*34c3 preroll music*
Herald Angel (H): OK, probably a couple years ago you realize that a lot of the
refugees coming up from Syria and North Africa where we're communicating. We're
using technology in an interesting way to find their way around a lot of the Border
Patrol's. A lot of the hurdles that were put up in their way. In the US we have a
similar issue but it's different in many ways with illegal immigrants trying to
stay underneath the radar. Allison McDonald from the University of Michigan
is, has been studying how immigrants in the States deal with technology and it's
very different from here. Her interests are in technology, privacy, society and
human rights and I think we're gonna have an awesome talk from her. So, well, please
welcome her and we'll get moving. *Applause*
Allision McDonald: OK, thanks for coming. I'm Allison from the University of
Michigan. I'm talking today primarily about technology in immigration
enforcement and specifically about how the immigrant community in the United States
is responding to those changes and especially the undocumented community.
Before we get too far into the details I just wanted to tell a little bit of a
story. This is Anna Maria she is not a real person she is sort of a compositive
of many people that we spoke to but her story is really representative of a lot of
people that we know are living in the United States today. She and her
husband emigrated from Mexico about 12 years ago into the United States. She
really wanted to have children, but couldn't get the fertility support that
she needed in Mexico so she came to the United States. And now she and her husband
have two children who are attending US public schools. She and her husband are
both working and saving up to buy a house. They pay taxes; they attend church
every Sunday. They're involved in a lot of community events and are really integrated
into the local community. One difference from Anna Maria and a lot of
other people is that she's in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. What
this means is that she either entered the United States without legal authorization
or she came on a Visa and overstayed the allotted time. That means that day to day
she has to worry about being found and deported back to Mexico, removed from her
home and this puts her in quite a precarious situation trying to live a
normal life, a life similar to a lot of other people in our communities. But with
this constant concern that this life could be taken away from her if she's
detected. Other than this this one point she really lives this immigration story
that the United States loves to tell. We love to have this narrative of people
being able to come to the United States and build lives for themselves that they
might not be able to build in their origin countries. And that's exactly
what she's done. But just as natural to this immigration story is a history of a
lot of discrimination, racism and xenophobia. All the way back in the 1700s
we've had legislation that prevents people from becoming citizens based on their
origin country. We've had, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act preventing
people from China laborers coming to the United States entirely. The Asiatic barred
zone a couple years later just drew a box on a map and said the people in this
region can't immigrate to the United States. We've also seen things like the
Johnson Reed Immigration Act in the 1900s where the the US took census data from
before a big wave of immigration putting a quota system in place that essentially
prevented people from eastern and southern Europe from coming to the United States.
This history of discrimination and racism continues to today. Many of you, I'm sure
have heard of what's happening now with the so-called Muslim ban where a list of
seven countries are now blacklisted. Immigrants are unable to enter the
country. And this is just another data point to show the trend that our discourse
and immigration policy in the United States is often racialized. I want to talk
a little bit about what immigration enforcement actually looks like in the
United States. The agency that manages enforcement is called the US Immigration
and Customs Enforcement or ICE. They're in charge of enforcing within the borders
once people have already entered the country, finding people without
documentation or managing immigration cases. Over the last couple of decades
they've really been gaining in size and power. This is anything from the removal
of privacy restrictions on sharing data between federal agencies to an increase in
financial resources after 9/11. And this is happening even today. President Trump
back in January had an executive order that is looking to add another 5,000
agents to their current 20,000 over the next couple of years. So this is an agency
that's continuing should be bolstered. And another way that they're changing,
recently, is the way that they're integrating technology into their jobs.
This photo in particular shows a fingerprint scanner. The collection of
biometric data is becoming really common in immigration enforcements. And it's not
just when someone's taken into an immigration office but mobile fingerprint
scanners are being taken into communities. There are stories of people having their
biometric data taken, even without arrest. Being stopped in the street or being near
someone who's being detained for a particular reason. Everyone in the area or
everyone in the household having their biometric data taken. We've also seen the
removal of some restrictions on how this data can be shared between federal
agencies. In particular President Trump has reinstated the Secure Communities
Program which allows local police officers when they're booking people for local
crimes or in local jails to take biometric data and cross-check it against federal
immigration databases and crime databases. We're also seeing evidence that,... So
DHS, is the Department of Homeland Security the umbrella organization over
ICE. We have recently seen through a Freedom of Information request that this
organization has used cell-site simulators or stingrays over 1,800 times in the last
five years. We don't know all of the cases where these have been used. And we really
can't speculate these cases are shrouded in secrecy and we don't know when and how
they're being used. But we do have one case, it's actually close to my home in
Detroit Michigan where an undocumented man, ICE was able to send a warrant to
Facebook to get his phone number and then use that phone number with a cell site
simulator to track him to his home and ended up deporting him to El Salvador.
