danni naeil

Author: danni

  • A book that changed my life

    A book that changed my life

    Most of can relate to, and reminisce, a moment in our life when we made an important choice, when we reach a subtle decision point. Not long ago I was on my way out of a bookstore when I suddenly caught the attention of a book I had seen before, but disregarded: Deep Work by Cal Newport.

    In short, Newport argues that more and more people are losing their ability to focus on one single thing – deep work. Deep work is related to learning and doing an excellent job: being able to learn things very well and also performing them very well without being distracted. Part of his statement, if you want to call it that, is that people who know how to focus and deep work are the ones with higher status and salaries. They will, most likely, be more exempted from rapid changes in the marketplace/workforce and constant job insecurity. People who can deep work are able to work with machines, programs and will always be better at learning even more new things. They are versatile.

    He names different people who have learnt to focus intently on one task at a time, such as Carl Gustav Jung, Mark Twain, Bill Gates, J.K. Rowling and Theodore Roosevelt. My favorite is a man changing career to become a software developer. He chose to isolate himself for a while and studied only books on programming and later became one of the best students at a devcamp.

    Network services, such as texts, mails, instant messages, blogs, microblogs cause time to be fractured into tiny incoherent pieces. I mean, is sending mails really work? Are we paid to send and receive mails about virtually anything? Who in their right mind pays us to spend time on Facebook, unless it’s explicitly in my job description?

    Whenever I think of work today, I picture myself with my back to a mound or a hill. Right behind me is a small tunnel venturing into the hill. I’m able to see the end of it clearly, as well as people there. In front of me is green, billowing hills basking in wonderful sunshine with a clear blue sky as background. Behind me, through the tunnel, I can hear the noise, the hysteric conversations and shouts, the endless chatter, though if I just relax that all goes away.

    This is also how I describe my state of mind to people who ask me how I feel and what I do when there’s stress and pressure. I don’t imply I never feel lost or stuck in between chores, but it rarely happens and I can simply turn it off by taking a deep breath. But the difficulty is not I. Instead it’s everyone else stuck on the other side of the tunnel, the hill. The people who so dearly want to be heard, who scream out their importance, who spam me (and others) with mails, phone calls, messages of various kinds, who so desperately want a response, a reaction. I find it sad and somewhat shocking I was once there too, and my greatest issue is explaining this to people who actually are so plainly stuck, that I’m no longer one of them. I don’t long for their hysteric communication, their endless chatter, their constant flow of mails at work, mails with no relevance or coherence. It pains me people are unable to actually communicate properly, because they lack the insight to their own problems.

    Newport doesn’t have a one-way ticket for everyone and he concentrates on people working in office, in the service sector, with computers. Thus, it’s hard to read this book and apply most of it if you’re a nurse, a bus-driver or preschool teacher. He introduces several methods and techniques dependent on work, children, age and the like. I won’t go into more details, except for some basic rules:

    • Don’t work during evenings
    • Don’t work during weekends
    • Don’t work on holidays
    • Walk or jog a lot
    • Don’t spend much (or any) time on social media

    Basically, it’s one of the most useful books I’ve ever read. It’s rather short, easy to read and brimful of tips and tricks for creating a better prerequisites for life, not just work. He gives you useful tips on how to actually convert your everyday work into an experience where you actually benefit more than you possibly thought possible.

    Back to my bed – Elderbrook

  • Reasons and responsibilites to protect personal data

    My essay is finished. The subject was how the Swedish government wrote about personal data in two strategies, namely the so-called Digitalization strategy and the National strategy for cyber security. Who is responsible for protecting personal data and what are the reasons to protect personal data? Is there a gender perspective present?

    Personal data is omnipresent and processed by companies, organizations, state authorities, the health care sector and municipalities. Many times for no reason at all or the collection and use concern personal data that should not be processed. Simultaneously, there’s plenty of stories how personal data is harvested or scraped by actors and there’s virtually no chance to know who holds personal data and where it is.

    Reading Swedish news can weekly tell how information and personal data is lost or abused. Personal data is collected on such a large scale, it’s impossible to protect it. Data brokers, governments, authorities, all are involved in this collection, processing and dissemination. What, then, does the Swedish government write about responsibilities and reasons to protect it?

    Why the gender perspective? The report Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex and Lies are Weaponized against Women Online was issued earlier 2021. One of the conclusions is that online gendered abuse and misinformation is a national security issue by being directed at women (in this case) systematically, resulting in less public participation from women in a democratic society. Much of the abuse is directed by actors from other countries as well. Another is how women’s personal data can be abused and weaponized against them, for instance spreading conspiracies about sex, national, sexual and gender identity.

    Does personal data relate to national security in the government texts, or more to individual security? Can the loss or abuse of personal data threaten or weaken national security?

