Facebook on Defensive as Cambridge Case Exposes Data Flaw

Facebook said it found out about Cambridge Analytica’s access in 2015, after which it had the firm certify that it deleted the data. On Friday, Facebook said it now knows Cambridge actually maintained it — an infraction that got Cambridge suspended from the social network. Once that was announced, executives promptly moved on to defending Facebook’s security.

” This was unequivocally not a data breach ,” longtime Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth said on Twitter.” People chose to share their data with third-party apps and if those third-party apps did not follow the agreements with us/ users it is a violation .” Alex Stamos, Facebook’s head of security, echoed the same arguments. Cambridge denied doing anything illegal or employing the information contained in the 2016 presidential election; Facebook tells it has no way of knowing how or whether the data was used for targeting in the Trump campaign.

Facebook’s advertising business depends on users sharing their most personal data via its social network. But the company’s” not a violate” argument isn’t likely to make users feel any safer or more comfy doing so — especially given that it’s already under fire for missing that Russian actors were purchasing U.S. election ads on the site to sway voter sentiments, as well as operating fake accounts disguised as real Americans. The company has also been fending off accusations that it’s too slow to notice or react to harmful content.

U.K. Inquiry

The latest incident has raised new the issue of what technological guardrails Facebook has in place to prevent approved users from sharing sensitive datum, and how much visibility the company has into how outsiders use the data.

Facebook wouldn’t comment on those questions, saying only that it has made significant improvements in its they are able to” see and avoid violations” by app developers, such as random audits of applications use its tools to make sure they’re following the rules. And it’s no longer let developers who use Facebook’s login tools see information on their users’ friends.

The disclosure of Facebook’s actions also underscores it’s continuing struggle to anticipate negative consequences of its lack of oversight- in some cases taking action only after things go wrong. The company in the past two years has worked to understand and counteract the spread of misinformation on its site, the use of its automated ad system for racist targeting, the spread of fake user accounts, the spread of violent video, and more.

But when the company tries to explain what it’s doing, it grapples with the perception that it’s shirking responsibility for its problems, treating them as public-relations snafus instead of serious product flaws.

Stamos, the Facebook security executive, deleted his original tweets on Cambridge Analytica, saying he wasn’t so good at” talking about these things in the reality of 2018 .” Specifically, he said he didn’t know how to balance his personal notions with its own responsibility to Facebook and his co-workers, amid all the criticism.

” We have collectively been too optimistic about what we build and our impact on the world ,” Stamos wrote Saturday on Twitter.” Believe it or not, a lot of the people at these companies, from the interns to the CEOs, agree .”

Lawmakers in the U.S. and U.K. aren’t persuaded Facebook has its users’ own best interest in mind. Over the weekend the company faced criticisms from members of the Senate intelligence committee, and in London, the head of a parliamentary committee called on CEO Mark Zuckerberg to have a senior executive answer those questions.

” We have repeatedly asked Facebook about how companies acquire and hold on to user data from their site, and including with regard to whether data had been taken from people without their permission ,” Damian Collins, chair of the U.K. Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee, said in a statement.” Their answers have consistently understated the health risks, and have also been misleading to the committee .”

Read more: www.bloomberg.com

The long read: Interconnected technology is now an inescapable reality ordering our shopping, monitoring our cities and sucking up vast amounts of data along the way. The promise is that it will benefit us all but how is possible to?

In San Francisco, a young engineer hopes to optimise his life through sensors that track his heart rate, respiration and sleep cycle. In Copenhagen, a bus operating two minutes behind schedule transmits its locating and passenger count to the municipal traffic signal network, which extends the time of the green light at each of the next three intersections long enough for its driver to make up some time. In Davao City in the Philippines, an unsecured webcam overlooks the storeroom of a fast food stand, allowing anyone to peer in on all its comings and goings.

What links these wildly different circumstances is a vision of connected devices now being sold to us as the internet of things. The technologist Mike Kuniavsky, a innovator of this idea, characterises it as a state of being in which computation and data communication[ are] embedded in, and distributed through, our entire environment. I prefer to see it for what it is: the colonisation of everyday life by information processing.

Though it can often feeling as if this colonisation proceeds of its own momentum, distinct ambitions are being served wherever and however the internet of things seems. The internet of things isnt a single technology. About all that connects the various devices, services, vendors and efforts involved is the end goal they serve: capture data that can then be used to measure and control the world around us.

Whenever a project has such imperial designs on our everyday lives, it is vital that we ask just what ideas underpin it and whose interests it serves. Although the internet of things retains a certain sprawling and formless quality, we can get a far more concrete sense of what it involves by looking at how it seems at each of three scales: that of our bodies( where the effort is referred to as the quantified ego ), our homes( the smart-alecky home) and our public spaces( the smart-alecky city ). Each of these instances illuminates a further aspect of current challenges presented to us by the internet of things, and each has something distinct to teach us.

At the most intimate scale, the internet of things is visible in the form of wearable biometric sensors. The simplest of these are little more than networked digital pedometers, which count steps, measure the distance a person has traversed, and furnish an estimate of the calories burned in the course of this activity. More elaborated models measure heart rate, breathing, skin temperature and even perspiration.

If wearable biometric devices such as Fitbits and Apple Watches are, in theory, aimed at rigorous self-mastery, the colonisation of the domestic surrounding by similarly networked products and services is intended to deliver a very different experience: convenience. The intent of such smart home attempts is to short-circuit the process of reflection that stands between having a desire and fulfil that longing by buying something.

Right now, the perfect example of this is a gadget being sold by Amazon, known as the Dash Button. Many internet-of-things devices are little more than some conventional object with networked connectivity tacked on. The Dash Button is the precise opposite, a thing in the world that could not have existed without the internet. I cannot improve on Amazons own description of this curious object and how it runs, so Ill repeat it here: Amazon Dash Button is a Wi-Fi-connected device that reorders your favourite item with the press of a button. To use Dash Button, simply download the Amazon app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Then, sign into your Amazon Prime account, connect Dash Button to Wi-Fi, and select the product you want to reorder. Once connected, a single press on Dash Button automatically places your order.

In other words: single-purpose electronic devices, each dedicated to an individual branded item, that you press when youre running low. Pressing a Dash Button specific to your preferred pet food, washing powder or bottled water automatically composes an order request to Amazon for that one product.