We're also seeing this move to start collecting social media data at the
borders. This isn't just for people on temporary visas but also nationlised
citizens and people with permanent residency cards. This might not be so
relevant to people who are already in the country because they're not crossing the
border regularly, but this might be impactful if they have friends and family
crossing borders to visit them. And new immigrants as well. This is a database
that we don't really know what it's being used for yet. But there are some hints in
the way that, for example, ICE has been soliciting contracts from big data
companies to create algorithms to do this extreme vetting to be able to find
suspicious activity or suspicious people from troves of social media data. In fact
we have already seen some of these contracts being awarded. There was a 3
million contract recently given to a company called Giant Oak who claims to
take big data and find bad guys. Their creepy slogans, "We see the people behind
the data" 'trademark'. And this is just another example of the way that technology
is being used to... in ways that are sort of unpredictable at this point but
we have many examples where this style of research can often be
discriminatory. And it might be expected that at this point in time technologies
ending up integrated into law enforcement in the way that it's being integrated into
a lot of different parts of our lives. But there's a reason that this moment in
particular is so frightening. This administration's making it abundantly
clear what they think of immigration. Just in less than a year so far we've seen the
repeal of the deferred action for Childhood Arrivals Program which you might
also hear as the DREAM Act or people here talking about Dreamers. This is a program
that allowed people who entered the country under the age of 16 to get work
permits and driver licenses and attend university and have their immigration
cases delayed so long as they're meeting educational goals. We've seen the
elimination of privacy protections from sharing data between federal agencies. And
in addition to the actual concrete policy changes, we're hearing a lot of really
nasty rhetoric around immigrants and immigration. That's causing a lot of
concern among people who are in the immigrant community or who are allies to
the immigrant community about what this means in terms of harassment and hatred
even beyond the the legal changes. We're also seeing a change in deportation
practices while Obama was prolific in deportations. He had a very explicit
policy in place that the priority deportations would be people who were
national security threats whatever that might mean, or people with serious
criminal records, or people who had just recently entered the United States. That
policy is being removed and we're seeing more and more people who are deported
after living in the United States for a long time with family and friends and
lives built in the communities; who might have family or children who are US
citizens who don't have criminal records. So what does this mean for Anna Maria? For
one without a criminal record. She previously might have been able to have
some high amount of confidence that she wouldn't be a priority target and that
confidence is being eroded. We're seeing lots of people who previously
wouldn't have been targeted be deported regardless of their clean record, and lack
of action that really makes them more visible than they have been in the past.
She and her husband are starting to think about, what happens to their children if
they're deported. They have to make the decision because the children were born in
the United States, they're US citizens. They have to decide whether they should
give custody to friends and family who can stay in the United States, or if they
should take them back to Mexico, rather than letting them stay and get the US
education that they want to have. She has to be concerned about ICE being in her
community and outside of her home. Possibly having her fingerprints taken if
she's in the wrong place at the wrong time. She might have to worry about
friends and family from Mexico visiting, and crossing the border, and having social
media data taken from them. That, I mean, as we all know, might indicate a lot more
than just about the person who's crossing the border. Our social media lives give a
lot of information about her networks that might expose information about her. It's
also worth noting that Anna Maria is far from alone. There are as many as 11
million undocumented immigrants in the United States today. Over 2/3 of them have
been in the United States for more than 10 years which means they're integrated into
our communities, they own houses, they have jobs, they pay taxes, they live
really normal lives to the extent that they can in the United States. They've
built their lives here. So with this context in mind, I and some of my
collaborators were wondering, how this is really changing the way that people use
technology? Or if it is, given the sort of objectively heightened risk that they're
facing day to day. We wanted to know whether or not there's any sort of
reaction to those changes happening in their daily lives. We reached out to some
immigration support organizations, so immigrant rights and activist's
organizations and worked with them to be able to communicate with this community.
