PRG’s own Albert Fox Cahn (director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project) has co-founded a new podcast, Surveillance and the City. Check it out here.
On September 22 at 11am Eastern, global experts (including many PRG members) will weigh in at a town hall titled “Contextual Integrity of Contact Tracing.” Details here.
The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project has been publishing great work lately exploring COVID-19’s effects on surveillance trends, including:
Last week, Apple and Google announced a change in their mobile-phone-based contact tracing framework. Instead of providing a backbone on which government actors must create their own apps to notify people of potential exposure, the companies will now provide their own notification software.
A few days ago, Facebook announced a new research partnership aiming to understand the impact of Facebook and Instagram on users’ political attitudes. Instead of conducting the research solely internally, Facebook has selected 17 external researchers with which it will partner. Users will be paid to stay off of their accounts throughout the election cycle, and the researchers will conduct studies to see the difference between their political attitudes and beliefs and those who continue to be users, among other research topics.