phase transition from humans to robots
in the trucking workplace right it's not
like it goes human human human robot
right that's not how it works instead
it's gonna be this much more gradual
curve right because being a truck driver
actually involves a whole lot of things
that aren't just driving right you have
to interface with customers you have to
secure your load you have to make
repairs you have to load Freight all
kinds of stuff that's harder to automate
right than highway driving and hence
might be automatable someday but it's
gonna come later right the idea is that
it's not likely that we won't have truck
drivers at all but it is likely that the
nature of truck driving will change and
probably what will
that will require human truck drivers
human workers to integrate their work
with the technology in new ways
now we sometimes think about this a lot
of people in our town amidst vehicles
think about this is what they call the
handoff problem right that humans and
machines pass the baton back and forth
basically and we kind of discreetly
parcel out which functions the humans
good at and which function the robots
good at but we actually see happening
and trucking today is not a discrete
parceling out instead what we see is the
integration of the human and the robot
into one another in a very physical way
so in practice the way workers are
actually experiencing the rise of AI and
trucking right now isn't this
displacement but is this very gradual
physical intrusion into their work in
their bodies now this is a cartoon from
a trucker magazine I never thought I was
going to spend a bunch of time reading
trucker magazines but there you go I do
that now so this is a robo trucker and
this article is about in the trucker
magazine is about some of these systems
right now I'm gonna tell you about a few
of the examples that come up in this
article and in some other some of my
other work so Mercedes recently
announced that they're working on a vest
for truck drivers that they wear and it
monitors their heart rate and their
other vital signs and the idea is that
the vest knows if the trucker is gonna
have a heart attack and if so it stops
the truck automatically this is a
company called seeing machines it's one
of kind of several companies that do use
driver facing cameras to monitor signs
of fatigue now seeing machines does this
by monitoring a driver's eyelids looking
at the movement of a driver's eyelids
and the the direction of his eyes and if
his eyes closed or he looks away from
the road it'll send an alert to his boss
it gets logged on his record and this is
my favorite part it'll cause the
driver's seat to vibrate too kind of
like goose him back into attention it's
it's true
the in strivers are wearing the smart
cap which is meant to detect fatigue by
monitoring a drivers brainwaves so it's
basically doing an EEG and if you get
tired it can sound an alarm it will text
your manager it can also be programmed
to text your family members so there are
other systems to right some companies
use predictive analytics to determine a
driver's likelihood of being involved in
a crash using not only driving data but
other information about what's happening
in is
life like if he got a pay change or he
started driving at a different time in
the morning lately things like that so
the key point I want to make about this
is the distance between these two types
of thread right and I think both are
real threats but we tend to hear this
narrative of displacement without
necessarily recognizing this other
threat of intrusion so the question of
displacement isn't the only important
thing to understand here we should also
think about how in this work the
intrusion of AI is very intimate and
very much about bodies right very much
about a truck drivers body it's this
forced hybridization that really changes
the nature of the work that remains okay
last little snapshot this is to the
extent I have a greatest hits this is
the greatest it's only three songs okay
the last thing I want to tell you about
is a newer project I'm working on an
interdisciplinary project I'm doing with
a bunch of researchers at Cornell where
I work now including an NYU including
some experts in cybersecurity and in
human-computer interaction and in this
project we're looking at the role of
Technology in intimate partner violence
now there are a lot of components to the
work we're doing they're a bunch of
researchers on the project but I'm just
gonna tell you about a little slice of
it so we know that intimate partner
violence is a really pervasive problem
faced by about 10 percent of men and
about a quarter of women in the United
States that have suffered rape physical
violence or stalking at the hands of an
intimate partner and we know also that
technology plays a really big and
growing role in this so in the course of
the last year we've been wrapping up a
study at intimate violence shelters in
New York City and we've learned a lot of
really depressing information about the
many ways that people use technology to
victimize other people with whom they
had or are having intimate relationships
and some of this has gotten some play in
the media and you're likely familiar
with some of the things like harassment
via social media the exposure of private
information or images things like
revenge porn and it's clear that victims
have a really hard time getting legal
action that addresses those problems for
them or getting platforms to help them
out but what I want to talk with you
about today is this other kind of aspect
of it that has become clear to us then
that I found really interesting which is
how different intimate partner violence
is from other types of privacy and
security threats that we
or commonly think about so there are a
lot of technologists that are becoming
really enthusiastic about intervening in
the context of domestic violence which
is great but there are some perils right
to treating intimate partner violence
like the other contexts in which we
think about privacy and security and
their unique ethical and design
challenges that arise when your threat
is intimate and physically co-present
and has access to your devices and has
access to your body so it's different
than these other contexts in which we
normally think of digital threats as
physically remote usually so we need a
kind of threat model differently in this
case that's kind of the work we're doing
and I want to highlight a few
distinctions between intimate partner
violence in other contexts the first is
what we sometimes call the peril of the
blank slate so often in privacy and
security if your integrity has been
compromised a pretty straightforward of
advice is will close your account right
reopen a new one cut up your credit card
change your password take some steps to
disconnect or to insulate yourself from
the invasion but in the context of
intimate partner violence that's a super
fraud advice for several reasons
so first disconnection can greatly
escalate your bodily risk so this is a
quote from a social worker in New York
City who told us disconnecting often
makes it worse her clients were much
more at risk when they actually separate
from their abusers because suddenly the
abuser no longer has any control over
the victim so the only thing the abuser
has left is the phone and if you change
her number he's most likely gonna go
crazy and that's when he's gonna start
stalking you any way he can so weirdly
and sort of counter intuitively in some
sense you might actually not want to
over protect yourself against tech
mediated abuse if the risk is that
that's going to lead to other vectors of
abuse like physical or sexual abuse the
deletion of abusive material can also
make it harder for victims to do things
like retain evidence that they need for
