Tutorial 10 Activities#

Activities#

In your group, please decide amongst the following tasks that your group would like to undertake.

Please make sure that the tasks are accessible to everyone in the group, and that everyone is comfortable in taking part.

Also to maintain privacy, please do NOT share your screen when engaging with these tasks.

Exercise 1

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a tool, called “Cover Your Tracks” which allows you to discover how “tracking technology follow[s] your trail around the web, even if you’ve taken protective measures…” by showing you “how trackers see your browser” (quotes from Electronic Frontier Foundation).

Explore how EFF Cover Your Tracks work, and if you’re interested, go through the experiment and see what tracking companies can find about you, and discuss with your group. If you are not comfortable actually using the tool, you can just read up on the topics on the ‘Learn’ page for discussion.

Exercise 2 (Advanced/Technical)

Ad-blockers such as uBlock Origin (uBO) and AdGuard do help block ads/trackers to help protect your privacy.

If you have them installed, click on their status window/logger to find out what ads are blocked on popular websites that you frequent (e.g. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger illustrates uBO’s logger; https://kb.adguard.com/en/ios/features illustrates AdGuard’s iOS logger).

  • Discuss your findings with the group (to the extent you’re comfortable with).

  • If you’re not comfortable with the task or don’t have ad-blockers installed, discuss what sites you hypothesise/predict trackers will be more prominent in, and what amount of trackers (tens, hundreds, thousands?) can be found on a given page.

Exercise 3 (Optional)

If you’re interested, take a look at how you can install ad-blockers and how they can help protect your privacy in your spare time.

Consider the reading posted in the module on Data Governance, citation here for convenience:

What if Facebook goes down? Ethical and legal considerations for the demise of big tech.

—Carl Öhman, Nikita Aggarwal. Internet Policy Review 9(3), 1-21, 2020.

Now, think of a related ‘thought experiment’ that is relevant to the topic at hand, but instead of social media, we are talking about open source programming code and the sharing of knowledge.

This actually happened, luckily only briefly, in 2020.

GitHub was temporarily forced to remove youtube-dl, an open source YouTube archiving tool, after some legal threats by the Recording Industry Association of America. An excellent write-up is available here on Wikipedia.

Briefly, the case is as follows: (quoting from Wikipedia)

“On October 23, 2020, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) issued a takedown notice to GitHub under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), requesting the removal of youtube-dl and 17 public forks of the project. The RIAA request argued that youtube-dl violates the Section 1201 anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, and provisions of German copyright law.”

Now, the initial takedown of the youtube-dl tool might be based on legal reasons by the RIAA; but luckily, it was reversed, as:

“On November 16, 2020, GitHub publicly reinstated the repository, after the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent GitHub a document contesting the takedown notice, which clarified that the software was not capable of breaching commercial DRM systems”

However, this is where an ethical question comes in: tools such as youtube-dl are used by, for example, internet archivists and those studying the history of the Internet, to be able to archive multimedia files which have significant historical or cultural or scientific content. By removing tools such as youtube-dl, a major side effect is that such culturally and historically significant content might not be able to be archived.

Exercise

Discuss, based on your own thoughts, and that of the reading linked above:

  • Were Github (hosting the source code of the tool) and the RIAA (the industry group which initiate the takedown) acting legally?

  • Similarly, are the both parties above acting ethically?

  • How should the parties above have proceeded - i.e. to balance between copyright protection and the need to preserve information for future generations?

Note

As always, post your answers on the forum discussion.