In the end, we were able to talk to 17 undocumented immigrants in the Midwest. We
were primarily asking them about how they manage risk in their daily lives offline,
as well as online. And whether or not that's changing over the last year or two
years, when this discourse around immigration is really changing, and then
whether these changes that we're seeing, are causing them to maybe react in the way
that they're using technology. I can tell you a little bit about who we spoke to.
The majority were women, 14 of our 17 participants were women. Most of them were
in their mid 30s, average age 35. And lots of them had children. So it was a lot of
parents. Everyone that we spoke to, had been in the United States for more than 10
years. So they really had their lives and their communities here. And most of them
were also from Mexico. That's about consistent with the immigrant community in
the United States, especially from Latin America. The majority are from Mexico. And
then there was a mix of immigration stories. Some of the people we spoke to
had crossed the southern border by foot or otherwise. And some people had overstayed
visas, had flown to the United States and stayed. So we wanted to first get an idea
of how they're managing and sort of thinking about risk in their daily lives
offline to get a sense of how deeply it impacts the way that they're living. What
we found across the board is that immigration is a really sort of looming
presence in their lives. They think a lot about how they're exposing themselves, and
that possibly exposing their status to authority figures. And they put like a lot
of careful consideration into how to keep a low profile. Driving is one really good
example of this cost-risk cost-benefit analysis that they're doing. Most people
we spoke to you talked about driving one way or another, and about half chose to
drive and half chose not to. Most of the people don't have driver's licenses for
the United States because it's difficult to get them without legal immigration
papers. So the risk with driving is that if you're stopped, if you're pulled over,
even if you didn't have a traffic violation, if you stop for a taillight or
something. The routine is to ask for a documentation of your license. And if you
don't have that there might be more questions, and in the end, you could
expose yourself to immigration or other legal law enforcement. Some people really
thought that the risk was worth it. To live their lives how they want to. They're
going to try to just not think about the risk and do what they need to do day to
day. Other people felt that the risk was too great and chose not to drive at all.
And that's a significant sacrifice, especially in the United States where our
public transportation systems aren't fantastic. This might mean that they can't
set their own work schedules, or they can't take their kids to school if they
miss the bus. So it's a significant risk. But it's also a big sacrifice if they
choose not to drive. People also think a lot about how they're exposing themselves
to authority figures. As one example, the decision to file taxes or not is a big
risk. So in the United States, you don't need to have any sort of government ID to
file taxes, you just need a tax ID. So a lot of these people are filing taxes. But
in order to do that, they are giving up to the federal government their names, their
addresses, their employment history, contact information. And some people think
that that risk is worth it, right. Because this person for example feels like, by
paying taxes every year they're able to establish a good history of upstanding
behavior. They can maybe have a better case for getting a legal status if the
time comes, when that's an option. And another example of, you know, exposing
information to authorities, might be filing for benefits for US born children,
or even library cards, or local ID cards. And the risk is going to be different in
each case depending on what they're exposing. Some people chose to forego
significant benefits to avoid giving that information to authorities. This person is
talking about DACA, the deferred action for childhood arrival program. This would
make it much easier for their son to go to college, give their son hopefully if they
trust the program, a much more reliable immigration status. They wouldn't
technically have a legal immigration status but they would be sort of assured
that their status, or rather their immigration case is a low priority. They
wouldn't be targeted. And as long as they're attending universities, they could
have confidence. So the program says that they wouldn't be targeted. These people
were concerned because in order to file that paperwork for their son, they had to
give up a lot of information about themselves: their phone numbers, their
names, their addresses. And in the end, they decided not to do it. And
unfortunately, only weeks after we spoke to this person, the DACA program was
repealed. This has led a lot of people to be concerned because the people who did
apply for the program, have given that information to the government, to the
Immigration services in particular. And at this point in time, we have no assurances
that that information won't be used in immigration cases. At the moment, there's
just a sort of FAQ page that says, we don't use this information now but we
reserve the right to change that at any time without telling anyone. People are
also really feeling the changes that are happening in the last couple of months.