I dont for a second wishes to downplay the value of such a product for people who have ageing mothers to look after, or kids to drop off at daycare, or for whom simply getting in the car to pick up some cat food may take an hour or more out of their day. But the benefit to the individual client is tiny compared with what Amazon gains. Sure, “youve never” run out of cat food. But Amazon gets data on the time and place of your need, as well as its frequency and intensity, and that data has value. It is an asset, and you can be sure that Amazon will exploit it in every way its terms and conditions permit including by employing it to develop behavioural models that map our desires in high resolve, so as to target them with even greater efficiency in the future.

Again, the aim of devices such as the Dash Button is to permit the user to accomplish commercial transactions with as little conscious believed as is practicable not even the few moments it takes to tap out commands on the touchscreen of a phone or tablet. The data on what the industry calls conversion is as clear because this is unremitting: with every box to tick or form to fill, percentages per of users that make it all the way to checkout tumbles. The fewer steps there are in a transaction, the more likely people are to expend their money.

Manufacturers, seduced by the revenue potential of subduing the domestic surrounding, keep trying to eliminate these steps, in the hope that one of their connected products will become as essential to everyday life as the smartphone. The recent industry push towards the smart home is simply the latest version of this.

For the moment, this strategy is centred on so-called smart speakers, a first generation of which have now reached the market. These products include the Amazon Echo and Google Home, each of which is supposed to function as the command hub of a connected domestic environment. Amazons Echo is a simple cylinder, while the Google Home is a bevelled ovoid. But the physical kind of such speakers is all but irrelevant, as their primary task is to function as a branded virtual deputy, a simple, integrated way to access the numerous digital controls scattered throughout the contemporary home from lighting and entertainment to security, heating, cooling and ventilation systems.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple each offer their own such assistant, based on natural-language speech recognition. Most are given female names, voices and personalities, presumably based on research indicating that users of all genders prefer to interact with women. Apples is called Siri and will, according to reports, soon be get its own device, Amazons Alexa, and Microsofts Cortana, while one simply addresses Googles Home offering as Google.

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At first, such devices seem harmless enough. They sit patiently and quietly at the periphery of our awareness, and we only speak to them when we need them. But when we consider them more carefully, a more problematic picture emerges.

This is how Googles assistant works: you mention to it that youre in the mood for Italian food, and then, in the words of one New York Times article, it will then respond with some suggestions for tables to reserve at Italian restaurants utilizing, for example, the OpenTable app.

This example showsthat though the choices these deputies offer us are presented as neutral, they are based on numerous inbuilt premises that many of us would question if we were to truly scrutinise them.

Ask restaurateurs and front-of-house workers what they think of OpenTable, for example, and you are able to swiftly learn that one persons convenience is anothers accelerated pace of run, or worse. Youll learn that restaurants offering reservations via the service are, according to the website Serious Eats, required to use the companys proprietary floor-management system, which means leasing hardware and using OpenTable-specific software, and that OpenTable retains ownership of all the data generated in this style. Youll also learn that OpenTable takes a cut on reservations per seated diner, which obviously adds up to a significant amount on a busy night.

Conscientious diners have therefore been known to bypass the ostensible convenience of OpenTable, and build whatever reservations they have to by phone. By contrast, Google Homes frictionless default to inducing reservations via OpenTable normalises the choice to use that service.

This is not accidental. It reflects the largely preconscious valuations, priorities and internalised beliefs of the people who devised Google Home. As throughout the industry, that is a remarkably homogeneous cohort of young designers and technologists. But more important than the degree of similarity they bear to one another is how different they are from everyone else.

Internet-of-things devices are generally conceived by people who have entirely assimilated services such as Uber, Airbnb and Apple Pay into their daily lives, at a time when figures from the Washington DC-based Pew Research Center suggest that a significant percentage of the population has never use or even heard of them. For the people who design these products, these services are normal, and so, over period, they become normalised for everyone else.

There are other challenges presented by this way of interacting with networked information. Its difficult, for example, for a user to determine whether the options they are being offered by a virtual assistant result from what the industry calls an organic return something that legitimately came up as the result of a search process or from paid placement. But the main problem with the virtual assistant is that it fosters an approach to the world that is literally thoughtless, leaving users disinclined to sit out any prolonged frustration of passion, and ever less critical about the processes that result in gratification.

Virtual deputies are listening to everything that transpires in their presence, and are doing so at all times. As voice-activated interfaces, they must be constantly attentive in order to detect when the aftermath word that rouses them is spoken. In this style, they are able to harvest data that might be used to refine targeted advertising, or for other commercial purposes that are only disclosed deep in the terms and conditions that govern their use. The logic operating here is that of preemptive capture: the notion that companies such as Amazon and Google might as well trawl up all they can, because no one knows what value might be derived from it in the future.

This leads to situations that might be comical, were it not for what they connote about the networking of our domestic environments. These narratives circulate as cautionary narratives: one of the best-known was the time the US National Public Radio network aired a narrative about the Amazon Echo, and various cues spoken on the broadcast were interpreted as commands by Echos belonging to members of the audience, causing domestic chaos.

Put aside for one moment the question of disproportionate benefit the idea that you as the user derive a little convenience from your embracing of a virtual assistant, while its provider gets everything all the data about your life and all its value. Lets simply consider what gets lost in the ideology of convenience that underlies this conception of the internet of things. Are such constraints presented to us by life in the non-connected world truly so onerous? Is it genuinely so difficult to wait until you get home before you preheat the oven? And is it worth giving away so much, just to be able to do so remotely?

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Most of us are by now awarethat our mobile phones are constantly harvesting information about our whereabouts and activities. But we tend to be relatively ignorant of the degree to which the contemporary streetscape has furthermore been enabled to collect information. This developing is often called the smart city. If the aspiration beneath the instrumentation of the body is ostensible self-mastery, and that of the home is convenience, the aspiration at the heart of the smart city is nothing other than control the desire to achieve a more efficient use of space, energy and other resources.

A broad range of networked information-gathering devices are increasingly being deployed in public space, including CCTV cameras; advertisements and vending machines equipped with biometric sensors; and the indoor micropositioning systems known as beacons that, when combined with a smartphone app, send signals providing information about nearby products and services.

The picture we are left with is that of our surroundings furiously vacuuming up info, every square metre of seemingly banal pavement yielding so much data about its its utilization and its users that nobody yet knows what to do with it all. And it is at this scale of activity that the guiding ideology of the internet of things comes into clearest focus.

