Can "Conscious Data Contribution" Help Users to Exert "Data Leverage" Against Technology Companies?

Abstract

Tech users currently have limited ability to act on concerns regarding the negative societal impacts of large tech companies. However, recent work suggests that users can exert leverage using their role in the generation of valuable data, for instance by withholding their data contributions to intelligent technologies. We propose and evaluate a new means to exert this type of leverage against tech companies: "conscious data contribution" (CDC). Users who participate in CDC exert leverage against a target tech company by contributing data to technologies operated by a competitor of that company. Using simulations, we find that CDC could be highly effective at reducing the gap in intelligent technologies performance between an incumbent and their competitors. In some cases, just 20% of users contributing data they have produced to a small competitor could help that competitor get 80% of the way towards the original company's best-case performance. We discuss the implications of CDC for policymakers, tech designers, and researchers.

SoK: Anti-Facial Recognition Technology

“…P could try to prevent F from collecting their online images by withholding them. Recent works propose the concept of "data leverage" where users of online platforms work collectively to withhold data or control how their data is used by tech companies [100], [32], [121]. While not specifically aimed at facial recognition, these proposals offer alternative models for online engagement while protecting user data.…”

“…In the last 12 months, more than a dozen AFR tools have been proposed (e.g., [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32]). While most are constrained to research prototypes, a few of these tools have produced public software releases and gained significant media attention [19], [22], [33].…”

Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies

“…[60,129]. Building on the data as labor concept, several papers have explored early concepts of data leverage, investigating how people might withhold or redirect their data labor to force a data-dependent organization to change its practices [117,118].…”

“…Simply put, data leverage refers to influence that members of the public have over tech companies because important computing technologies rely on the public's data contributions. Data leverage includes power achieved by harming data-dependent technologies, such as "data strikes" [118] and "data poisoning attacks" [44], as well as power achieved by helping to improve alternative technologies and thereby create increased competition [117]. The concept of data leverage seeks to capture an emergent theme in fields that help to make up the FAccT community, including human-computer interaction (HCI), social computing, society and technology studies (STS), and areas of machine learning (ML) research that seek to advance fairness, justice, and a human-centered perspective (e.g.…”

“…The concept of data leverage seeks to capture an emergent theme in fields that help to make up the FAccT community, including human-computer interaction (HCI), social computing, society and technology studies (STS), and areas of machine learning (ML) research that seek to advance fairness, justice, and a human-centered perspective (e.g. [5,7,19,28,51,82,117,118,120]). Our goal with this paper is to make clear the connections between the research happening in these fields and, through the concept of data leverage, show that the proverbial whole of this framework is greater than the sum of its disciplinary parts.…”