Nicholas Vincent
Assistant Professor · School of Computing Science , Simon Fraser University
Responsible AI, Human-computer Interaction, Machine learning, social computing
Prof. Nick Vincent is an Assistant Professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He studies the content ecosystems and data supply chains that fuel data-dependent technologies like search engines, recommender systems, and generative AI. This involves exploring avenues for people to control how data flows and participate in the governance of AI systems. The overarching goal of this research is to work towards highly capable and widely beneficial AI technologies that mitigate -- rather than exacerbate -- inequalities in wealth and power.
- I am based in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University and direct padcomp. I am also associated with Public AI Network, ixLab, Digital Democracies Institute, Metagov, and SFU School of Public Policy.
- I share content on Bluesky, GitHub, LinkedIn, and X. My papers can be found below or via Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, and DBLP.
- See my newsletter on Substack: Data Leverage Newsletter.
News & Notes
Publications
Latest peer-reviewed work plus workshop pieces and preprints.
Peer Reviewed
Filter by venue
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Tracing Everyday AI Literacy Discussions at Scale: How Online Creative Communities Make Sense of Generative AI
Haidan Liu, Poorvi Bhatia, Nicholas Vincent, Parmit Chilana
ACM CHI 2026 -
Are We Horses? Rethinking Data as Labor
Tae Wan Kim, Nicholas Vincent
Philosophy & Technology 2026 -
Collective Bargaining in the Information Economy Can Address AI-Driven Power Concentration
Nicholas Vincent, Matthew Prewitt, Hanlin Li
NeurIPS Position Papers 2025 -
An Audit and Analysis of LLM-Assisted Health Misinformation Jailbreaks Against LLMs
Ayana Hussain, Patrick Zhao, Nicholas Vincent
AIES 2025 -
Responsible AI in the OSS: Reconciling Innovation with Risk Assessment and Disclosure
Mahasweta Chakraborti, Bert Joseph Prestoza, Nicholas Vincent, Seth Frey, Vladimir Filkov
AIES 2025 -
Algorithmic Collective Action with Two Collectives
Aditya Karan, Nicholas Vincent, Karrie Karahalios, Hari Sundaram
ACM FAccT 2025 -
Push and Pull: A Framework for Measuring Attentional Agency on Digital Platforms
Zachary Wojtowicz, Shrey Jain, Nicholas Vincent
ACM FAccT 2025 -
A Canary in the AI Coal Mine: American Jews May Be Disproportionately Harmed by Intellectual Property Dispossession in Large Language Model Training
Heila Precel, Allison McDonald, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent
arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.13073 2024 -
Pika: Empowering Non-Programmers to Author Executable Governance Policies in Online Communities
Leijie Wang, Nicholas Vincent, Julija Rukanskaitė, Amy X. Zhang
ACM CHI 2024 -
Peer Produced Friction: How Page Protection on Wikipedia Affects Editor Engagement and Concentration
Leah Ajmani, Nicholas Vincent, Stevie Chancellor
ACM CSCW 2023 -
The Dimensions of Data Labor: A Road Map for Researchers, Activists, and Policymakers to Empower Data Producers
Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent, Stevie Chancellor, Brent Hecht
Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2023 -
Behavioral Use Licensing for Responsible AI
Danish Contractor, Daniel McDuff, Julia Katherine Haines, Jenny Lee, Christopher Hines, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent, Hanlin Li
ACM FAccT 2022 -
CEAM: The Effectiveness of Cyclic and Ephemeral Attention Models of User Behavior on Social Platforms
Farhan Asif Chowdhury, Yozen Liu, Koustuv Saha, Nicholas Vincent, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah, Maarten W Bos
AAAI ICWSM 2021 -
Addressing Documentation Debt in Machine Learning Research: A Retrospective Datasheet for BookCorpus
Jack Bandy, Nicholas Vincent
NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2021 -
AdverTiming Matters: Examining User Ad Consumption for Effective Ad Allocations on Social Media
Koustuv Saha, Yozen Liu, Nicholas Vincent, Farhan Asif Chowdhury, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah, Maarten W Bos
ACM CHI 2021 -
Can "Conscious Data Contribution" Help Users to Exert "Data Leverage" Against Technology Companies?
Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2021 -
A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results
Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2021 -
Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies
Vincent, Nicholas and Li, Hanlin and Tilly, Nicole and Chancellor, Stevie and Hecht, Brent
Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2021 -
How Do People Change Their Technology Use in Protest?: Understanding Protest Users
Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent, Janice Tsai, Jofish Kaye, Brent Hecht
ACM CSCW 2019 -
Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines
Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson, Patrick Sheehan, Brent Hecht
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 2019 -
"Data Strikes": Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Form of Collective Action Against Technology Companies
Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht, Shilad Sen
The World Wide Web Conference (WWW) 2019 -
Women (still) ask for less: Gender differences in hourly rate in an online labor marketplace
Eureka Foong, Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht, Elizabeth M Gerber
ACM CSCW 2018 -
Examining Wikipedia With a Broader Lens: Quantifying the Value of Wikipedia's Relationships with Other Large-Scale Online Communities
Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson, Brent Hecht
ACM CHI 2018
Workshop / Pre-print
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WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and other Language Editions
Zining Wang, Yuxuan Zhang, Dongwook Yoon, Nicholas Vincent, Farhan Samir, Vered Shwartz
WikiWorkshop 2026 2026 -
Sync or Sink: Bounds on Algorithmic Collective Action with Noise and Multiple Groups
Aditya Karan, Prabhat Kalle, Nicholas Vincent, Hari Sundaram
Algorithmic Collective Action Workshop at NeurIPS 2025 2025 -
Open WebUI: An Open, Extensible, and Usable Interface for AI Interaction
Jaeryang Baek, Ayana Hussain, Danny Liu, Nicholas Vincent, Lawrence H. Kim
arXiv preprint 2025 -
If open source is to win, it must go public
Joshua Tan, Nicholas Vincent, Katherine Elkins, Magnus Sahlgren
CodeML @ ICML 2025 2025 -
Epistemic Authority in AI Fact-Checking: A Human and Data Centric Perspective
Devansh Bhojak, Nicholas Vincent
4S 2025 Conference: Reverberations 2025 -
Step-By-Step Reasoning with Meta Cognitive Prompts to Reduce Contextual Hallucination
Brian Miki, Nicholas Vincent
HEAL Workshop @ CHI 2025 2025 -
Canada as a Champion for Public AI: Data, Compute and Open Source Infrastructure for Economic Growth and Inclusive Innovation
Nicholas Vincent, Mark Surman, Jake Hirsch-Allen
author preprint 2025 -
AI for Just Work: Constructing Diverse Imaginations of AI beyond "Replacing Humans"
Weina Jin, Nicholas Vincent, Ghassan Hamarneh
arXiv preprint 2025 -
Responsible AI in the OSS: Reconciling Innovation with Risk Assessment and Disclosure
Mahasweta Chakraborti, Bert Joseph Prestoza, Nicholas Vincent, Seth Frey, Vladimir Filkov
AAAI 2025 Workshop on AIGOV 2024 -
A step forward in tracing and documenting dataset provenance
Nicholas Vincent
Nature Machine Intelligence, News & Views 2024 -
Designing an open-source LLM interface and social platforms for collectively driven LLM evaluation and auditing
Timothy J. Baek, Nicholas Vincent, Lawrence Kim
HEAL Workshop @ CHI 2024 2024 -
The Need for Flexible Interfaces for Text-to-Image Auditing: A Case Study of DALL·E 2 and DALL·E 3
Clare Provenzano, Parsa Rajabi, Diana Cukierman, Nicholas Vincent
GenAICHI @ CHI 2024 2024 -
An Alternative to Regulation: The Case for Public AI
Nicholas Vincent, David Bau, Sarah Schwettmann, Joshua Tan
RegML 2023 Workshop @ NeurIPS 2023 2023 -
Sharing the Winnings of AI with Data Dividends: Challenges with 'Meritocratic' Data Valuation
Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht
EAAMO 2023 Poster Track 2023 -
Epistemic Injustice in Online Communities: Unpacking the Values of Knowledge Creation and Curation within CSCW Applications
Leah Ajmani, Mo Houtti, Jasmine C Foriest, Michael Ann Devito, Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson
Workshop at CSCW 2023 -
Can Licensing Mitigate the Negative Implications of Commercial Web Scraping?
Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent, Yacine Jernite, Nick Merrill, Jesse Josua Benjamin, Alek Tarkowski
Workshop at CSCW 2023 2023 -
Ethical Tensions, Norms, and Directions in the Extraction of Online Volunteer Work
Hanlin Li, Leah Ajmani, Moyan Zhou, Nicholas Vincent, Sohyeon Hwang, Tiziano Piccardi, Sneha Narayan, Sherae Daniel, Veniamin Veselovsky
Workshop at CSCW 2022 -
Misleading Tweets and Helpful Notes: Investigating Data Labor by Twitter Birdwatch Users
Isaiah Jones, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent
ACM CSCW Posters 2022 -
Collaborative Design of Contribution Tracking Systems for Decentralized Organizations
Nicholas Vincent, Christine Vandevoorde
CESC 2022 2022 -
Twitter Engagement with Retracted Articles: Who, When, and How?
Rod Abhari, Nicholas Vincent, Henry K Dambanemuya, Herminio Bodon, Emőke-Ágnes Horvát
arXiv preprint 2022 -
From My Data to Our Data
Yakov Feygin, Nicholas Vincent, Hanlin Li, Chirag Lala, Luisa Scarcella
Book Chapter 2021 -
A Data Dividend that Works: Steps Toward Building an Equitable Data Economy
Yakov Feygin, Hanlin Li, Chirag Lala, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent, Luisa Scarcella, Matthew Prewitt
Berggruen Institute white paper 2021 -
Mapping the Potential and Pitfalls of 'Data Dividends' as a Means of Sharing the Profits of Artificial Intelligence.
Nicholas Vincent, Yichun Li, Renee Zha, Brent Hecht
arXiv preprint 2019 -
Deep learning of tissue fate features in acute ischemic stroke
Noah Stier, Nicholas Vincent, David Liebeskind, Fabien Scalzo
BIBM 2015 Workshop on Biomedical Visual Search and Deep Learning 2015 -
Detection of hyperperfusion on arterial spin labeling using deep learning
Nicholas Vincent, Noah Stier, Songlin Yu, David S Liebeskind, Danny JJ Wang, Fabien Scalzo
BIBM 2015 Workshop on Biomedical Visual Search and Deep Learning 2015
Editorial
Op-eds, essays, and commentary published in external venues.
Filter by venue
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Where Biden’s AI policies fall short in protecting workers.
Jan 2024 — The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists link
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How creatives can stop AI from stealing their work.
Sep 2023 — The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists link
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A roadmap toward empowering the labor force behind AI.
Jun 2023 — Montreal AI Ethics Institute Research Summaries link
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ChatGPT Stole Your Work. So What Are You Going to Do?
Dec 2022 — Wired link
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What if we could check Big Tech?: The collective voice of millions of users could be as effective as regulation
Feb 2021 — Northwestern Now link
Blog
42 posts on the Data Leverage Newsletter. View on Substack
- Two natural allies of a "Data Transparency" agenda: capabilities forecasters and social simulators
- A Short Guide to Data Strikes and Conscious Data Contribution in the Context of 2026 Frontier AI
- The Paradox of Reuse in 2026: A Case of Quasi-Enclosure, or "Subsidized Club Goods that Sort of Look Like Public Goods"
- The Coding Agent Data Deal
- Coding agents are (1) a big deal, (2) very relevant to data leverage, and (3) able to help build tools that support data leverage!
- Almost Everybody -- Including Both Data Creators and AI Companies -- Stands to Benefit from Clearer "Data Rules"
- How collective bargaining for information, public AI, and HCI research all fit together
- Which datasets should we assume are "in all the AI models"?