The strongest and most explicit articulation of this ideology in the definition of a smart city has been offered by the house periodical of the engineering company Siemens: Several decades from now, cities will have countless autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users habits and energy consumption, and provide optimum service … The goal of such a city is to optimally govern and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems.

There is a clear philosophical position, even a worldview, behind all of this: that the world is in principle perfectly knowable, its contents enumerable and their relations capable of being meaningfully encoded in a technical system, without bias or distortion. As applied to the affairs of cities, this is effectively an argument that there is one and only one correct solution to each identified need; that this solution can be arrived at algorithmically, via the operations of a technical system furnished with the proper inputs; and that this solution is something that can be encoded in public policy, without aberration.( Left unstated, but strongly implicit, is the presumption that whatever policies are arrived at in this way will be applied transparently, dispassionately and in a manner free from politics .)

Every aspect of this argument is questionable. Perhaps most obviously, the claim that anything at all is perfectly knowable is perverse. However thoroughly sensors might be deployed in a city, they will merely ever capture what is amenable to being captured. In other terms, they will not be able to pick up every single piece of information necessary to the formulation of sound civic policy.

Other, all-too-human distortions unavoidably colour the data collected. For instance, people may consciously adapt to produce metrics favourable to them. A police officer under pressure to make quota may focus on misdemeanours that she would ordinarily overlook, while conversely, her precinct commandant, under pressure to present the city as ever-safer, may downwardly categorize a felony assault as a simple misdemeanour. This is the phenomenon known to spectators of The Wire as juking the stats, and it is particularly likely to occur when financial or other incentives depend on achieving a performance threshold.

There is also the question of interpreting. Advocates of smart cities often seem to proceed as if it is self-evident that each of our acts has a single, salient meaning, which can be recognised, attained sense of and acted upon remotely by an automated system, without any possibility of fault. The more prominent advocates of this approach appear to believe that no particular act of interpretation actively participate in making employ of any data retrieved from the world in this way.

But data is never just data, and to assert otherwise is to give inherently political and interested decisions an unmerited gloss of scientific objectivity. The truth is that data is easily skewed, depending on how it is collected.Different values for air pollution in a given location can be produced by differing the height at which a sensor is mounted by a few metres. Perceptions of hazard in a neighbourhood can be transformed by somewhat altering the taxonomy used to categorize reported crimes. And anyone who has ever run in opinion polling knows how sensitive the results are to the precise wording of a survey.

The bold assert of perfect knowledge appears incompatible with the messy reality of all known information-processing systems, the human individuals and organizations that make use of them and, more broadly, with the world as we experience it. In fact, it is astonishing that any experienced technologist would ever be so unwary as to claim perfection on behalf of the members of any computational system , no matter how powerful.

The notion that there is one and only one solution to urban problems is also deeply puzzling. Cities are made up of individuals and communities who often have vying preferences, and it is impossible to fully satisfy all of them at the same time.

That such a solution, if it even existed, could be arrived at algorithmically is also implausible. Assume, to the purposes of argument, that there did exist a master formula capable of balancing the needs of all of a citys competing constituencies. It surely would be convenient if this golden mean could be determined automatically and consistently. But the wholesale surrender of municipal management to an algorithmic toolset seems to place an undue sum of trust in the party responsible for authoring the algorithm.

If the formulas behind this vision of future cities turn out to be anything like the ones being implemented in the present generation of computational models, life-altering decisions will hinge on the interaction of poorly defined and subjective values. The output generated by this procedure may turn on half-clever abstractions, in which complex situations resistant to direct measuring are reduced to more easily ascertained proxy values: median walking velocity stands in for the pace of urban life, while the number of patent applications constitutes an indicator of invention, and so on.

Quite simply, we need to understand that creating an algorithm intended to guide the distribution of civic resources is itself a political act. And, at the least for now , nowhere in the current smart-city literature is there any suggestion that either algorithm or their designers would be subject to the ordinary processes of democratic accountability.

And ultimately, it is difficult to believe that any such findings would ever be translated into public policy in accordance with the arrangements free from politics. Policy recommendations derived from computational models are only rarely applied to questions as politically sensitive as resource apportioning without some intermediate tuning taking place. Inconvenient results is a possibility repressed, arbitrarily overruled by more heavily weighted decision factors, or simply ignored.

As matters now stand, the claim of perfect proficiency that is implicit in most smart-city rhetoric is incommensurate with everything we are all familiar with the route technological systems run. It also flies in the face of everything we are all familiar with how cities work. The designers of the smart city have failed to reckon with current realities of power, and the capacities of elites to suppress policy directions that dont serve their interests. At best, the technocratic notion that the analysis of sensor-derived data would ever be permitted to drive municipal policy is naive. At worst, though, it dismisses the lessons of history.

So, yes: the internet of things presents many new potentials, and it would be foolish to reject those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with scepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us.

This is an adapted extract from Radical Technology: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield, published this week by Verso .

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

Kim Kardashian Wests posting of an audio recording of her husbands call with Swift discussing his song Famous may violate California wiretapping law

Kanye West could face legal action and even criminal prosecution as a result of his conflict with Taylor Swift if it turns out he secretly recorded telephone calls with her in California, according to legal experts.

Kim Kardashian West launched a media firestorm after she posted an audio recording of her husbands phone call with Swift discussing Kanye Wests new song Famous, which includes a line about the pop star.

In the song, Kanye raps: I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I constructed that bitch famous.

Kanye faced intense backlash for the lyric, prompting him to defend the anthem on Twitter in February, saying: I called Taylor and had a hour long convo with her about the line and she thought it was funny and dedicated her blessings.

Swift appeared to address the line in a Grammys acceptance speech in February, when she told, I want to say to the young women out there, there are going to be people along the way who try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.

Now, Kanye and his reality Tv superstar wife are attacking Swift with the release of highly edited excerpts of a phone call recording on Kardashians Snapchat account. The audio includes Kanye citing an excerpt of a lyric and Swift saying, I truly appreciate you telling me about it, thats really nice.

Swift has since responded on Twitter , saying that Kanye secretly recorded the phone call.

If Kanye recorded the correspondence in California, where he and Kim Kardashian live, and failed to get Swifts consent, then he would have violated country statute, experts say.