prosecution it can cut off social
support that they need to further kind
of help them get out of the relationship
right and Plus you may actually need to
make maintain contact with your abuser
if you have things like children that
you have joint custody of another
difference is that when your adversary
is intimate it totally changes the
nature of what it means to be
authenticated so in most contexts we
tend to think of an
who doesn't probably know you personally
and is connecting from somewhere else
right connecting remotely but an
intimate partner violence an attacker
can compel disclosure of things like
your access credentials super easily and
might have physical access to your
device in your accounts by the nature of
the relationship that you're in with
them right so in many cases things like
phones right like an abuser or excuse me
a survivor would tell us oh well my
abuser has access to the phone because
it's his phone he bought the phone right
or we have a family plan
and so my abuser has access to all my
communications data because he can see
that right on the account page he can
also very likely guess the answers to
your security questions he probably has
your password or if he doesn't he can
physically threaten you to get it so the
sort of obvious privacy and security
solutions don't work here because of the
context something like an access
credential is almost meaningless to
people in these situations now this
other big issue that we're also looking
at is spyware so there's a bunch of
concern right about the installation of
spyware apps that detect things like
location and communications data and
lots of other information and which are
often really explicitly marketed towards
abusive partners but there's this other
big issue that I think is less noticed
which has to do with what we call dual
use apps so these are things that are
really common that all of us probably
haven't used things like find my phone
or find my friends or some of the
parental trackers for kids that I
alluded to earlier right many of which
can also be used for surreptitious
tracking so our research shows that the
advertising often suggests these uses so
if you search for example on the Google
Play Store for track cheating boyfriend
the first advertised thing that comes up
is a parental tracker right because you
can use that for that purpose so the key
here though is that this is
off-the-shelf software right this
doesn't require you to be some crazy
hacker that you can you know you root
the phone or use some great software
exploit you don't have to have great
technical skill to do this this isn't
this isn't really hacking now all of us
work has led us to develop a new model
that we're calling the UI bound
adversary which we're defining as being
an authenticated adversarial user of a
system who carries out attacks using
basically just standard user interfaces
right pretty untechnical sophisticated
attacks but they're really complicated
to mitigate right because of the social
and relational context around them so
now we're doing work to see if we can
develop tools to better characterize
behaviors that are unique to abusers to
better to text by we're on phones and
then we're also thinking about how to
design and evaluate user interfaces
better in light of this model so I'll
tell you just a little bit about one
little thought about the user interface
part and this isn't intended to address
all of the stuff I just told you about
but it's just one example so one I know
this seems like a weird slide to put up
after everything I just told you but one
potential way to address some of these
threats is by building apps that hide
what they really are so some people call
that a steganographic approach am i
thinking here is influenced maybe
surprisingly by the NCAA tournament it's
a silly example but I think it makes the
point so during the first round of March
Madness or like how many people watch
March Madness there are some people
whenever I talk to academics like nobody
watches basketball so I'm glad that you
guys actually maybe know what that is
so it's this big basketball tournament
right and in the first round they're
like 32 games ish to get through and a
lot of them are on during the day right
and so people want to watch them there's
this documented productivity drop in
American companies during the first few
days of the tournament every year
because people want to watch and so
because their undoing the day people
have to watch at work and there are
streaming options now available that let
you do that
so since people need to watch basketball
at work need to watch basketball at work
they need a good way to do that on the
sly right they need a good way to easily
get cover for what they're doing with
something kind of work II so I don't
want to if any of you can actually see
or maybe you know because you've done
this what on this slide indicates kind
of a surreptitious like escape hatch the
boss button there it is the boss button
see on the upper right-hand corner
there's this little tiny button that
says boss button which you click when
the boss is walking by and this comes up
which you know looks like pretty work II
like whatever your line of work is
probably there's some graphs so the
n-c-double-a has been doing there's like
a great article that shows like what the
boss button has brought up each year and
each year at some variation on this
essentially the eventually branded then
they got like sponsors to do the boss
button they put jokes in them some
computer games have something similar
it's a decoy right to avoid getting
caught screwing around at work right and
it's kind of like a fun it's funny but I
think it actually gets it a really
important idea which is that in the
context of trying to watch basketball at
work your adversary is physically
co-present right it's your boss and
they're looking over your shoulder
they're trying to see what you're doing
with your device and maybe they have
like some visual access at least to the
device so this this idea actually has
applicability for people in some
dangerous situations where somebody else
might similarly have kind of over the
shoulder access to what you're doing
and there this is so this is obviously
just like one small kind of silly
example but there actually are a few
sites in the in the intimate partner
violence context that use some kind of
like escape button like this to try and
let you get out really quickly so the
reason I told you there's these three
stories which might seem quite distinct
from one another is that you know we
often talk about data fication as being
this really impersonal dynamic right
this dynamic that somehow separates us
from real life or from intimate life in
some way that's kind of the common media
take about it but obviously data is not
impersonal right data is super personal
and very intimate in a bunch of ways it
weaves itself it weaves itself into our
homes into our workplaces into our
relationships and sometimes it intrudes
into our bodies into the way we take
care of one another
and even into the ways that we try to
hurt one another so beyond compliance
there are a bunch of ethical issues
involved right in how we design for our
technologies if we think about how
intimately those technologies affect us
and if we think especially about how
they're going to get used in existing
asymmetries of power right there are
always power differentials in every
context right on the ground whether
that's in the home in the workplace and
an intimate relationship and so i I've
been really interested in kind of
thinking about that and thinking about
how we can use technology
try and remediate some of those
asymmetries and I really appreciate the
chance to show these snapshots to you
and I wish you a really excellent
conference Thanks