- Algorithmic Collective Action With Two Collectives
- On AI-driven Job Apocalypses and Collective Bargaining for Information
- How do we know our AI output is good? Double checks, bar charts, vibes, and training data
- Each Instance of 'AI Utility' Stems from Some Human Act(s) of Information Recording and Ranking
- Google and TikTok rank bundles of information; ChatGPT ranks grains
- [microblog] One book is worth '0.06%' benchmark points to AI; is 'no different from noise'. What gives?
- Public AI, Data Appraisal, and Data Debates
Show all 42 posts
- Evaluation Data Leverage: Advances like 'Deep Research' Highlight a Looming Opportunity for Bargaining Power
- Tipping Points for Content Ecosystems
- AI Labs Should Open Source Data Protection Technologies
- Live by the free-content-for-training sword, die by the free-content-for-training sword
- Selling AGI like AG1: Will Consumers Push Back Against Proprietary Blends of Herbs and of Data?
- Perplexity CEO's Interaction with Striking New York Times Workers Does Not Reflect Well on the AI Industry
- Is Zuckerberg right to say that your specific creative work has no value to AI?
- "Many Models" and "Track Changes" for AI: Some Thoughts on LLM Interfaces
- Project Spotlight: CollectiveVoice
- Building a Data Pipeworks for Democratic AI: From Human Knowledge to Records to AI Systems
- Will the New York Times Data Strike Have a Large Impact on ChatGPT?
- A Harbinger of the Future of Content? The New York Times Starts a Data Strike
- The WGA Strike is a Canary in the Coal Mine for AI Labor Concerns
- Reddit, StackOverflow, and Europe: All Trending Towards Data Dignity
- Data Leverage Recap: December 2022 - April 2023
- Bing Rewards for the AI Age
- Plural AI Data Alignment
- AI Technologies are System Maps, and You are a Cartographer
- AI Artist or AI Art Thief? Innovation, Public Mandates, and the Case for Talking in Terms of Leverage
- ChatGPT is Awesome and Scary: You Deserve Credit for the Good Parts (and Might Help Fix the Bad Parts)
- The Paradox of Reuse, Language Models Edition
- Apple Now Lets You Opt-Out of Tracking: Will This Give You More Influence Over Tech Companies?
- GitHub Copilot and the Exploitation of "Data Labor": A Wake-Up Call for the Tech Industry
- Powerful Technologies and Their Power Laws: Estimating Machine Learning Systems' Data Leverage Vulnerabilities
- Why You're an Expert Language Model Trainer
- Don't give OpenAI all the credit for GPT-3: You might have helped create the latest 'astonishing' advance in AI too
- "Data Strikes": A New Form of Leverage for Tech Users?
Talks & Conversations
Invited talks, panels, and podcasts.
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Collective action strategies in the age of AI w/ Nick Vincent from Data Leverage
Mar 2026 — The Blockchain Socialist (Podcast)
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Panel Moderator, NeurIPS Workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action
Dec 2025 — (Panel)
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Collective Bargaining in the Information Economy
Dec 2025 — San Diego, CA (Poster Presentation)
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A Data Flow Perspective on "AI Social Simulation": Will Recent AI Advances Enable New Social Science, Destroy Ecosystems for Knowledge, or Something More Subdued?
Sep 2025 — Seattle, WA (Talk)
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Data Leverage and AI Safety
Aug 2025 — Singapore AI Safety Hub (Talk)
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AI as a Public Good with Jake Hirsch-Allen and Nicholas Vincent
Jun 2025 — BrainTrainr Podcast (Podcast)
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Canada as Champion for Public AI
Mar 2025 — McMaster Internet Policy Lab (Talk)
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Emerging Concerns with the Generative AI Data Paradigm (and how academic research and “Public AI” can help)
Mar 2025 — UBC NLP (Talk)
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Activism in the Age of AI
Mar 2025 — IATSE 891 AI Day of Learning @ Downtown Vancouver (Talk)
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Human-Centered AI Research and New Paradigms for Generative AI Data
Aug 2024 — Human-Centered AI Conference @ Pepperdine University (Talk)
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Economic Concentration and Dispossessive Data Use: Can HCI Solve Challenges from and to AI?