Well, it's been too many months, the last year and a half. They're feeling the
pressure in their communities for immigration services being, or immigration
enforcement being more present and less predictable. Of one person described
feeling like, instead of coming to take a particular person, they're just coming and
looking for anyone who might be undocumented. Many people that we spoke
to, had negative experiences with ICE. Including,... if it weren't,... if they
hadn't had to experience themselves, lots of people had friends and family who had
negative experiences. And they're feeling this increase in presence of enforcement
in their communities. And this is leading them to make significant changes to the
way that they're living their lives. For example, one person we spoke to talked
about how they won't leave their child at home alone anymore because they're worried
that, while they're out, their child; if they're picked up while they're out, and
the child's at home alone, they might be left there. Or ICE might even show up at
the house while the child's there alone. They don't want either of those things to
happen. So people are changing a lot of the ways that they live day to day. And
this is a very present concern, in the way that they talk about their daily lives. So
we were wondering if this is true when they think about the way that they use
technology and what they're doing online. First, let me just give you an overview of
what sort of technologies they primarily use. This community is really mobile
heavy. Some people had computers in the home. A lot of people had access to
computers through local libraries and things. But everyone had a smartphone and
they were very dependent on it. Some people used email but when they spoke
about email, it was mostly to do with communicating with their kids schools or
doctor's appointments. It wasn't really a social thing. So the majority of what we
spoke to people about, were social media tools. In particular, all but one of our
participants were active users of Facebook. Most people were using WhatsApp
and Facebook Messenger, as well. These are the three primary tools that people had
the most to say about. There were some other tools that they were on: Instagram,
Twitter, and Snapchat. But really, the overarching, sort of a sense that people
had about these tools is that it's bringing significant benefits to their
daily lives. Especially, when you think about this community being separated
permanently from a lot of their friends and family back home, or their former
home, their origin country. What they had to do before, maybe sending photos in the
mail or through post cards, buying international calling cards, being able to
call people with video chat now is a significant improvement to their ability
to keep in touch with people back in Mexico or in wherever their... the origin
country is. People also talked about, how it's improving their lives in other ways.
For example, being able to organize their own work schedules, and have more control
over the way that they're employed. The benefits go on and on, and it's a lot of
the same things that we've experienced over the last decade, and the way that our
lives have changed for the better. Because we're able to use these technologies. When
we ask people about risk, the things that really pop into their heads first, are
hackers. They're really concerned about fraud and identity theft. And they think a
lot about their children contacting strangers on the internet, or accessing
inappropriate content. But that's not to say that concerns related to their status,
their illegal status were absent. They're just much less certain. You know, it's
easy to think about the consequences of identity theft. That's sort of concrete.
But a lot of these status related concerns were less concrete. People talked about
harassment as well, being something that's increasing in the real world, as well as
online. In particular participating in communities, or in conversations online
that may be expose their immigration status. This harassment has moved online.
They're experiencing it in the real world, as well, but they're hearing stories or
having stories themselves about people threatening them with immigration
enforcement. That's increasing over the last year or so. There are a couple of
ways that people manage these risks. Primarily, what we found people really
thought about, is their concrete steps to managing their privacy online were fairly
basic things like, making sure that they only accept friends and family on
Facebook. They might have set their profile to private. But they're really not
fiddling with these more fine-grained privacy settings. They're not, you know,
sharing particular posts only to particular people, or using that. They
were talking about, they didn't tell us about using these, like private groups or
anything like that to sort of create separate spheres of friends and family.