    My main conclusions are:

    ·  the Swedish government perceives everyone as responsible for personal data, though the individual has the utmost responsibility for his/her/their personal data

    ·  the government is mainly focused on thwarting crimes like child pornography

    ·  the government doesn’t want to centralize processing of personal data

    ·  too strong a state can threaten personal data and individual security

    ·  there’s a sort of built-in contradiction when the government wants public data more accessible for the creation of services by companies (for instance)

  • Book review: Privacy is power

    “It’s not about something to hide, it’s about something to lose”. This quote by Edward Snowden sums up this book by Carissa Véliz, first released in 2020. Here, I will present some topics of the book for the interested. I should emphasize that this review concerns the 2020 edition.

    Carissa is an associate professor at the University of Oxford and has led an extensive research project on privacy, Data, privacy & the individual.

    Introduction of everyday life

    She takes us on a tour through everyday life with an array of technological devices and the related privacy issues: electronic door bells, cameras of various kinds and genetic tests. It’s nice to read something that’s actually relatable, in a setting of everyday life, starting in the morning and ending the same day. At times, though, it’s a bit far fetched. All those devices and the lack of privacy is there to depict a bleak and likely future more than life today, because very few people encounter all of those devices every single day. We meet them all in one day as one person.

    Collective aspect of privacy

    By far, my favorite part of the entire book, and probably the most important one too. We’re not isolated people, but interconnected and interdependent. On my phone, there’s personal data on people I call, text, send mails and photograph. In the photos is location data and biometric data on people. In my calendar I reveal information on people I meet: when, where, why and how.

    Perhaps my neighbor’s phone contains photos of me, processed by apps I didn’t even knew existed, now fed some of my biometric data. What are the apps, who owns those apps, which personal data do they share and disseminate and with which third parties? Where is my personal data actually stored and what actual purpose is behind the collection in the first place?

    Our urge to willingly share information about ourselves to people we know is a gate into sharing information with an unknown amount of people. How many people read the privacy policy of a new app or service?

    Privacy is power

    Thus, one conclusion is that privacy is about power, because personal data is power. Collection of personal data is power, so abstaining or avoiding to be “harvested” is a key to keep autonomy and the privacy of individuals (somewhat) intact.

    Companies, which is most often the case in the Western countries, collects lots of personal data on lots of people. Virtually no one can avoid or escape this massive collection. Holding personal data means power, because people can be “nudged” into doing things they aren’t even aware. Tristan Harris’ famous article on “How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind” is a telling example, the Cambridge Analytica scandal another.

    Carissa shares a story of how someone she knows works as a programmer and assigned the task of surveilling one single person for a period of time. His job is to follow and study this person, in order to understand what computer systems can do and the amount of personal data one is able to collect. It’s not been long since it was revealed how tech giants assigned staff to actually listen to people’s conversations through voice assistants.

    What happens if a state turns authoritarian, as happens in Poland and Hungary, from within the European Union itself? What happens when the state also uses the personal data companies have collected? Carissa tells us a moving story from World War II, which I will write about separately.

    The inevitable technological progress

    A very common trope of the debate in many countries is that technological progress is more or less absolute, inevitable. No matter what we say or do, technological progress cannot be stopped. It has become a religion of sorts, a belief rather than fact. Carissa names Google Glass as an example of hampered technological progress. After the reinvention of the smartphone and the smartwatch, the glasses would become the next inevitable device for the masses. After heavy criticism, much concerned with privacy, and outright bans, Google Glass project was officially abandoned.

    Read it

    These are some of the topics Carissa covers in her book and I have briefly reviewed parts of the content. There’s plenty of more and all I can do is urge you to read it.

    If you would like a good introduction on privacy, I recommend the episode Privacy by the podcast Constitutional. It’s set in the American context, but is a very good story of how privacy became a more complicated issue in the United States one hundred years ago and the importance of one man, Louis Brandeis.

  • Idea accepted

    After many days of straying like a lost dog around the different ideas, I settled on one idea. I managed to narrow it down, from the fields of computational propaganda, information warfare, privacy and surveillance capitalism, to the core of many of them: personal data. What does the Swedish government write about personal data and processing (of personal data)? How does the government write about personal data and security? Is it my responsibility to keep personal data safe and secure, is it the government’s responsibility? And do they apply a gender perspective? What is the perspective on information security?

    May means a lot of writing on this issue. Thus the list of interesting and intriguing books grows longer and longer still. In summer I hope I’ll manage to write a little about some of them.

  • Time to decide

    I’ve reached the point in my education in political science where I have to choose. Choose a subject I wish to pursue. It can be anything. That’s not me however.

    Up until this point I’ve gathered lots of information on many different subjects I find interesting. Some are links to news, some from books, some from websites and some are student or doctoral thesises. All of a sudden I find myself unable to actually choose one subject, one political level and one method to focus on. Perhaps this is me, after all, having too many options.

    The different topics so far concern privacy, both personal and collective; weaponization of social media, especially against women; cybersecurity and feminism; computational propaganda and the nation state or the municipality; knowledge of personal data and GDPR among political parties; information/data wars between nation states; the introduction of 5G and cybersecurity dimensions of 5G on a municipal level; and, finally, the debate (or lack of debate) on surveillance equipment, such as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), traffic intelligence or bulk intelligence gathering.

    Huh.