By Roberto Yus, assistant professor, Computer Science, UMBC, and Primal Pappachan, Penn State

Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight – inside your TV, fridge, car and office. These things know more about you than you might imagine, and many of them communicate that information over the internet.

Back in 2007, it would have been hard to imagine the revolution of useful apps and services that smartphones ushered in. But they came with a cost in terms of intrusiveness and loss of privacy. As computer scientists who study data management and privacy, we find that with internet connectivity extended to devices in homes, offices and cities, privacy is in more danger than ever.

Internet of Things

Your appliances, car and home are designed to make your life easier and automate tasks you perform daily: switch lights on and off when you enter and exit a room, remind you that your tomatoes are about to go bad, personalize the temperature of the house depending on the weather and preferences of each person in the household.

To do their magic, they need the internet to reach out for help and correlate data. Without internet access, your smart thermostat can collect data about you, but it doesn’t know what the weather forecast is, and it isn’t powerful enough to process all of the information to decide what to do.

The Nest smart thermostat tracks your presence and is connected to the internet. Smart Home Perfected/Flickr, CC BY

But it’s not just the things in your home that are communicating over the internet. Workplaces, malls and cities are also becoming smarter, and the smart devices in those places have similar requirements. In fact, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already widely used in transport and logistics, agriculture and farming, and industry automation. There were around 22 billion internet-connected devices in use around the world in 2018, and the number is projected to grow to over 50 billion by 2030.

What these things know about you

Smart devices collect a wide range of data about their users. Smart security cameras and smart assistants are, in the end, cameras and microphones in your home that collect video and audio information about your presence and activities. On the less obvious end of the spectrum, things like smart TVs use cameras and microphones to spy on users, smart lightbulbs track your sleep and heart rate, and smart vacuum cleaners recognize objects in your home and map every inch of it.

Sometimes, this surveillance is marketed as a feature. For example, some Wi-Fi routers can collect information about users’ whereabouts in the home and even coordinate with other smart devices to sense motion.

Manufacturers typically promise that only automated decision-making systems and not humans see your data. But this isn’t always the case. For example, Amazon workers listen to some conversations with Alexa, transcribe them and annotate them, before feeding them into automated decision-making systems.

But even limiting access to personal data to automated decision making systems can have unwanted consequences. Any private data that is shared over the internet could be vulnerable to hackers anywhere in the world, and few consumer internet-connected devices are very secure.

Understand your vulnerabilities

With some devices, like smart speakers or cameras, users can occasionally turn them off for privacy. However, even when this is an option, disconnecting the devices from the internet can severely limit their usefulness. You also don’t have that option when you’re in workspaces, malls or smart cities, so you could be vulnerable even if you don’t own smart devices.

Therefore, as a user, it is important to make an informed decision by understanding the trade-offs between privacy and comfort when buying, installing and using an internet-connected device. This is not always easy. Studies have shown that, for example, owners of smart home personal assistants have an incomplete understanding of what data the devices collect, where the data is stored and who can access it.

Smart speakers continuously listen for your commands. Oscar Wong/Moment via Getty Images

Governments all over the world have introduced laws to protect privacy and give people more control over their data. Some examples are the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Thanks to this, for instance, you can submit a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) to the organization that collects your data from an internet-connected device. The organizations are required to respond to requests within those jurisdictions within a month explaining what data is collected, how it is used within the organization and whether it is shared with any third parties.

Limit the privacy damage

Regulations are an important step; however, their enforcement is likely to take a while to catch up with the ever-increasing population of internet-connected devices. In the meantime, there are things you can do to take advantage of some of the benefits of internet-connected without giving away an inordinate amount of personal data.

If you own a smart device, you can take steps to secure it and minimize risks to your privacy. The Federal Trade Commission offers suggestions on how to secure your internet-connected devices. Two key steps are updating the device’s firmware regularly and going through its settings and disabling any data collection that is not related to what you want the device to do. The Online Trust Alliance provides additional tips and a checklist for consumers to ensure safe and private use of consumer internet-connected devices.

If you are on the fence about purchasing an internet-connected device, find out what data it captures and what the manufacturer’s data management policies are from independent sources such as Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included. By using this information, you can opt for a version of the smart device you want from a manufacturer that takes the privacy of its users seriously.

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Roberto Yus, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Maryland Baltimore County and

Primal Pappachan, Postdoctoral Scholar in Computer Science, Penn State

Header Image: Appliances that make your life easier could also put your privacy at risk. Eric Kayne/AP Images for Samsung

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By John Rennie Short, professor, School of Public Policy, UMBC

Global flashpoints, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Chinese actions in Xinjiang, share a common background: a previous history of invasion and occupation.