And channel management, just in the sense that like, even though they think about
curating this, like close network of friends and family, they're still really
thoughtful about what they post in which channel. Whether like it's safe to put a
photo, for example on their wall, or you know, in their timeline versus sending it
directly to family. This person, for example, even after they post something
publicly, publicly being, you know. within their Facebook wall, they'll still go back
to a couple days later and just delete everything because they're not totally
confident that that's private. Another really interesting thing is that in all of
this, the conversations we had, no one really expressed the sense that they
understood that they're really living on Facebook. The tools that they're using
like almost exclusively, are all owned by the same company. No one also express any
sort of sense that these companies are entities in themselves that might have
interest in access to their data. Much less one that cooperates with law
enforcement. That concern didn't appear in any of our conversations. They tend to
think about these platforms as being sort of a medium to communicate with other
people. You know, the way that they use it, is to talk to other individuals, or
groups of individuals. But the platform doesn't seem to be like a repository for
data. In fact, they are expressing significant trust in Facebook, Facebook in
particular. A lot of people were grateful for the changes that Facebook's made over
the last year or two, in terms of account management. So they're grateful that if
there's a suspicious login attempt, they'll be able to stop it. That's helped
a lot of people. And that sort of generates trust in these platforms. And
the sense that Facebook really has their back. In addition to sort of managing the
way that they're sharing information, we did see some people choosing to abstain
from sharing. Especially, when it came to topics around immigration. Some people
chose to not join, you know, public Facebook groups, or get information from
certain places because they were afraid that by associating with these groups,
they might indicate something publicly about their status. And that's frustrating
for a lot of people who want to participate in these conversations, and
especially, because the discourse around immigration is so toxic in the United
States. Some people express this feeling that they have to just sit there and take
this discourse happening around them without participating, because they're
worried about being targeted, or harassed, or maybe even like having physical
consequences: being followed, or having immigration sent to their house if someone
were to find them. Some people expressed the opposite, though, which is
encouraging, right? Some people felt that, even though the risk is there, it's more
important for them to share their thoughts than it is for them to be tiptoeing around
immigration enforcement. This is also really interesting because this sort of
exposes sometimes family tensions about these topics. This is a really, it's a
mixed status community, meaning that sometimes parents will be undocumented and
children will be US citizens. Or lots of people have friends and family who have a
different legal status than they do. So risk is really distributed. You know, it's
not just individual, it's within families and within communities. And there can be a
lot of tension between, you know, children and parents, or friends, you know,
siblings, about how they share information on these platforms. Some people are much
more conservative with what they share. And this quote also reveals something else
kind of interesting. When we talk to people about concerns about immigration,
it's very rarely that they talk about whether immigration will be able to
investigate them, as much as it is about when, which is this final point that
there's really this sense of resignation in the community about what information
immigration enforcement has about them. Lots of people feel like, it doesn't
really matter what they do. Immigration can know where they are and what they're
doing. They can find them if they just decide to. It's just a matter of whether
immigration enforcement is going to choose to come after them, rather than whether
they can. This is also true with the way that they think about technology. They
have a sense that there's really no privacy. If immigration decided to, they
would be able to see the messages on Facebook, they could see what was
physically on their phones, that they have this sort of all-powerful, you know,
toolkit to access their digital information. And honestly, this story in
particular, this sense of surveillance comes from experience often. This person
had a really negative experience with ICE, you know, coming and talking to her
family. And ICE knowing things that they hadn't told anyone. Somehow ICE had known
things that they were keeping very private. And so there's this assumption
that, well, it's happened to me before, I've seen it happen to my friends, they
probably could know anything they want to. But it's not all negative, it's not all
resignation. Another thing that we saw, many people, not everyone, but maybe half
of the people we spoke to, had this really strong sense that there was this
responsibility to share things in the community to help each other. There's this
growing sense of community identity. And this might mean sharing information about
resources for the immigrant community or sharing information about workshops, or
events, vigils, but also information about immigration enforcement. If ICE is in a
particular community, they might tell their friends and family, avoid this area
until further notice. They're helping each other, they're sending information. So, it
can't be total resignation. There's still this sort of beam of hope that they're
helping each other. And they must have hope that they can do something because
they are. And this has been something that has become faster and easier with
technology, too, right? It's much easier to send a message than it is to call, or
to spread information before we had, you know, smartphones. But all of this really
leads to the question: Considering how much they inconvenience themselves in
their daily lives offline, why are they doing comparatively little online to
change their practices, or to reduce their visibility? I don't think it's enough
that, although lots of people expressed this sense that they're like relatively
low-tech literate. That in and of itself isn't really enough of an explanation,
right? There are so many different factors into the way that they're making these
decisions, and they're thinking carefully about the decisions they do make. So we
have some thoughts on this. It really can't be understated how much of a benefit
technology is to this community. It's making a significant difference in the way
that they live their lives. So the choice to abstain is not trivial. The risk that
they're facing by using like Facebook, by putting phone numbers on Facebook, or
sharing photos of their family and friends, and like, building these online
networks, is, really the risk involved in that is uncertain, right? At this point we
have really sparse data about direct connections between the use of technology,
or the use of social media and immigration enforcement, and consequences. Maybe that
will change, but at this point it's unclear which changes might be actually
beneficial, right? Because there's not a direct connection between using this tool,
putting this information online, and immigration enforcement showing up.
