Session organised in collaboration with Fundación Telefónica.

WORKSHOP: Facesponge with Aymeric Mansoux and Gerald Kogler. 10h-14h

Have you ever wondered what is going on “behind the scenes” on social networks like Facebook? In this workshop we will explore our so-called social data and get a glimpse at how it is viewed by the company and third parties who access it. In order to break several myths about Facebook applications, you will be invited to take part in designing small programs that extracts and manipulate you and your friend’s online information. Nothing will be written back to Facebook at any time, we will only be reading existing data. No data will be collected or viewable by anyone else.

No programming experience is required. Basic knowledge of javascript can be useful to explore more advanced possibilities of the Facesponge sandbox.

This workshop is part of the Naked on Pluto project, a critical text adventure Facebook game concerned with issues of online privacy and control within centralized commercial social networks, designed and written by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths.

Facesponge is developed in collaboration with Baltan Laboratories.
All Naked on Pluto software is released under free culture licenses.

Schedule:

* Naked on Pluto presentation
* Gameplay session
* Anatomy of an FB app
* Introduction to Facesponge
* Breaking FB apps myths
* Group discussion

Practical information:

* The workshop will be taught in English.
* You will need to bring your own laptop.
* Places are limited.

DEBATE: Identity and simulation. Artificial life on the networks. With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. 19h-21h

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

REGISTRATION:

Workshop + Debate: 6€
Please send an email explaining the reasons for your interest to cursos@cccb.org
Limited capacity!

Debate: 3€
Tel-entrada (tel. 902 101 212 / www.telentrada.com)
CCCB page for the event

Art Meets Radical Openness: Liwoli 2011

Guests Friday 13 May

Marloes de Valk – http://naked-on-pluto.net and http://pluto.kuri.mu
Owen Mundy – http://givememydata.com/
Dusan Barok – http://www.faceleaks.info/

Guests Saturday 14 May

Nicolas Malevé – http://yoogle.be/spip.php?page=start_yoogle
Margaritha Köhl – http://www.univie.ac.at/publizistik/Koehl.htm
Pippa Buchanan (Mozilla Webcraft) – http://p2pu.org/webcraft
Birgit Bachler – http://www.birgitbachler.com

‘Plutonian Striptease’ is a 2 evening lecture series, filled with short 30 minute lectures on social media, online privacy, the data market and the economy of open systems.

We all share a lot of information with others online. Not only voluntarily and consciously via public parts of social media, but also unknowingly, by searching, purchasing, browsing… And on top of that, non-public parts of the web are being scraped to complete the already very detailed profiles data brokers and listening companies have on us.

“You have zero privacy anyway, get over it.” (Scott McNealy, as chief executive of Sun Microsystems , 1999)

The open web, heralded for it’s transparency, interoperability and decentralized nature, is not just about being open and accessible for the benefit of us all, it also happens to greatly facilitate data harvesting, tracking, scraping, data mining, profiling and behavioural advertisement. This facilitation is fuelled by, and fuels a booming industry. There is no single and clear definition of what the open web really is, and maybe that is because of it’s paradoxical nature. On the one hand, there is a strive for openness driven by an ideology for the public good, on the other it’s driven by commercial goals.

Compared to the speed with which the data market is growing, legislation to protect users from invasion of privacy is light-years behind. Making an ‘opt-out’ or ‘do-not-track’ option mandatory would be a good start. But even if the law were up to speed, is it possible to properly enforce such laws? It would require a close look into the code of every application and online service accessing a users personal data; a police raid of App Store, Android Market, and the like. A 2010 study by Pennsylvania State University, Duke University, and Intel Labs showed that out of 30 randomly selected popular Android apps that access personal information, fifteen of the apps reported users’ locations to remote advertising servers and seven applications broadcast the handset’s device number or phone number to outside servers (Eck W., et al, 2010).

