The recent privacy laws approved are a step forward to data privacy and usage transparency, but ultimately, the problem is still there, you cannot see who is using your data, I believe that the solution should be that each user is correctly notified that the information that companies recollect about them is not only that which they willingly submit to their platforms. Also, users should be able to see the information that these companies have inferred about them, since that can be quite impressive, like, deceases, depression, addictions, etc. And of course, you should be able to request the deletion of your personal information or at least, the deletion of misleading in information.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/opinion/computational-inference.html

Computational Inference was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this week we focused mainly on the Backend. I deployed the NodeJS application to Heroku and it’s got a MongoDB hosted in Mongolab. All thanks under free tier hosting and with https. And it was really easy to setup, that’s why Heroku is my go-to platform for small projects, you can deploy your project as simple as a push to a remote git branch, it will run tests and deploy for you.

The work we did on the backend is administrative stuff, now users can create badges and assign them to individual people (they need to have been created before), and the frontend consumes that information, displayed in the user profile, you can see their badges and their descriptions, the profile picture of the user and it’s biography. Right now we don’t have a way to differentiate between admins and regular users, I would like to implement a policy based authorization ala AWS (if you have ever used it).

It’s like so, you have a global admin, and that admin can give permission to other users to perform certain actions, each policy is untransferable, strict and concise. It can be as minimal as able to see badges, see profiles. And go up to able to revoke, and remove profiles. There will be one global admin who is in control of everything and it will delegate responsibilities to other users. Each policy rule must grant only one action, so, if someone wants to see, create, modify, and delete badges, it’s user should have attached a policy which contains a rule to see, a rule to create, a rule to modify, and a rule to delete.

What we will present this week will our progress now, we will probably show our progress in the API as well as in the React Native application, which now stores user information and it’s access token, so the user don’t have to login again unless the token is either expired or lost.

Review Week 10 was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week we will complete the profile section of the application, we will try to display the everything, the username, the profile Image, update them and also display the badges, create a popup to show them along with their description. Also, for the backend we should create the admin roles, and also setup the admins in an environment variable for now.

After that, we will work in the simplest way to deliver badges, that will be, that an admin grants the badge directly to an user, or list of users (bulk edit). This operation should only be available to admins. I think we should also define different roles, and attach those roles to our users, i.e.: independent roles to all possible actions, like, submit a badge, grant a badge, remove a badge, delete badges, remove users, request badges, create and invite to groups, attach badges to groups, etc.

This should be enough work for the week, considering the amount of work that this implies.

Week 10 — Plan was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week we made a little more progress, we did setup the authentication on the backend, now we are using Google sign-in to authenticate the user and restrict the email domains to itesm.mx, the backend is now also checking the id token, from this authentication, retrieving the user’s information, and updating it in our database to store it’s user image, name, etc. Maybe we should make that editable afterwards in the profile.

Now, we have a simple middleware to check for authentication, we will need a way to check for authorization afterwards, (can it be native to google signin? or should we implement our own). For this implementation we are had to configure a firebase project, create a database and also, generate the appropriate keys for the project and configure android’s Maven project to use the corresponding apis.

I think it was a good advancement, because it turned out to be more complex (in terms of configuration) than we initially thought it would be. So, now we are under our expected project’s burn rate (I think I am not using this term correctly, but who cares). We will need to be a little bit more productive from now on when we execute tasks.

Week 9 — Review was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A special product that comes to my mind Juicero, a juice press company founded in Silicon Valley, promising a healthy life, cold and fresh fruit and vegetable juice, with the convenience of not having to shop and the vegetables for yourself, it was priced $400 USD, each bag of juice is $5 USD. And it turns out it was just an expensive press with and app, and a lot of unnecessary configuration just to squeeze a bag of shopped vegetables. It’s the most useless product it’s ever existed. Yet, they received millions on founding because they had a good speech. the CEO of Juicero even wrote a Medium article about how this “system” produces value to their customers and provides a great experience, overall, it’s all unintentionally funny by how inconvenient the product is, and by how the guy tries to push it too hard. You can find the article here.

So when I saw this week’s headlines about hacking and hand-squeezing Produce Packs, I had a one overriding thought: ”We know hacking consumer products is nothing new. But how can we better demonstrate the incredible value we know our connected system delivers?”

I believe Juicero represents all that is wrong with the Silicon Valley “disruptive” company. They created a vision and mission for their product, with the objective of Change the world, disrupt the tech industry, and Improve the life of it’s customers, but they only provide with an overly complicated device connected to the internet with no purpose whatsoever, but to make sure that you only use their own bags of juice.

So, why do we need a machine that squeezes our juice bags? why do we need a machine that turns on the lights, instead of hitting the switch by ourselves? They are creating a culture similar to a pyramid scheme, in the sense that they try to convince in the thinking that you absolutely need their product, you should buy their expensive services, and they do it by saying things like these:

The journey from Coca-Cola to carrots to Juicero’s rainbow of fruits and vegetables has let me connect my work to my personal mission and passion: solving some of our nation’s nutrition and obesity challenges. I’m very proud of what my teams and I have accomplished in the last ten years, especially in regard to positively shifting the dialogue about our food system and how it can better serve all of us in health, nutrition, and sustainability. All of that was training for becoming CEO of Juicero — the single most ambitious and inspiring job I’ve ever held.

