Future Tense

Future Tense Newsletter: The Practice of Privacy

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Lock it down.

maxkabakov/thinkstock.com

Greetings, Future Tensers,

The juncture of technology and privacy is a confusing one, a dense weave of forces and factors that can be difficult to disentangle. That’s the (seemingly accidental) lesson of Privacy, a play starring Daniel Radcliffe that opened this week in New York City. Cybersecurity professor Josephine Wolff writes that it disappointed, partly because it conflates personal privacy with corporate data collection and government surveillance, collapsing a handful of distinct problems into one another. To the extent that Privacy succeeds at all, Wolff suggests, it’s by encouraging the audience to think “about the data stored on their phones.”

Digital rights activist April Glaser offers a more nuanced look at such issues in an article on information security best practices for political protesters like those at the Republican National Convention this week. There are, however, a host of other ways in which many of us still happily cede information about our digital selves, not least of all through the surveys that frequently pop up on websites, which Rachael Cusick investigated for Future Tense. Want to know how to protect yourself from these invasive questionnaires? The best way’s probably to not take them.

Here are some of the other stories we read while getting excited about the new season of Mr. Robot:

  • Education: The Bedtime Math Foundation’s app aims to help parents incorporate word problems into their children’s nightly routines.
  • Cartography: A map library in Maine is putting its gorgeous collections online—and revealing the complex ambiguities of digitization in the process.
  • Gaming: Niantic built Pokémon Go on a foundation it established with its earlier game Ingress. A veteran of that cult hit offers some tips to players of the newer title.
  • Conservation: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is using drones to deliver vaccine candies to prairie dogs in order to protect ferrets in the great plains. It sounds goofy, but it just might work.

Events:

  • What concerted steps should Canada, Mexico, and the United States take to ensure that North America will become the world’s leading energy power for generations? Future Tense and the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute invite you to join them in Washington, D.C., at noon on Tuesday, July 26, for a conversation on what it will take for North America to fulfill its energy potential. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website, where the event will also be streamed live.

Checking for blue check marks,

Jacob Brogan

for Future Tense