To some, the trade-off between personal data and free services paid for through advertisement is more than fair. You get as much back as you give, convenience comes at a price. The problem is that it has become almost impossible to make those trade-offs consciously and with a good idea of what the consequences will be. Online, it’s hard to tell when you’re leaving private space and entering a public one. The ‘I’ve got nothing to hide’ argument proposed by those involved in the ‘privacy versus security’ debate, is not easily matched with a one-liner explaining the value of privacy, this is a more complex and abstract story, and as pointed out by Bruce Schneier, the real choice is liberty versus control (B. Schneier, 2006). He points to two proverbs that say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (“Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

This lecture series investigates these issues and showcases art projects making the hidden world of data harvesting tangible.

Enck W. et al., 2010, TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones , [online] Available at: [accessed 14 April 2011]

Schneier B., 2006, The Eternal Value of Privacy. [online] Available
at: .[Accessed 14 April 2011].

Plutonian Striptease has been organised by Marloes de Valk, and is the follow-up of a series of interviews published on http://pluto.kuri.mu, asking experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media about their views on this topic.

http://naked-on-pluto.net

Public Lecture: Joris van Hoboken, Nicolas Malevé and Aymeric Mansoux
Date: Wednesday, 16/03/2011
Time: doors open at 18:45, lecture begins at 19:00
Location: Mauritsstraat 36, Rotterdam
Entrance free
streamed at: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/pzwart_video.html

Bringing together artists, programmers and theorists, Sniff, Scrape, Crawl… is a series of lectures examining the porous borders of privacy in the digital age. Previous public events in this series have touched upon a wide rage of topics such as surveillance, data-mining, the function and limits of anonymity, and the profound influence of network architecture on social, political and legal issues.

The next three talks will continue to explore and expand upon these ideas from different perspectives. Joris van Hoboken will be looking at search engines, how they track queries and what impact data retention and profiling has on our civil liberties. Nicolas Malevé will be speaking about social network platforms and the evolution of national and international legal agreements, while drawing parallels between the processes of homogenization of the web and the processes of legislative harmonization within the EU. Lastly, Aymeric Mansoux will be talking about *Naked on Pluto*. The project, which is a collaboration between Mansoux, Dave Griffiths and Marloes de Valk, is a multiplayer text adventure game on Facebook that explores the perils of centralized social networks.

Joris van Hoboken (NL) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Information Law, and his thesis focuses on regulatory aspects of search engines. He graduated cum laude in both Theoretical Mathematics (2002) and Law (2006) from the University of Amsterdam. His LL.M. thesis dealt with the new Dutch regulations on access to personal data in criminal proceedings, i.e. an analysis of how citizens’ interests are implicated in the limitation of such access. Until 1 September 2006, he worked as a paralegal at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and as a co-director of Bits of Freedom, a digital civil rights organisation.
Main site: http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/

Nicolas Malevé is an artist, software programmer and data activist developing multimedia projects and web applications for and with cultural organisations. His current research work is focused on cartography, information structures, metadata and the means to visually represent them. He lives and works in Barcelona and Brussels. Since 1998 Nicolas collaborates with Constant, a non-profit association, based and active in Brussels since 1997 in the fields of feminism, copyright alternatives and working through networks. Selection of works: *Copy.cult and the Original Si(g)n*, a project of investigation on the alternatives to author’s rights. www.constantvzw.com/copy.cult/home
*Yoogle!* an online game that allows users to play with the parameters of the Web 2.0 economy and the marketing of personal data. http://yoogle.be

Aymeric Mansoux (FR) is an artist, musician, media researcher and core tutor at the Piet Zwart. In 2003, he founded GOTO10 with Thomas Vriet, a non profit organization and artist collective, with the goal to promote the use and support of free software in electronic music and media art creation. Aymeric has been active in the collective until 2010 and initiated several projects such as: ‘make art’, a yearly international no nonsense festival for software artists using and writing free software; ‘Puredyne’, a popular live GNU/Linux distribution for creative media and the ‘FLOSS+Art publication’, the first collection of essays on FLOSS and digital art production.
Main site: http://su.kuri.mu/
Naked on Pluto: http://pluto.kuri.mu/

The *Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…* public lecture series has been realised with the collaboration of Research Programme (Lectoraat) Communication in a Digital Age.