The speech of Dr. Katie Panciera, one of the students of the first graduating class of Berea in Computer Science in 2005, was very eye opening for me. First of all, her academic and professional career’s extent made me very proud as a Berea student that such bright people emerge out of our school, inspiring me to become another one. Her doctoral study in the University of Minnesota, followed by employment at Facebook and Google, and her academic position at the Milwaukee School of Engineering all sound like a great career.
In her speech, she talked about many things relating to data and data security through the lens of a UX researcher. She created a little activity where she asked what information we needed to give to be here today. Responses of the participants were quite surprising, ranging anywhere from their passport number to their date of birth. It is a truth that all of us have a lot more data than we think we have. The reality is, that amount of data is saying more about us than what we think, which is also a point made in the documentary “the Social Dilemma” we watched in our Human Centered Computing class. According to the documentary, the companies use and develop algorithms to gather more data about you for advertisement and increasing user screen time purposes. Because think of it this way, if Instagram knows you like playing the guitar, it will keep showing you guitar videos to keep you engaged with the app, which means more screen time for Instagram app which would translate to more advertisements shown to you on the app, making Instagram more money. That’s why data is very important.
Instagram is just one example. Data plays a huge role in every aspect of our lives. Sometimes, we cannot even have the option to opt out of giving our data because it is required for things that we cannot inherently opt out since they are a core component of our lives. Dr. Panciera talked about this topic giving multiple examples. She gave the example of job applications nowadays, which are mostly in HTML pages where you are not given the option by the developer to not enter a certain information, because it will not let you go on and complete your application without that required piece of information.
Dr. Panciera also gave two more very interesting examples. First one was about how one of her friends wanted to buy a stroller off of Amazon but didn’t want Amazon to know that she is pregnant. The steps Dr. Panciera explained that her friend did were quite amazing and fascinating just to be able to discretely buy a stroller. It shows that how even companies like Amazon require your data and you can’t simply opt out of them unless you want to go through a very hard route just like Dr. Panciera’s friend and her husband did. The other example Dr. Panciera gave was about the application process for stimulus money for Covid-19 in South Africa. She mentioned how the users cannot opt out of giving certain private information in a relatively unsecure environment to such as WhatsApp, and how the data is not processed securely.
After listening to Dr. Katie Panciera’s speech, I have gained a lot of valuable knowledge that helped me better shape my understanding about data and how/why it is important. In conclusion, it was a great speech that made me more intrigued about data security and ethics that come with it.