In California, the wiretapping statute dictates two-party permission, which means its a crime to record or eavesdrop on all communications including a private conversation or phone call without the consent of all parties involved.

The law stipulates a possible punishment of a $2,500 fine or a year in district jail.

Outside of statutory injuries, Swift could seek civil damages through a lawsuit, which experts said is a more likely course of action.

California is an all-party consent wiretapping nation. What that means is, even on things like a conference call, before you record it, youre supposed to announce to everyone, Im going to record this bellow, told Chris Hoofnagle, prof of law at the University of California and an expert on privacy.

Theres civil and criminal liability, he said, adding that criminal prosecution would be unlikely in this kind of example, but that Swift could allege damages to her reputation.

Paul Schwartz, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, said Swift could also bringing a tort assert alleging public disclosure of private facts.

Representatives for Swift and Kanye West did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

People and TMZ have reported that Kanye West recorded the audio while in Los Angeles.

The recording of the conversation does not feature Kanye reading out the line I built that bitch famous, but he did read the rest of the lyric and asked for Swifts approval.
Go with whatever line you think is better, Swift responded. Its patently truly tongue in cheek, either way.

Wests video for Famous also triggered widespread criticisms, including from actor and novelist Lena Dunham, a friend of Swift, who said it was emblematic of rape culture. The video depicts Swift and other celebrities appearing to be naked next to West in bed.

Swifts statement released Sunday told, You dont get to control people emotional response to being called that bitch in front of the entire world.

She added, Of course I wanted to like the sung. I wanted to believe Kanye when he told me I would love the anthem. I wanted us to have a friendly relationship.

Kanyes I built that bitch famous line is a reference to the 2009 MTV VMAs, when Kanye infamously interrupted Swifts acceptance speech, saying, Taylor, Im really happy for you and Imma let you finish, but Beyonc had one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time.

At that time, Swift was already a hugely successful and critically acclaimed singer-songwriter.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

Have you procured yourself checking email at dinner, or skipping from book to screen, unable to focus? The closer the world gets to our fingertips, the more we stand to lose

The first time my father looked at me was on a screen, utilizing technology developed to detect flaws in the hulls of ships. His father, my grandfather, could only remainder his hand on my grandmothers belly and imagine his infant in his intellect. But by the time I was conceived, my fathers imagination was provide guidance to technology that dedicated shape to sound waves rippling off my body.

The Glasgow-based Anglican obstetrician Ian Donald, who in the 1950 s helped bring ultrasound technology from shipyard to doctors office, had devoted himself to the task out of a belief that the images would increase empathy for the unborn, and attain girls less likely to choose abortions. The technology has furthermore been used, though, to make the decision to terminate a pregnancy because of deformity, because the mother wants a child of a certain sexuality. Whatever the intended and actual effects, it is clear that the now iconic black and white images of our bodies before we are born mediate life and death. But what prepares us to stimulate life-and-death decisions?

My wife and I debated learning the sex of our first infant before birth. I created the questions with my uncle, a gynaecologist “whos been” delivered more than 5,000 babies. He was prone neither to giving advice nor anything whiffing of spirituality, but he urged me, strongly , not to find out. He said, If a doctor looks at a screen and tells you, you will have information. If you find out in the moment of birth, you will have a miracle.

I dont believe in miracles, but I followed his advice, and he was right. One neednt believes in miracles to experience them. But one must be present for them.

Psychologists who examine empathy and compassion are finding that, unlike our almost instantaneous responses to physical pain, it takes time for the brain to see the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. Simply put, the more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the cost of depth redefining text from what fills the hundreds of pages of a fiction, to a line of words and emoticons on a phones screen the less likely and able we are to care. Thats not even a statement about the relative worth of the contents of a fiction and a text, only about the time we spend with each.

We know that texting while driving is more dangerous than driving drunk. You wont risk killing anyone if you use your phone while eating a snack, or having a dialogue, or waiting on a bench, which means you will allow yourself to be distracted. Everyone wants his parents, or friends, or partners undivided attention even if many of us , especially children, are get are applied to far less. Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.

Novels demand many things of readers, but the most obvious is attention. I can do any number of other activities while watching a TV reveal or listening to music, and I can carry on a conversation with a friend while at an art gallery, but reading a novel demands putting everything else aside. To read a book is to devote oneself to the book. Novels always trafficking in human empathy, always bringing the other closer, always ask us to transcend our perspectives, but isnt that attention, itself, a generous act? Generous toward ourselves?

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My father was not present for his childrens births it was customary, then, for men to be in the waiting room. I witnessed my sons being born. My experience was richer, deeper, more memorable and fulfilling than my fathers. Being physically present allowed me to be emotionally present.

We think of technologies as wielders of information and manipulators of matter. Google, we all know, is in the business as they put it of organising and making accessible the worlds info. Other technologies are more earthy the car propels us over land at speeds our legs cannot reach, and the bomb allows us to kill many adversaries in ways our bare hands cannot.

But technologies are not only effective at attaining or thwarting the aims of those who encounter them, but are affective. Technology is not strictly technological. I love you the same I love you issuing from the same person with the same honesty and depth will resonate differently over the phone than in a handwritten letter, than in a text message. The tone and rhythm of voice craft the words, as does the texture and colour of stationery, as does the glowing typeface of the text chosen by our mobile phone manufacturer. We love our Macs more than our PCs because Apple was more interested in harnessing and inflecting the affective resonances of its technology and in restricting a smaller coterie of upper-class to guard and guide these affects so as to create a distinctive ecosystem. We find ourselves played with smartphones in a manner that is we never did with the functional handle of a traditional landline phone because, whereas the first telephone devised by engineers supposing in functional terms, the phones in our pockets nowadays are always built in dialogue with marketers who have carefully noted how colour and curve, brightness and texture, heft and size make us feel.

We consumers forget that technology always plugs into and creates certain affects, the building blocks of emotions, as well as full-blown emotional experiences. We forget this, but successful companies do not. They remember and profit staggeringly. We forget at the expense of who we are.

