Internet profiling: The economy of data intraoperability on Facebook and Google

Bechmann, Anja

doi:10.7146/mediekultur.v29i55.8070

Cited by 23 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 32 publications

(33 reference statements)

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“…The market for digital advertising is dominated by Facebook and Google, who aggregate users, and connect these with advertising intermediaries, content developers, ad publishers, and advertisers. Investigating power relations in advertising networks starts with a deeper understanding of the emerging Facebook/Google duopoly, each of which follows a distinctive data strategy (Bechmann, 2013). Drawing on a mix of digital methods, financial analysis, and interviews with industry informants, two levels of analysis emerge.…”

Section: Infrastructural Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

PLATFORM POWER & PUBLIC VALUE

Poell

Nieborg

Dijck

2020

SPIR

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This paper offers an analytical framework to critically examine the power relations that structure the online platform ecosystem. Following a relational understanding of power, it focuses on the connections between the five leading platform corporations - Alphabet-Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) - and the many other digital properties (i.e. platforms, websites, and apps) that populate the online ecosystem. Exploring these connections, we notice that a growing number of digital properties are integrated with, and increasingly dependent on the infrastructural services offered by the GAFAM platforms. These services include: advertising networks, login services, cloud hosting, app stores, payment systems, data analytics, video hosting, geospatial and navigation services, search functionalities, and operating systems. Such infrastructural services allow a wide variety of companies to make their products and services available online, attract and target users, analyze their activities, and generate revenue. It is through the ubiquitous integration and consistent use of these infrastructural services that platform power emerges and is consolidated. To demonstrate how such power relations can be analyzed, the paper highlights two key infrastructural services: app stores and ad networks. For each service it discusses two levels of analysis that can be pursued to gain insight in the workings of platform power. Ultimately a systematically analysis of the key infrastructural services will need to be developed to arrive at a refined taxonomy of platform power relations. Such taxonomy is essential to establish guidelines for governing the platform ecosystem in correspondence with key public values.

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Section: Infrastructural Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

PLATFORM POWER & PUBLIC VALUE

Poell

Nieborg

Dijck

2020

SPIR

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“…Specialized APIs generate data points from all over the web to automate the creation of fine-grained user profiles that are made accessible for third-party developers on a contractual and proprietary basis, e.g. to enable the dissemination of advertising (Bechmann, 2013). Access to these APIs is governed by either keeping the documentation of API specifications from public view, by limiting access quota to data streams, or by enforcing the use of specific developer environments for which authentication is required.…”

Section: Proprietary Social Media Apis and The Architecture Of The Webmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weaving seams with data: Conceptualizing City APIs as elements of infrastructures

et al. 2019

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This article addresses the role of application programming interfaces (APIs) for integrating data sources in the context of smart cities and communities. On top of the built infrastructures in cities, application programming interfaces allow to weave new kinds of seams from static and dynamic data sources into the urban fabric. Contributing to debates about ''urban informatics'' and the governance of urban information infrastructures, this article provides a technically informed and critically grounded approach to evaluating APIs as crucial but often overlooked elements within these infrastructures.The conceptualization of what we term City APIs is informed by three perspectives: In the first part, we review established criticisms of proprietary social media APIs and their crucial function in current web architectures. In the second part, we discuss how the design process of APIs defines conventions of data exchanges that also reflect negotiations between API producers and API consumers about affordances and mental models of the underlying computer systems involved. In the third part, we present recent urban data innovation initiatives, especially CitySDK and OrganiCity, to underline the centrality of API design and governance for new kinds of civic and commercial services developed within and for cities. By bridging the fields of criticism, design, and implementation, we argue that City APIs as elements of infrastructures reveal how urban renewal processes become crucial sites of socio-political contestation between data science, technological development, urban management, and civic participation.

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“…Moreover, since the reference documentation describes a platform's available objects, relations, and fields, we can employ these materials to write histories of a platform's changing data strategies, as demonstrated by media scholars. 58 We can use them to reconstruct the interplay between recent data scandals around social media and the changes made to their APIs and development platforms.…”

Section: Interface Module and Standard-level Historiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media and Platform Historiography: Challenges and Opportunities

Helmond

Vlist

2019

TMG

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In this article, we propose a methodological outlook for historical platform studies to increase the prominence of platform historiography in the field and practice of web history and archiving. We discuss the challenges of social media archiving and the research opportunities for 'platform' historiography by focusing on the distinctive characteristics of web-based social media 'platforms'. Based on our review of the literature, we argue that it is critical to foreground how contemporary platforms serve multiple user groups beyond end users (e.g. developers, business, investors) and how they operate on multiple levels (e.g. interface, architecture, ecosystem). By attending to the multiple sides and layers of social media beyond their end users only, we can reconstruct histories of platforms, not only as social networks, but also as technical artefacts, business organisations, and more. A focus on the materiality of platforms introduces numerous underutilised archived web sources that present significant entry points and research opportunities for platform historiography. We assess the availability of these archived sources across the leading web archives. Our results show that despite the challenges of social media archiving, platforms' resources are in fact well-preserved if we look beyond their end-user interfaces. Drawing on illustrative examples, we discuss two sets of entry points and materials for platform historiography at length: first, for writing developer-side histories, and second, for business-side histories. We conclude with recommendations for platform historians and archiving practitioners and reflections on the future of platform historiography.

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Internet profiling: The economy of data intraoperability on Facebook and Google

Cited by 23 publications

References 32 publications

PLATFORM POWER & PUBLIC VALUE

PLATFORM POWER & PUBLIC VALUE

Weaving seams with data: Conceptualizing City APIs as elements of infrastructures

Social Media and Platform Historiography: Challenges and Opportunities

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