The northwestern region of Xinjiang, for example, became an autonomous region under Chinese rule in 1955. Officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, this mainly Turkic, Muslim area is viewed by the Chinese as a possible threat to China’s security and territorial integrity.

The government in Beijing encouraged mass migration of Han Chinese into Xinjiang, which fomented resentment among the local Uyghur people. After clashes in 2009 that caused more than 200 deaths and a 2013 terrorist attack in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese cracked down with aggressive policing and extreme surveillance. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been jailed, more than 1 million detained in “reeducation camps,” and China has been accused of genocide.

These tactics of invasion and occupation can also be seen in the way 250,000 Russians moved to Crimea after it was annexed in 2014.

Academics sometimes refer to these tactics as “settler colonialism.” As a strategy of subjugation, it has many historical precedents and it provides an important lens for understanding geopolitics in various parts of today’s world.

Two types of empire

History is studded with empires. Broadly speaking, there are two types.

British rule in India exemplifies an empire of control, where imperialists extract wealth and resources without large-scale emigration from the colonizing country. The importation of the wealth of India, especially its textiles, was an essential requirement of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

There are also empires of settlement that occupy colonial territories by moving in large numbers of settlers. Across the world, especially in the lightly settled open grasslands of Australia and the Americas, the original inhabitants were displaced and marginalized as their homeland was taken by treaty, sale, guile and theft.

The process often involved brute force or ethnic cleansing as land was seized and handed over to immigrants. In Australia, the British justified colonization by declaring the continent “terra nullius” – that is, empty and uninhabited.

Settler colonies were used to safeguard the edges of empires. A policy used by the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) that moved ethnic Chinese settlers into recently captured territory is still used today in Tibet and Xinjiang. Both imperial Russia and the former Soviet Union encouraged citizens to settle border regions, so today at least 20% of the population of Ukraine is ethnic Russian.

Civilians continue to flee from Irpin because of ongoing Russian attacks in Irpin, Ukraine on March 8, 2022. Emin Sansar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Settler colonialism

Many settler empires rose in the 18th and 19th centuries and continued well into the 20th century. In Africa, for example, settler societies were established by the British in Kenya, the French in Algeria and the Dutch in South Africa.

The colonists who moved in, often in large numbers, were typically white Europeans who took control over the land, lives and economy of Indigenous peoples. There were exceptions, though. In Liberia, Black Americans settled in the land of Black Africans; in Israel, mainly Jewish immigrants took over the land of Arab populations; and in China, the majority Han people moved into non-Han areas.

My research into the interactions between Indigenous people and European settlers in North America and resistance to cultural integration by an Indigenous art movement in central Australia has offered me a different way to view history. Looking at the past through a lens of settler colonialism substantially changes how we view histories of many countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the U.S.

Today’s issues, viewed through a colonial lens

Most settler societies are steeped in a prejudiced history in which racial categories define who has power. One strategy has been to make full citizenship available only to settlers and their offspring. Some of the more extreme examples include racialized rule in South Africa that created brutal apartheid and traumatized generations of aboriginal Australians.

There is also a long history of child abuse, with Indigenous children taken from their homes to be assimilated into settler society. Emerging evidence of these practices, including those experienced by Indigenous children in Canada’s residential schools, is helping to rewrite the history books from the Indigenous – rather than just from the settler – perspective.

By restricting immigration, some countries – including Australia, Canada and the U.S., among others – have tried to maintain their racial or ethnic identities and their power. Many of these policies were weakened only in recent years.

But in acts of amazing resilience, Indigenous societies have resisted cultural assimilation, political marginalization and economic insecurity.

Settlers raced into what was then known as ‘Indian Territory’ as the sound of a gunshot opened the area to white settlement on Sept. 16, 1893. The land rush marked the early beginnings of the state of Oklahoma. AP Photo/A.A. Forbes

Land is a key issue, as Indigenous groups continue to pursue land claims and resist land grabs. From ongoing Mapuche claims in Chile to aboriginal Australians’ successful campaign to overturn the legality of “terra nullius,” land seized by settlers is being disputed.

New facts and greater awareness of the racist nature of settler societies are challenging the triumphalist view of progress. New information is providing a darker understanding of the impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples, including ethnic genocide and the devastating impacts of the loss of both land and cultural identity.

This isn’t just history. Unequal, brutal treatment of settlers and indigenous peoples continues in today’s settler societies, not least of all in Xinjiang and in Ukraine.

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Header image: Demonstration for the rights of the Uyghurs in Berlin, 2020. Leonhard Lenz, Wikimedia Commons , CC BY-SA

John Rennie Short, Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.