Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

This will be a talk based on my 2017 article with the same name.

This was right before the Cambridge Analytica story blew up and words like privacy and tracking finally became commonplace in common vernacular. But even today in 2020, our understanding of what our web surveillance infrastructure means is hard to understand. Should we be worried? Is it really that much of a threat? And what can we as web people do about it?

One aspect I find that's missing in all this is that the analysis tends to be either technical or business-oriented. While that's important, I suggest that we also look at the web as a cultural space that makes “friendship over hyperlink, knowledge over the network, romance over HTTP” possible. We'll then explore what it means for this cultural space to be less open, more centralized, and increasingly user-hostile.

We'll talk about history, discuss some technical architecture but mostly demonstrate what I mean with real-life examples. I'll end the talk with practical solutions that each of us can adopt for a healthier web (in my point of view in any case).

All my sources will be documented, and I promise to make the presentation entertaining.