Saturday, April 14, 2018

Reflect on a Guest Lecture


The guest lecture that I am going to reflect on Is the guest that my group and I introduced, Stephanie Rosenthal. Stephanie Rosenthal is currently an assistant Professor of Applied Data Analytics here at Chatham University. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2007 with a Bachelors in Science and Computer Science, and later received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon in Philosophy and Computer Science in 2012. She was a Human-Robot Interaction Scientist for Bossa Nova Robotics, and then was a Research Scientist at Carnegie Mellon before she started teaching at Chatham during the Fall 2017 semester. She had also worked at startups, government agencies, and universities before joining Chatham. Dr. Rosenthal teaches programming, data science, and research methods classes in the business department.


Dr. Rosenthal’s presentation was about data collecting on the internet (in specific). She discussed how cookies work and the various ways that companies/websites collect data and information about the people that visit their site. She mentioned that they can collet information about you from what you click on, if you sign up to get discounts, obviously because they are asking you for personal information, like email, phone number, name, etc. They can also collect information about you if and when you buy something from their website if that is available because you’re giving them your card number and address as well.

This aspect is a good thing, yet it can be very dangerous as well. The positive part of this is that companies can figure out what products are popular and which ones aren’t selling to help them determine what they should sell more and less of. The negative of this is that there can be fake companies asking for your information that can hack everything of yours that’s related to the internet, which is a lot. The other negative is that some companies, like YouTube for example, illegally collects kids’ data. An article from MIT’s Technology’s Review says that “ YouTube knowingly gathers data about children under 13 years of age, tracks them across the web, and delivers ads to them without the parental consent that is required by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/610800/youtube-may-be-illegally-collecting-kids-data/

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