There's also the significant trust in the platforms that they're using and their
peers are using as well and there just tends to be less critical thought about
the safety of using platforms when there's already this component of trust. Facebook
has done a lot for account security for example over the last couple of years and
has built trust in this community. And as well as having you know all of your
community on a tool when they're all there together there's like less of a, less
critical thought about whether they're it's safe to be there. And there is this
component of resignation when we've sort of pushed people to think really
explicitly about the risk with immigration enforcement, being in sharing information
on social media using technology there was the sense that if they wanted to - they
could have the information, I mean, they already have it in a lot of ways when
they're filing taxes or just you know it's accessible to authorities is the general
sense of regardless of what they do online. So this kind of in combination
with the uncertain risk it makes it really hard to make concrete steps towards
changes that might be helpful. So finally, I just wanted to share a couple of things
that I learned especially as a digital security trainer and doing this study.
Most importantly everyone that we spoke to was really excited to learn. That's just
general like tech literacy but also security and privacy. People really care
and they're excited. And everyone expressed gratitude that we were talking
to them about this topic. They care a lot. But so what was difficult for me having a
background in trainings was still being surprised by things that in these
conversations that thinking I knew what they wanted or what they needed and that
not being the case. So one thing I would say is you know don't assume that you know
what's best for them or even what they want or need. Go and talk to people
they're really you'll learn a lot from talking to people about what they think
their risk is versus what they're doing. For example something that I was surprised
to learn is that they're really not using online resources when they have concerns
about online privacy. They're talking to their kids and they're talking to their
neighbors and their friends. So for this community in particular it would be really
much more effective to go into an in- person training. A training in Spanish in
this case. In the language that they're naturally speaking and have like in-person
resources that will get you much further than you know compiling lists of ideas or
tools or strategies, that'll probably never be accessed. And as a vehicle to do
this, when we had a really positive experience working with support
organizations, on the front end that allowed us to build trust with the
community, so by working with people who they already trusted and who already knew
them well I really think we were able to talk to people much more openly and much...
with much more trust than they would have otherwise. Whether they would have spoken
to us at all is a question. They also were a great resource for us as we were
developing interview materials and also like training materials afterwards when we
went back to communities and conducted digital trainings. They helped us develop,
you know, culturally sensitive language and we were able to just ask, you know, is
this location is this style of presentation, is this length, is this time
what should we do you know they were a resource to us to make sure that the
things that we were developing were most accessible to the people that we're
talking to. And, they also themselves from what I've seen have a lot of questions
about the way that they're using technology. That's a great place to go and
talk to people about, you know, organizational practices. And you might
find that it's a lot easier to get people to change their practices if they're in
sort of an organizational setting where there's peer pressure or maybe some
hierarchy of people who are really encouraging them to use more secure tools
or to think carefully about data they're collecting about people that they
contact. So working with these organizations also might be an opportunity
to do trainings with activists and with lawyers and with other people who are
working alongside this community. Finally, which is always a difficult thing to hear
as a trainer, the people we spoke to probably aren't going to be adopting new
tools for one it might not be safe, it's hard to make that calculus right, but a
tool that's specifically designed for a community at risk or in order to do a
particular function that would be of interest to, for example, the undocumented
community or some other vulnerable community might increase visibility
depending on the threat model. If they're found with a particular app or if the app
is like exposing number of users or location of users, for example. And it's
not to say that we should stop developing new tools we should always think about
ways to make better and safer and more private resources. But it's worth thinking
especially if you're going to be working with communities or building resources for
communities that we should think also about how to make sure that they're using
the tools they are already used more effectively and more safely. That might
mean sitting down with someone for a while and going to their privacy settings on
Facebook or, you know, making sure that their settings on Whatsapp, make don't
back up data to the cloud or expose phone numbers to people they don't know. But
there's a lot to do in both of these directions. And especially if you're going
to be moving into working with these communities, this is something to keep in
mind, that I thought was especially poignant. For that I can take questions.
