Privacy, Governance, Creativity, & Surveillance Lecture Notes

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering the key concepts from the lecture notes on privacy law, AI governance, copyright, and surveillance capitalism.

Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal

A major privacy incident where approximately $87$ million users' data was accessed through personality quizzes and the Facebook Open API without their consent for psychographic profiling.

OCEAN Model

A framework for psychographic profiling consisting of five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Psychographic profiling

The practice of using digital behavior (likes, shares) to predict personality traits and build thousands of data points per person to enable microtargeting.

Microtargeting

The use of tailored political ads that are invisible to non-targets, often blending real news with misinformation to bypass disclosure and consent requirements.

Transparency (Privacy Principle)

The requirement for companies to clearly define what data is collected, how long it is stored, and who it is shared with.

Disclosure (Privacy Principle)

A principle granting users the ability to see all personal data retained by a platform.

Control (Privacy Principle)

A set of user rights including opt-in (rather than opt-out) consent, the right to delete data, and the respect of "Do Not Track" requests.

Notification (Privacy Principle)

The requirement for mandatory data breach disclosures and the labeling of political and paid content.

Inferred Vulnerabilities

Classifications derived by AI systems from user chats (such as health risks or emotional states) that can flow into advertising or insurance ecosystems.

Blurred Data Boundaries

The practice of multiproduct companies merging chat data, search history, purchases, and social media activity for profiling purposes.

Human Authorship Requirement

A core U.S. copyright principle stating that fully AI-generated works are not copyrightable; protection is only granted to human selection and arrangement.

Digital Replicas

Unauthorized AI voice or likeness clones, such as "Fake Drake," which highlight the need for a federal right protecting individual voice and likeness.

EU AI Act

A product-safety-oriented regulation that uses a risk-based system (unacceptable, high, low) to govern AI systems extraterritorially.

Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments

Evaluations required by the EU AI Act before public deployment of high-risk systems, though critics note they lack mandatory mitigation requirements.

Surveillance Capitalism

An economic system that extracts human experience as raw material, converting behavior into data to predict and modify future behavior.

Behavioral Surplus

Data captured beyond what is needed for service improvement, which is monetized through prediction products and behavioral futures markets.

Instrumentarian Power

A new form of power that operates through continuous monitoring and computational control rather than violence or ideology.

Big Other

The pervasive sensing infrastructure that constitutes the heart of instrumentarian power and surveillance capitalism.

Right to Future Tense

A human right challenged by surveillance capitalism, characterized by individual autonomy and the freedom to exercise free will without behavioral shaping.

Risk-based system (EU AI Act)

A governance framework where AI systems are categorized as unacceptable (banned), high-risk (regulated), or low-risk (exempt).