Most of our communication technologies began as substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldnt always watch one another face to face, so the phone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a message possible without the person or persons being near their phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster and more mobile messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements on face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if lessened, substitutes for it.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to opt the diminished replaces. Its easier to make a phone call than to stimulate the effort to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someones machine is easier than having a phone conversation you can say what you need to say without a answer; its easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up. Shooting off an email is easier still, because one can further conceal behind the is a lack of vocal intonation, and of course theres no chance of accidentally catching person. With texting, the high expectations for articulateness is further reduced, and the other shell is offered to hide in. Each step forward has constructed it easier simply a little to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey datum rather than humanity.

The problem with accepting with preferring lessened replaces is that, over day, we too become diminished replaces. People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little. Or simply feeling whats been designed and sold to us to feel.

The novel has never stood in such stark opposition to the culture that surrounds it. A book is the opposite of Facebook: it requires us to be less connected. It is the opposite of Google: not only inefficient, but at its best, useless. Screens offer a apparently endless supply of information, but the true value of the page is not what it allows us to know, but how it allows us to be known.

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Like so many people I know, Ive been concerned that telephones and the internet have, in subtle ways, attained life less rich, provided bright pleasures at the expense of deep ones, have distracted me, made concentration more difficult, led me to be elsewhere far too often. Ive received myself checking email while giving my children a bath, jumping over to the internet when a sentence or notion doesnt gone effortlessly in my write, searching for tint on a beautiful springtime day so I can see the screen of my phone. Have you?

Have you found yourself putting loved ones on hold so you could click over to a call from an unidentified number? Have you found yourself conflating aloneness with loneliness? Have you find your relationship to distraction reversing: what was once a annoyance is now attempted?

Do you want to click over to the other call, want to have an email to have to respond to, want even crave the ping of an incoming, inconsequential message?

Isnt it possible that technology, in the forms in which it has entered our everyday lives, has decreased us? And isnt it possible that its getting worse? Almost all new technology causes alarm in its early days, and humen generally adapt to it. So perhaps no resistance is necessary. But if it were, where would it come from, and what would it look like?

With each generation, it becomes harder to imagine a future that resembles the present. My grandparents hoped I would have a better life than they did: free of war and starvation, comfortably situated in a place that felt like home. But what futures would I dismiss out of hand for my grandchildren? That their clothes will be fabricated every morning on 3D printers? That they will communicate without speaking or moving? Merely someone with no imagination, and no anchor in reality, would deny the possibility that they will live forever. Its possible that many reading these terms will never die.

Lets assume, though, that we all have a defined number of days to indent the world with our faiths, to find and generate the beauty that merely a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers. We often use technology to save period, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or builds the saved period less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. Its not an either/ or situation being anti-technology is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly pro-technology but a question of balance that our lives hang upon.

One day, nanomachines will see weaknesses in our hearts long before any symptoms would bring us to a doctor. And other nanomachines will repair our hearts without our feeling any pain, losing any time or spending any fund. But it will only feel like a miracle if we are still capable of feeling miracles which is to say, if our hearts are worth saving.

Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer is published by Hamish Hamilton. To order a copy for 16( RRP 20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p& p over 10, online orders merely. Phone orders min p& p of 1.99.

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From Google to Uber, Silicon Valleys tech giants have a woman problem. Meet Lawless& amp; Lawless, the sisters opposing back

On the wall of Lawless& Lawless‘s San Francisco office is a framed, full-page newspaper advert with a black background and merely two words in white text: “Thanks Ellen”. The ad, taken out in March 2015 in a Silicon Valley freesheet, referred to Ellen Pao, who had recently opposed a $16 m sexual discrimination suit against her former employer, venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins. Pao claimed she was passed over for promotion and excluded from sessions after she accused a senior partner of sexual harassment.

Although Pao lost the suit, coverage of the case shone a bright light on Silicon Valley’s gender problem. More legal suits followed, this time against Facebook and Tesla. The common denominator? The lawyers representing the women: Therese and Barbara Lawless. The formidable sisters, who have been practising job statute together since the late 1980 s, have become the go-to attorneys in the battle against what they describe as America’s” wild west” of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.

” For so long, women kept their mouths shut and did their jobs, and put their heads down because they were so afraid ,” tells Therese, 56, the younger of the pair, speaking from across a large boardroom table in their unassuming office.” But more and more girls are just fed up .” In the wake of the Pao case, their phones haven’t stopped ringing.” I’ll get women in their 50 s calling me up and telling,’ I can’t put up with it any more ‘,” Therese says.

The sisters take turns to lead the conversation. Therese, dressed in a trouser suit and with long, dark hair, opts her terms carefully. Barbara, 70, who has a softer voice but equally no-nonsense manner, punctuates Therese’s sentences, as if annotating out loud.” All of this has been going on for a long time ,” Therese tells.” For ever !” Barbara interjects.

At the same time the Ellen Pao case went to court, Lawless& Lawless filed a discrimination suit against Facebook, over allegations made by project director Chia Hong, who claimed she faced gender and racial discrimination and harassment while working at the company. She alleged that her sentiments were belittled in group meetings, and that a superintendent asked her why she didn’t just stay at home and look after her child. Eventually, after a conciliation session between the parties, Hong dropped the instance; Therese says the matter has been “resolved”, but can’t say whether there was a settlement.

In February, the Lawless sisters squared up to Elon Musk‘s electric vehicle company, Tesla, on behalf of 33 -year-old engineer AJ Vandermeyden. She accused the company of ignoring her complaints regarding ” permeating harassment”from humen on the factory floor, including inappropriate speech, whistling and catcalls. Vandermeyden also alleged they paid her a lower salary than men doing the same run, promoted less qualified men over her, and penalise her for being a whistleblower- eventually firing her after she spoke about her experience to the Guardian. Tesla rejected the allegations; the case is ongoing.

But these high-profile occurrences represent only a small proportion of the Lawless sisters’ workload. More than 95% of their gender discrimination and harassment cases are settled behind closed doors and involve non-disclosure arrangements.” If companies are going to pay X quantity of dollars[ the sisters’ website lists settlements of between $450,000 and$ 8m ], then, as part of the deal, our lips are sealed ,” Therese says.” It’s far worse than people know. People would be appalled at some of the behaviour that goes on at the workplace .”

***

Therese and Barbara, originally from Buffalo, New York, grew up as two of 12 siblings: six girls, six sons.” It was great- crazy, but really fun ,” Barbara says. She was the second child, born 14 years before Therese, the ninth.” It could be chaotic ,” Therese adds,” but our mom was very organised- I always likened her job to running a small business .”

