Self-Service Data on Open Markets?

• In Event: The Social Lives of Data: Attention, Agency, Exploitation

Abstract

For commercial reasons including capture and retention of onlookers and consumers, markets-platform, on Internet, stage the data produced within them. It also exposes them to the risk — or profit — of this data being collected by external algorithmic robots, also known as « bots ». Based on the breaching experiment theorized by Garfinkel, it is possible to use other bots to force platforms to reveal the policy put in place to protect, or on the contrary leave in self-service, the data they stage. We propose to show, based on a work in progress on a livewebcam platform (i.e. a market where producers of live and a priori erotic content meet onlookers and customers), how little the platform protects the data that emerges on its surface (on the contrary, some markets-platform try to provide strong protection against suspicious third parties). It is thus possible to imagine what alliances are likely to appear (with content thieving bots for example) from a situation where all open markets are in a position to be looted by third parties.

In a second time, we will try to show how these data could be exploited by third parties like marketers or sociologists in order to produce knowledge about markets. We will propose an original representation of market dynamics based on graph theory, and a representation of the distribution of engagement trajectories from onlooker to consumer, likely to be produced by any third party with scraping technologies and the latest network modeling techniques.

Author

• Jérémie Garrigues, Université de Lausanne