*applause* Herald angel (H): So we have four
microphones in this room. I see one is already occupied with somebody. May I
remind you that a question is typically one to two sentence and ends with a
question mark. And with that I will take microphone 4.
Mic4: Hi, thanks! You mentioned that these communities are reluctant to adopt new
tools. Were there any exceptions to that or were there any like attributes of new
tools that you think they would be more likely to adopt?
Allison: Yeah that's a good question! I I've been thinking about this. I would say
that this is absolutely true what I said about reluctance to adopt new tools when
it's when we're talking about social media. So it's difficult to like move
people to Signal for example from Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger because the people
they talk to are already on these tools and it's not just moving one person but
like a community. If we start to think about tools that might be special-purpose
we didn't talk to anyone who mentioned this app but I know in the past there have
been discussions about ways being used it's like a crowd-sourced map system being
used to like track law enforcement. Like I said we didn't talk to anyone who used
that app but possibly if there's like a specific utility in it there could be some
critical mass of people who spread the word in a smaller community. Yeah it's
something to think about. I don't think it's impossible but I would say it would
be challenging. H: I assume that the baby doesn't want to
speak on microphone 1 so I'm gonna go to a microphone 3.
Mic3: I have two questions is that okay? Allison: Yeah.
Mic3: Thank you. The first one is kind of a nitty-gritty academic question and that
is: can you tell us anything about your IRB approval process, what you're doing to
protect subjects data? Because this is very sensitive and I'm curious how you've
approached that. Allison: Yeah absolutely. So we didn't
have IRB approval before we spoke to anyone. We actually got an exemption for
collecting data about participants. So we compensated for each interview that we
did, we gave participants $20. We were not required to collect any proof of payment
we recorded the interviews and encrypted them locally. They were translated by
people in our research group and then transcribed with all identifying location
and name data redacted. And, that those were all stored encrypted on our personal
drives and then in a University Drive. All the data has been deleted now all of the
original data as well. Mic3: Awesome! Thanks. The other one is a
big picture scatterbrain question: which is about how this is a technological
solution to a political problem. Do you feel that directing or helping immigrants
understand how to protect themselves technologically, is the answer or
necessarily part of the answer or do you feel like maybe eventually our community
needs to be helping people exit places like the U.S. that are increasingly
hostile to immigrants? Allison: That's a good question. I don't
think that helping people be more safe online is really a solution. I mean the
solutions gonna be in policy and in law. I think this is a utility really in the
short term is like making sure people feel safe and like have more control over
disclosure to the extent that they can. But I don't think that's going to,... I
don't think that's a winning, you know, single pronged battle. As for leaving the
United States that's kind of a funny question considering how much people have
sacrificed to come to the U.S. and especially having integrated into
communities already. A lot of the people I spoke about today were long-term residents
I mean everyone was a long-term resident. So they've sort of built their lives in
the U.S. But there has been a significant decrease in the number of people
immigrating to the U.S. without authorization that's thanks to Obama era
policies of like, you know, return immediately at the border so whether
people are now moving to other countries is a good question and whether we should
encourage that is... I don't know, interesting.
Mic3: Thank you H: Microphone 2.
Mic2: Hi, so I have a questions: Are there any initiatives to help the people in a
way that so,.. The fact that they don't... they feel that they are less risk online
and they don't perceive the risk as much and do you feel that helping them
understanding those risk and maybe trying to be more secure online will actually
help them or is there a resignation towards the government accurate?
Allison: If you're thinking about specific people I think,... Maybe when individual's
information is going to be accessible in the long run if immigration enforcement
really chooses to maybe that sense of resignation to some extent is accurate but
lots of people aren't necessarily on the radar. And I think what's most beneficial
about helping people understand how to use technology more effectively and like
that's really just increasing confidence. It's this uncertainty and like choosing to
abstain from participating in conversations because they just don't
trust that they can be secure, like private enough. You know or that their
personal information, their home addresses that they they're still at risk of this
harassment like that's... That lack of confidence and privacy is really what I
think can be helped and... Sorry I had another point. Yeah, but if it's worthwhile
you know thinking about how you can contribute to helping. I mean even
outside of like privacy work, a lot of people really just are eager to learn more
about how to use technology like to help their lives. Right, so the other thing I
was going to say was, we also put significant thought into whether or not,
you know, how to have these conversations with people and like how to ask questions
about, you know, the risks online without really freaking them out. Because we
didn't really have solutions. It's not like at the end of an interview we could
say like well we have a solution for you just install this app and you'll be safe.
