By David M. Krakow
The issue of data privacy is hardly new.
Fast forward 135 years, and the threat is more complicated and widespread. It seems at times that one can’t think about a hamburger without receiving a digital reminder that a McDonald’s order is only a click away.
The term “right to privacy” was used as far back as an 1890 Harvard Law Review article addressing the threat posed by photography and newspapers.
In November of 2022, Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) launched the Digital Witness Lab, where engineering and journalism work together so that we can learn not just who is tracking us, but why and the impact it has on society.
The Launch of the Digital Witness Lab at CITP
Surya Mattu, before launching the Digital Witness Lab at CITP, had spent his career at the intersection of engineering and journalism, digging into the dark corners that journalists frequently can’t access because companies keep information hidden in proprietary software and apps.
“The issue,” Mattu explained, “is not that McDonald’s can track you online, triggering an ad blitz. The problem,” he said, “is when a company like Facebook [now Meta] uses data to do things such as redlining geographic areas so certain demographics don’t have access to housing information or employers use algorithms to ensure some job seekers don’t pass the screening stage.”
“There are websites where you’d kind of expect tracking to take place, so you receive ads and from an accountability standpoint, there’s nothing really wrong with that,” Mattu said. “But what I did was, I took their techniques and built this tool that allowed us to see how an individual might be affected by that kind of tracking.”
One of the lab’s main projects was WhatsApp Watch, where they collected data in a privacy-respecting manner, to study how the social media app was being used by politicians for election campaigning in countries such as India, Sri Lanka, and South Africa.
In India, Mattu explained, politicians were manipulating group chats so the lines were blurred between political and personal speech because even though the information was technically encrypted, there was no labeling. In larger group chats, volunteers of political parties were spreading messages that provided a false sense of public consensus.
Academia Meets Journalism
The WhatsApp Watch project within CITP’s Digital Witness Lab was a continuation of Mattu’s goal of making it easier for journalists and engineers to enhance each other’s missions.
“The basic gap I identified was that academic researchers do diligent, rigorous empirical work that’s often pushing the field forward, very precise and peer reviewed. But the field is such that it’s not incentivized to really focus on public impact,” Mattu explained. He said that academia prizes getting published in journals more than impacting public policy.
“It was really cool about the way this lab worked, and the fact that Princeton sort of went for it, that they just let me incubate this crazy idea of monitoring WhatsApp in India during the election. The fact that they [CITP] were open to that, and their support for the project, speaks to how broadly they think about the role technology plays in our society. I think CITP is still a pioneer in the space of tech accountability.”
After two plus years at CITP, Mattu is moving on. He recently went to work at Bloomberg News where he is a Senior Software Engineer for the Data Journalism Engineering Team. He will assist the newsroom’s investigations and “essentially, use my programming and engineering skills in the service of journalism.”
Bridging Storytelling and Tech Engineering Through a Lens of Art
Mattu received his Master of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication from the University of Nottingham in 2010 and a Master of Professional Studies from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU four years later.
Matta discussed how a third passion – art – was the bridge connecting his engineering and journalism impulses.
He went to art school after completing his engineering studies doing “tech projects from an arts perspective. “So, I gave up this lucrative engineering career to do art and I realized that journalism was a middle ground where I could still apply the storytelling approach to the stuff I really cared about: public interest work that could reach a broader audience.”
Before coming to Princeton, he spent four years as an investigative data journalist and senior data engineer at The Markup in New York, covering the impact of technology on society. He also spent time at, among others, Nokia Bell Labs, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NYU). He also joined ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism site, where his team was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for their work revealing machine bias.
At The Markup, Mattu’s team revealed that several dozen hospitals and health systems were collecting sensitive patient data through Facebook’s Meta Pixel code.
Mattu believes that one of the main impediments to public education is exhaustion-fed ignorance. “I think one of the problems with the technology space in general is that it creates a lot of apathy, leaving people with the feeling that ‘oh, it’s so bad, I’m doing everything wrong and there’s nothing I can do about it.’”
That, he said, is why journalists need to be about more than the data they collect. “One of the things I’ve noticed is that journalistic storytelling isn’t really about surveys. It’s about something that really kinds of hits people in the heart, that relates to their own personal experience.
He used as an example, one of the most contentious issues of the day, abortion.
“If I can show that someone who was trying to get an abortion had to change which state they went to because they were worried about which website was tracking them, that a prosecutor was using that to target them, that’s enough, right? So, for me, my role is to help people care in a way that’s relatable to their lived experience, not in a way where they’re expected to learn this whole new world, which they can’t really do much about.”
In his perspective, Mattu says, “All of my work is trying to give people a sense of agency.”
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