Hackathon ideas related to existing Humane Tech projects

aschrijver commented 6 years ago

Hi hackers!

I am maintainer of the awesome list related to The Center for Humane Technology and think there might be some projects there that could be used in the hackathon.

Offer more fine-grained control for accepting cookies

In Europe websites are required to display a popup asking for cookie acceptation. Some sites offer limited options to disable e.g. advertising-related cookies and only accept required ones (which then contains things as Google Analytics and Google Fonts).

ConsentCookie (formerly iCookie) offers a more fine-grained dialog to be displayed, where you can e.g. disable FB, Google, or other kinds of cookies. Of course if you have a tracking/ad-blocker this is less of a problem, but most people do not have this. The project could be further refined and extended. (Note, website is in Dutch, video Dutch with EN subtitles, GH README in English)

ConsentCookie | - Customizable script that allow users to opt-in for cookies on a case-by-case basis.

Offer alternatives for the most-pervasive trackers

For apps as well as websites Google is probably most prominently used to track users (see e.g. this analysis on apps).

By offering handy and cost-saving facilities like Google Analytics and Google Fonts they ensure this wide application of their trackers. This is why Fair Analytics was started. Its fully distributed by using the Dat Project's Hypercore module. Would be super if there were good alternatives. The same holds for Fonts servers, which could be distributed equally to share the costs.

Fair Analytics - A Google Analytics-alike server that doesn't undermine user's privacy.

Offer an app or browser plugin to easily manage `hosts`-based tracker blocking

There are great repositories such as Hosts and Blocklists that offer a large collection of known trackers, and have them organized in hosts files. Blocklists offers example hosts files by category to e.g. only block Facebook (and all its many related servers). This kind of blocking goes further than a browser-based blocker, as it is OS-wide. And also it offers a means of blocking that today's tech-savvy kids might not discover/circumvent that easily (especially if they are not admin).

Now, editing hosts files is a power user thingy, so an app and/or browser extension coudl be created for this purpose. It could allow options to enable/disable certain categories of sites, time-based blocking, etc. A challenge on mobile devices is that you probably need to 'root' the device to do this, but there may be smart ways around this.

Hosts - Consolidates several reputable hosts files, and merges them into a single unified one.
Blocklists - Shared lists of problem domains people may want to block with hosts files.

Audo firewall to block ultrasound tracking applications

The project SilverDog, created by ubeacsec.org, is a proof-of-concept for blocking out audio in the ultrasound frequency (above 18,000 Hz). What little people know, and even sounds like a conspiracy-theory, is that ultrasound is used for a variety of tracking applications, such as (evil!) cross-device tracking and proximity detection.

Would be great if we could protect ourselves against this under-the-radar technology, and also (for the purpose of raising awareness) have a means to display notifications or something when ultrasound bursts are sent out or received (maybe even showing the contained data)

SilverDog | - An audio firewall to block ultrasound tracking applications.

And more...

There is more on the list that may trigger your inspiration, so check it out :)

dazzaji commented 6 years ago

This looks relevant to me!

aschrijver commented 6 years ago

I just added a very interesting idea to the list: SilverDog, the ultrasound firewall :)

mitmedialab / Consent-HackDay