Let me conclude saying, please, before you buy into any new product or service, think twice. Do you really need it? What value does it add to your life? Is it worth the money? Does it really simplify the task it solves, instead of adding complexity to it?

Should this exist? was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s also risk at services on the internet. If you have read the user agreement document on sites like Facebook, you can see that they may sell your data to other parties, which includes advertisers, governments and who knows what else. With all the information you gave them, not just by posting stories to facebook, but by being tagged in other’s posts, your private conversations, and overall browsing the site, they can infer what you like, what kind of person you are, your relations with other persons, of course that will not be 100% correct, but they still have that information from you.

They know about you, so what? You have nothing to hide. The problem comes in when your data is leaked and malicious entities come into play, misusing your data, stealing your identity or even stealing from you, it has happened before and probably will keep happening.

It’s also important consider the ethical side of companies collecting your information, it’s not only that you are giving them your private information, they can also use that data to try to influence your opinions, behavior and preferences, with ads targeted specifically for you that try to convince you of buying stuff and to get to agree with a political point of view, like people said happened in the 2016 US elections.

Another good example is the recent ‘leak’ from a fitness company, Strava. Not exactly a leak because the company willingly published all of it’s users activity on the platform, which shows a heat-map of places where users use the fitness tracker. With this information you can potentially see the routes your neighbors make, but the interesting part that the internet found out is that you can outline secret military bases, and you can clearly see the use of the fitness tracker in Afghanistan, and see the layout of the base, you can even figure out the patrolling routines they have.

You can see how users of Strava where using it’s service for their benefit, but they ended up sharing really sensitive information, which leads to the conclusion of the article. With companies collecting information, and giant companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft services already stablished in our communities, it’s almost impossible not to share information with these companies or any other surveillance systems out there. People use Google to search, to navigate the city, they use Facebook to organize events and keep in contact with people, they use Windows as their personal computers, which collects information about the use of the computer. Some applications record user’s screens without their consent, supposedly for user experience research, but it’s a violation of the user’s privacy any way.

The idea is, be smart about what you share, when you share it, whom you share it with, always consider the implications of using a service, consider if it’s okay to share that sensitive information through the internet, you may regret it later (I know people who has had very bad experiences with this), specially if you are located in a secret US military base in Afghanistan, you might want to turn off your fitness tracker and your phone’s GPS service.

Smart Surveillance was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week mike and Carlos created the backend project and did a little bit of work, basically they created models and routes for users and badges, there’s still a lot of functionality missing, like authentication and authorization, admin functionality, group creating, badge distribution, events, etc.

In the frontend application I already have google sign-in, were only Tec domains can login, this will help us limit our users to valid Tec de Monterrey students and admins, but I still miss functionality to create a user in the actual application and store it’s information there, That is what I am planning to do this week, and also the user should be able to see it’s profile.

This Monday presentation will consist of showing the progress we have, we will show the mocks and the progress of the application.

Week 7 — pre-mortem was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week we are planning to start the backend and also make some progress on the frontend part, creating the UI for the application. And since we are no longer working with the UoA team we can decide the complete flow of the application, the design and UX.

I already built the login screen for the application but then I remembered Ken told me about some Google authentication from Tec de Monterrey. I think I will make it more simple and limit the login to google login and restrict the domain to itesm.mx, that way I can ensure that the users are part of the school, to which users are admins and which are normal users? I guess we can define them on the database, because I don’t think giving admin access to all, non students would be a good idea (student IDs start with an ‘A’ and others with an ‘L’, I think, maybe there’s more who knows).

Week 6 — Pre-mortem was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We had some trouble in our meeting with UoA team this week, we didn’t like their way of working, they were trying to assign us frontend issues from their project to us (which is completely different from what we understood the first time), we didn’t like the technologies they were using, and we were afraid that they would assign more tasks than we could handle.

So at the end we decided to decouple from the project of our Canadian fellows and keep working on our own version of the application, which we had already started. We have been advancing, we have the login screen implemented in React Native now. But it’s not as much as we expected to be done by the end of this week. I will try to push my team to work a little bit more, because if we keep this pace we will probably not gonna make it at the end.

Week 5 — Review was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We forgot to submit our review and plan for week 5. So I will talk about what our plan was.

On week 5 we were planning to meet with the UoA team and see how we would collaborate in the project, share our new ideas and progress. We were planning to make some progress in the frontend application in React Native, mainly, create some mocks of the application and the most essential screens, afterwards, I would implement them in React Native, just the UI part without logic implemented.

From the backend perspective, we want to setup the project, which we were planning to code in Go or in Node, since these languages is what the team has experience on, we also have to design the database and choose which one.

Week 5 — Plan was originally published in Smart Citizens on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.