Law is in the Lawless family blood. Their parent, William, a liberal who believed in educating girls and boys equally, was a judge, lawyer, law school dean and professor. Both Barbara and Therese marriage lawyers( Barbara has since remarried an accountant ), and they have two siblings, two nieces and a nephew in the field.

Their family name is a frequent conversation starter.” It’s Irish ,” Therese explains.” We don’t know what our ancestors did, but we’re trying to make up for it .”

When Barbara, who graduated from statute school in 1972, started off, women represented less than 10% of all law alumnus. She would frequently find herself the only female in a room of 100 lawyers. By the time Therese graduated in the late 1980 s, it was less of a sons’ club, at least for entry-level lawyers. However, among trial lawyers and in leadership positions, the representation of women was- and still is- very low.

Barbara tells me about an incident in 1975, when she attended a sentencing hearing while pregnant. The magistrate, a friend of her parent, took one look at her and told, as Barbara recounts,” You are in a family route- go back and send your[ business] partner down to make this argument .”

” I couldn’t believe it, but he must have been 75 years old and was generally a nice man. Still, I supposed,’ This is what we are dealing with .'”

She adds that this was at around the same time that schoolteachers were being forced into unpaid maternity leave in around the fifth month of pregnancy, over fears that it was dangerous for the mother and child, and distracting to students.

” I was dealing with the last vestiges of this going on, and didn’t want to make an example of him at the end of his career ,” Barbara tells.” That’s why females go into business together: it’s almost as if you have to start your own business because men won’t give you the opportunity .”

In 1988, Therese observed herself in the type of big corporate statute firm she had pledged to avoid. She stuck it out for nine months, until she found herself working on a occurrence that was ” so repugnant” she couldn’t take it any more. Two teachers had been fired from a private school for allowing students to create a poster about Aids, complete with a receptacle of condoms- too much for the Catholic community in Boston.

” I was supposed to represent the school ,” she remembers,” but I picked up the phone to Barbara and told,’ When can I go ?'”

***

Now the sisters are a force-out to be reckoned with in California.” If you have a case against them, you know it’s going to be serious ,” says Donna Rutter, a defense lawyer who represents companies that the Lawless sisters have sued.” They truly care about advancing women in society and in the workplace .”

The sisters have become used to facing aggressive tactics from defense lawyers, who often trawl through work emails and chats to find information that will put the complainant off pursuing a occurrence.” They go into all of the grime and to continue efforts to disgrace the victims ,” Therese says.” Sometimes they try and tell she initiated it, or she was incompetent at work, hence[ engaging in a sexual relationship] was the only style she could move ahead .”

In one particularly egregious occurrence, a company accused of sexual harassment hired psychologists to assess the emotional distress of the victim during the course of its pre-trial stage, and discovered that she’d had two abortions more than two decades earlier.” They tried to argue that her current emotional distress was impacted by the abortions rather than the harassment ,” Therese tells.” That was a little dirty .” She responded by persuading the magistrate to let her interview the jurors to screen out those with strong negative beliefs about abortion.

Before the Ellen Pao case, it was rare, if not unheard of, for a woman in a senior position to take a tech company or venture capital firm to tribunal over sex discrimination. Pao’s testimony was eye-opening, describing a” boys’ club” atmosphere, including men-only run trips and inappropriate behaviour by senior male partners towards junior female colleagues.

” What Ellen did was important ,” Therese says.” She took the result .”

Therese was approached by Pao’s attorney, Alan Axelrod, to work with him on the occurrence only three months before the five-week long trial. She knew the case was emblematic of something bigger when they arrived at the courthouse and were told that they’d have to move to a larger courtroom, to accommodate all the cameras. But, ultimately, the latter are outgunned by Kleiner Perkins.” We did not have the resources that a VC[ venture capital] firm with billionaire partners has ,” Therese explains.” I don’t have six or seven lawyers working on the occurrence, preparing my quizs or attending the courtroom with a jury consultant .”

The case was especially tricky, too, she says, because being left out of sessions, spoken over by co-workers or asked to take notes are all very subtle signs of discrimination; none provides the kind of smoking gun jurors are looking for.

Then there’s the culture bias that many people still have when talking about gender.” I think misogyny is so deeply ingrained in our culture that even girls perpetuate it ,” Therese tells.” We had a lot of female jurors who were willing to accept what were in my opinion simply untrue explains as to why things happened .” Several witness described Pao as having” sharp elbows” and being “prickly” and “competitive”. ” Men exhibiting the same type of aspiration and wanting to move up in the company are seen as being assertive, while Pao was perceived as bossy and aggressive ,” Therese says.

It’s a type of discrimination that the sisters think is permeating in the tech industry.” It’s also so much harder to prove ,” Barbara tells, because companies can always find alternative reasons to explain a lack of promotion, or why a woman wasn’t invited to certain meetings.

In the end, the jury sided with Kleiner Perkins, but potential impacts was felt far beyond the courtroom. Pao emboldened other women to talk, something other lawyers dubbed the” Pao effect “. Women shared their experiences of discrimination online utilizing the hashtag #ThankYouEllen. Trae Vassallo, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins, who testified against the firm at the Pao trial, went on to co-author a survey of women working in Silicon Valley: it found that 60% had experienced unwanted sexual advances and 90% had witnessed sexist behaviour at work. Pao has since launched a nonprofit venture called Project Include, unveiled in May 2016, which collects and shares data to assist diversify the tech workforce.

In February this year, Uber engineer Susan Fowler published a detailed account of unwanted sexual advances and discrimination at the company. She alleged that, when she joined, a manager immediately propositioned her for sexuality over the company chat tool, and that a director explained the shrinking numbers of women in her department by saying ” the women of Uber simply need to step up and be more appropriate technologists “.

Following Fowler’s post on her blog, dozens of stories emerged from Uber, including a report of a journey by senior employees, including chief executive Travis Kalanick, to a South Korean escort bar, and the leaking of a company-wide email from Kalanick that set off rules about sex and drinking ahead of a company journey. He wrote:” Do not have sex with another employee UNLESS a) you have asked that person for that privilege and they have responded with an emphatic’ YES! I will have sex with you’ AND b) the two( or more) of you do not work in the same chain of command. Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife #FML .”