So, it's sort of this balance between making sure that people still, you know,
use tools in the way that's so helpful for their lives. Right like we don't want them
to stop using Facebook if it means that they stop talking to their parents back in
Mexico. We don't want them to stop using email if it means that they can't talk to
their kid's teachers anymore. So it's this balance between like being aware of the
risk and being confident that you're doing as much as you can while not choosing to
abstain. H: So I'm hiding here in the corner
because I'm trying to see whether somebody's at number four? There's
somebody there yes. So Mic4 please. Mic4: Thanks. Hi, so I was wondering since
Facebook is the most popular tool that they use and they probably won't change
it, did you find anything that the people at Facebook could do to help undocumented
immigrants more? Allison: Yeah, I think the things that
Facebook can think about are really generalizable to a lot of vulnerable
communities. People, there were a few things in particular that some people are
really uncomfortable with, for example, Whatsapp if you're added to like a group
of people your phone number is exposed to everyone else in the group, without your
consent and that might be the case with like group SMS and things. But like, the
fact that Whatsup even uses a phone number is kind of something that we should
migrate out of, right. Facebook collecting phone numbers and collecting, you know,
location data regardless of how easy it is to opt in and out. And so, this is
primarily an academic work that's going to appear at the HCI, a human-computer
interaction conference, and we talk a lot in the paper about what these bigger
services can do. And really like we as a community can advocate for Facebook
resisting cooperating with law enforcement right. I mean it shouldn't really matter
to Facebook where you live or or how you got there. They're a social media platform
they shouldn't be, you know, helping immigration move people around physical
borders. They should be totally you know border agnostic. So advocating for that
kind of attitude shift would be helpful H: Microphone 2
Mic2: So thank you for the very interesting talk. And I have a question
that sort of picks up on the previous one. And because it's, you talk about it
Facebook has become such an important sort of a political actor in this arena. I'm
wondering if you've been following up on that as a survey research problem like
what's, what is there, what is it that they are doing and is this something
that's happening unwittingly or is there something about the general strategy of
Facebook that surf helps create this kind of trust. And I'm also wondering, going,
taking that question further, sorry it's more than a sentence that,
if you've been thinking about is if you see anything sort of suddenly eroding that
trust in the future, and I'm specifically thinking about this now, this question
about how it was possible for all this Russian money to go into Facebook
advertisements and that served, that's kind of point in the direction of pressure
for Facebook to be less serve general in their trust and picking up on certain, on
specific political issues which could also be immigration and disclosing some
information that they already have? A: Your question about whether there could
be a shift in trust in the future if something could trigger that. The example
in Detroit right where law enforcement was able to get a phone number from Facebook
with a warrant and then track the person with this phone number. If there are more
and more cases of social media data being used in immigration cases and there's
evidence to think that that might happen. It's possible that narrative might
overtake this sense that people have right now that Facebook's looking out for them
by keeping their account, you know, there's that letting them control it. In
terms of Facebook picking up immigration as a sort of an activist or a political
topic that they're interested in, I would now hold my breath on that one, but we'll
see. Yeah. H: So we have time for exactly one more
question and that is on Mic 1. Mic1: Hi, did you collect any information
or study anything about how these people were using financial services and such
things like online payments? Did they have bank accounts, were they concerned about
their financial privacy? A: Yeah, actually people, the concerns
they have with privacy and in terms of the way that they were using like online
banking because people were I mean using credit cards and online banking and paying
rent, you know, or utilities online. They didn't talk about privacy much in that
context except that they have this concern about their financial information being
stolen by hackers. Right, like the concern is for other people rather than the
entities that are providing these services. And I think a lot of the concern
there is coming from the fact that they have a lot to lose and very few legal
protections should something bad happened to them. But, yeah, so just generally like
people were using online banking and had bank accounts and were using these online
financials services. Some people were opting out but it wasn't due to privacy
concerns it was because they were worried about using their credit card on the
Internet. H: So with that I'd like you to help me to
thank our speaker Allison for this wonderful talk.
*Applause*
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