This summer, a company-wide investigation into sexual harassment at the firm led to the termination of more than 20 employees’ contracts. Soon afterwards, Kalanick announced he was taking an indefinite leave of absence, before resigning in the face of a mutiny among Uber’s investors.

Since then, several females have filed lawsuits against less well-known startups. In an ongoing wrongful dismissal suit, Elizabeth Scott accused the founders of virtual reality firm UploadVR of creating a” boys’ club” environment” marked by rampant sexual behaviour”, including setting up a room with a bed in the office referred to as the” kink room “.

Shortly after that, several female entrepreneurs, including 31 -year-old Sarah Kunst, accused tech investor Dave McClure of sexual harassment. Kunst alleged that she had been talking to him about a possible undertaking where reference is sent her a Facebook message saying,” I didn’t know whether to hire you or hit on you .” McClure stood down from his role at investment firm 500 Startups and fell on his sword with a blogpost titled I’m A Creep. I’m Sorry.

Last month James Damore, a software engineer at Google, circulated a 10-page memoranda in which he argued that there were biological reasons women were less are in accordance with employment opportunities in tech. Even the battle-hardened Lawless sisters were taken aback by its language.” That was so outrageous ,” Barbara says.” That he could even think that way in this day and age … I was shocked .” The memoranda went simply months after the US Department of Labor accused Google of systematically underpaying females, in an investigation that is still ongoing. More than 60 current and former Google employees are now considering bringing a class action, alleging sexism and pay gaps against women.

***

Why does the technology industry have so many issues with discrimination? The Lawless sisters point to the way it celebrates rule-breakers, and how it often blurs the lines between social and occupational lives- with long working hours, a lack of structure and human resources( HR) departments, and office fridges full of free beer.” The entrepreneurial personality makes people much bigger risk-takers ,” Barbara explains. And that risk-taking can spill over into unwanted sexual advances.” They[ Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs] are more blatant and less sophisticated compared with other industries ,” Barbara adds, mentioning certain law firms and accounting firms.” I actually do think they are cowboys .”

Increasingly, the Lawless sisters are ensure cases where individuals have gone to human resources for help, and not got it. Therese sets this down to a” lack of attention “: HR is not usually a priority for startups founded by a handful of computer science college graduates. If you’re building the next Facebook, you’ll hire software engineers, a sales person and an operations person; but “youre supposed to” won’t invest in human resources until the company grows. By the time the company is big enough to hire an HR person, the culture will already be embedded, and other inexperienced managers may not be able to identify discrimination.” They might have analyzed[ sexual harassment and discrimination ], but they don’t know it ,” Barbara tells.” When you see it a few times, you recognise it fast .”

Immature companies and their CEOs will often rally around a person accused of misconduct if that person is a key contributor to the company- the culture Susan Fowler describes at Uber. When she took screenshots of her manager’s sexual advances to HR, she was told that it was the “man’s first offence” and that he was a” high musician”, so would only get a warning.

As technology companies mature and become more institutionalised, females will have more protection and opportunities, Barbara believes:” The cultures will get more genteel and the cowboys will no longer regulation .”

Meanwhile, in addition to the Tesla litigation, which is currently in the pre-trial phase, the firm is working on a mix of cases, from pregnancy and disability benefits discrimination to sexual harassment, though Therese is protective over the details:” I don’t like disclosing how many cases I have, because I don’t want my foes use it against me ,” she says.

The sisters are increasingly concerned by the normalisation of loathe speech used against women and minorities. After Google fired James Damore, he and other ” free speech” advocates was contended that Google has been subsumed by liberal groupthink, and is censoring anyone with different views about diversity and political correctness. Andrew Torba, CEO of the social network Gab, which offered Damore a task, said,” The message to conservatives is: if you dare step out of line and say something outside of the status quo of liberalism, you can expect to be fired .”

” With the alt-right, we are getting these strange views that we haven’t had in the open for a very long time ,” Barbara says.” I wonder how many men actually was of the view that way. I believe a lot do .” Therese adds:” It’s troubling to insure some people thinking that the workplace is an appropriate forum for dislike speech. I hope he[ Damore] is not the norm for the new generation .”

Either way, the sisters won’t be out of run any time soon. As Barbara says,” It’s lifelong employment for sex harassment lawyers .”

A brief history of harassment

May 2012
Ellen Pao, venture capitalist and interim CEO of Reddit, brings a gender discrimination suit against her employer, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield& Byers( KPCG ). She is represented by Therese Lawless and Alan Axelrod. Pao losescorrect, but the high-profile case fosters other women to come forward.

March 2015
Former product manager and technology partner Chia Hong sues Facebook for gender and race discrimination, claiming she experienced a” hostile surrounding” and was belittled by male colleagues. It was resolved out of court.

March 2015
Tina Huang, one of the first 100 staff members of Twitter, submits a class action suit against the company, alleging that its promotion system discriminates on gender. Twitter denies the claims and hires the same lawyers who represented KPCG against Ellen Pao. The instance is ongoing.

September 2015
Computer security researcher Katherine Moussouris files a class action complaint against Microsoft, together with two other female employees, alleging that they discriminate against women in technical roles. The example is ongoing.

July 2016
Before an action is filed, Smartphone chip manufacturer Qualcomm pays $ 19.5 m to 3,300 employees who accused it of gender discrimination against women in tech, engineering and science-related roles.

October 2016
Scott Ard and Greg Anderson, two former editors at Yahoo, file separate suits against the company, both alleging that they lost their jobs because the performance review system introduced by former CEO Marissa Mayer discriminated against male employees. Yahoo denies the allegations.

February 2017
AJ Vandermeyden reveals that she has sued Elon Musk’s electric carmaker Tesla, accusing it of ignoring her complaints regarding” pervasive harassment“, paying her a lower wage than humen doing the same run, and promoting less qualified men over her. She is represented by Therese Lawless. Tesla refutes her concerns and in June 2017 dismisses her from the company. The action is ongoing.

April 2017
The US Department of Labor accuses Google of a “systemic” gender pay gap, saying it is in violation of federal job laws. In August, it emerges that more than 60 current and former Google employees are considering a class action over pay disparities for women.

May 2017
Former director of digital at virtual reality startup UploadVR Elizabeth Scott files a gender discrimination and wrongful termination lawsuit against the company’s founders. She alleges that they created a” son’ club” surrounding” marked by rampant sexual behaviour and concentrate”, including setting up a room with a bed in the office referred to as the” kink room “. Scott alleges that women were paid less than men, and given menial chores. The company denies the claims; the action is ongoing.

* Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in publish, please email weekend @theguardian. com, including your name and address( not for publication ).

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A spoof Instagram account is parodying millennial voluntourism and gap yahs

Name : White Saviour Barbie. Age : 20. Appearance : The very model of western millennial egalitarianism.

Is that a compliment? No, definitely not. Barbie Savior is an Instagram account that satirises the messiah complex of affluent westerners who spend time travelling in the developing world.

Im nothing like that . Really? But didnt you once expend an afternoon helping out in a rural Guatemalan orphanage during your gap year?

Yes, but And didnt you spend the entire afternoon dismis the staff and taking selfies with the children?

Yes, but And dont those selfies now exist exclusively as a method to convince people that you are nicer than you are, mostly so that they will sleep with you?

Rats, busted . Its OK. We have all done it. White Saviour Barbie merely glistens a light on that a little. In fact, the creators started the account after realising that they were guilty of imitating her behaviour. So what does White Saviour Barbie do ? She basically exemplifies the obnoxiously self-serving They have nothing, but theyre so happy attitude of many western travellers. For example, the caption under a photo of Barbie hugging a black Barbie is: Orphans take the BEST pictures! So. Cute. #whatsyournameagain #orphans.

Is there more ? A fortnight ago, she started a charity called Harness the Tears, because: Ever since Ive been here, Ive been crying almost 90% of the time. I realised how wasteful that was as there is such a need for water here! Given the fact that Ive always wanted to be a CEO and Im already 20 years old, I figured it was time to get moving!

This all voices a lot like the Sociality Barbie Instagram account from last year. Truth be told, it is. Poor Barbie is quickly becoming the ship by which white millennials chronicle their own self-loathing.

What could possibly be next ? Barbie Already Nostalgic for 2011 Student Disco? Barbie Blaming Her Dire Financial Outlook on Baby Boomers by Tweeting a Sad Emoji on Her 750 Smartphone? What about Barbie Silently Furious at the Condescension of an Apparently Ageing Media ? Yes, OK, point taken.

Do say: Check your privilege, White Saviour Barbie.

Dont say: And dont get me started on you, Masculine Hegemony Mr Potato Head.

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Our phones offer connection, communication and knowledge and have become part of our identities. No wonder privacy violations bother us so much

Apples recent refusal to abide by a court order to unlock the San Bernardino shooters iPhone has brought to the publics attention an debate over cybersecurity and encryption that has been raging throughout the tech world for years.

On the surface, that argument has a particular and recognizable ethical character. But further down, it is about something else something deeper that has to do with identity itself.

Utilitarian intellectuals like John Stuart Mill have always held that the best style to decide any ethical question is to look and assure which action has the best consequences.

Turning to the iPhone case, the way this argument has played out in the media suggests that it is all about which future is more dire: the one where terrorists can hide their communications in common devices, or the one where the governmental eye of Sauron considers all.

Yet this characterization oversimplifies what is really at stake. Both pictures of the future are misleading, if merely because terrorists have, like the rest of us, numerous ways to get in contact with one another. Breaking into this particular iPhone wont change that. Moreover, your data is already unsafe. As more than one wag put it on Twitter, thats what makes it so ironic that privacy advocates like to complain on social media.

But the deeper problem with the its all about the consequences side of the debate is that it ignores the increasingly intimate relation we bear to the devices around us.

Smartphones were only the first step towards the world we live in now the internet of things. More and more devices from refrigerators to cars to socks interact with the internet on a nearly constant basis, leaving a trail of digital deplete. That means greater convenience, but increasingly it also means that our devices are becoming ready at hand as Heidegger would have said. Weve begun to see them as extensions of ourselves. The Internet of Things has become the Internet of Us.

It is tempting to see that as metaphorical. But there is actually a metaphysical phase here, one which we can get at by way of two very different, if consistent, philosophical routes.

The first style in stems from what is known as the extended intellect hypothesis. According to the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers in a 1998 newspaper, our mental state, like our faiths or our memories, arent always simply in in our heads. They are spread out. In other terms, it is not just that I use my contact listing in my smartphone as a crutch to assistance me recollect, my actual remembering is partly constituted by the phone itself. It is a combo of brain cells and computer chips.

I am not sure whether Clark and Chalmers are right about the entire intellect, although they might be. But I am more convinced that one sort of mental state, the country of my knowing something, is often extended to our digital devices. My knowing, at the least in the passive, receptive sense of knowing, is definitely outsourced to my phone. And that is why I often feel 100% less knowledgeable when I dont have ready access to it.

If something like this is right, it helps to explain why we worry about losing more control over access to our smart devices. What and how I know it is part of my intellect; but if what and how I know is partly composed of what happens on my phone, if it is spread out in that way, then unlocking our devices is not simply like unlocking our home. It is more like opening up our intellects to Vulcan mind melds. And then the ethical topic here cant only be decided by tallying up the consequences; what harms our identity is a matter of principle.

Of course you might think that the extended knowledge hypothesis is too farfetched. But the other style to get to the same point is this: whether or not we actually are our telephones, we increasingly identify with them. We increasingly see them and the digital life we lead on them as partly constituting who we psychologically are.

The reason that matters is that psychology matters for autonomy. One type of freedom we care about is autonomy of action. But another type is freedom of decision. And you can violate my autonomy of decision in more than one route. One style is to overrule it. Hold a handgun to my head and I will find myself making decisions that arent actually in accordance with my most considered opinion about what is best for me.

On the other hand, you can also undermine it. Devote me a drug without my permission and my decision-making is constructed moot. It doesnt truly matter whether I wanted to take the drug or not. Ive taken it anyway and my decision is irrelevant.

Violations of information privacy undermine our autonomy of decision in the same way. They make a decision for us whether to share our datum. In some suits, perhaps like the case of the San Bernardino shooters phone, that may be justified. But there is a reason to be wary of generalizing, precisely because back-door telephone hacks would open us up to having our independence undermined in merely this way.

Arguably, what harms autonomy damages identity. And what harms identity, what harms us as individuals, as intellects, is not just a bad outcome it is bad in principle.

Michael Patrick Lynch is prof of philosophy and director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. His new book is The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data. Follow him on Twitter: @plural_truth

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