May 2024 — SIGCHI 2024 Outstanding Dissertation Award (Talk)
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A New Grand Data Bargain for Public Interest AI
Jan 2024 — SFU DDI (Talk)
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Responsive LLM Development
Jan 2024 — University of Toronto Data Sciences Institute: Fairness - ChatGPT Workshop (Panel)
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Community Dialogue on Accountable Governance and Data
Mar 2023 — Community Data Science Collective Community Dialogues (Talk)
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Human-centered data and language models -- Privacy, data as labor, and licensing
Feb 2023 — Stanford Social NLP Reading Group Talks (Talk)
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Algorithmic Contestability
Jan 2023 — Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence, Toward a Safety Science of AI (Talk)
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Does the rise of AI need us to adopt new data licensing policies?
Dec 2022 — Open Health Data and AI Summit 2022 (Panel)
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Should Tech Companies Be Paying Us for Our Data?
Oct 2021 — Things Have Changed Podcast (Podcast)
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The Importance of Wikipedia to Search Engines and Other Systems
May 2021 — Wikipedia Research Showcase (Talk)
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Public interest technologies for the ML age
May 2021 — 3rd Obfuscation Workshop (Talk)
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On Data Dividends
Apr 2021 — RadicalxChange Podcast (Podcast)
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Data Agency: Individual or Shared?
Dec 2020 — RadicalxChange Panels (Talk)
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Data Driven Economy for All
Jul 2020 — RadicalxChange 2020 Conference (Panel)
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The Critical Relationship of Volunteer-Created Wikipedia Content to Large-Scale Online Communities
Apr 2018 — Wikipedia Research Showcase (Talk)
Media Coverage
Select press, interviews, and commentary appearances.
Filter by outlet
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Should the public sector build its own AI?
The Financial Times , Gideon Lichfield , Sep 2025 Article link
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AI as 'teammate'? Not so fast, say experts warning it could be 'dangerous'
Canadian HR Reporter , Stacy Thomas , Jul 2025 Article link
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Can Wikipedia survive the rise of AI and Trump?
Australian Broadcasting Corporation , Rhiannon Stevens , May 2025 Article link
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'Trial and error': Over half of AI redundancies a mistake, say leaders
Canadian HR Reporter , Stacy Thomas , May 2025 Article link
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Inside Meta's secret experiments that improve its AI models
Business Insider , Alistair Barr, Pranav Dixit , Apr 2025 Article link
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OpenAI Is Reaping What It Sowed With DeepSeek
Business Insider , Alistair Barr , Jan 2025 Article link
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Is data supply AI’s Achilles’ heel?
UBS , Richard Mylles , Jun 2024 Article link
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Is this AI? See if you can spot the technology in your everyday life
The Washington Post , Kevin Shaul , Apr 2024 Article link
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Jews have always been prolific writers. Has AI wound up with too much of their work?
Jewish Telegraphic Agency , Asaf Elia-Shalev , Mar 2024 Article link
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Nicholas Vincent explains why robots.txt is no longer enough to protect against web scraping
IT Brew , Tom McKay , Mar 2024 Article link
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AI is killing the grand bargain at the heart of the web
Business Insider , Kali Hays, Alistair Barr , Jan 2024 Article link
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Newspapers want payment for articles used to power ChatGPT
The Washington Post , Nitasha Tiku , Oct 2023 Article link
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'Data leverage' and the Harry Potter test: How much is a single book worth to a giant AI model?
Business Insider , Alistar Barr , Aug 2023 Article link
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Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth
New York Times Magazine , Jon Gernter , Jul 2023 Article link
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We are all AI’s free data workers
MIT Technology Review , Melissa Heikkilä , Jun 2023 Article link
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Internet users are 'poisoning' their personal data in the fight against online surveillance
Le Monde , Aurélien Defer , Apr 2022 Article link
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Got the same name as a serial killer? Google might think you’re the same person
Vox , Rebecca Heilweil , Jun 2021 Article link
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Facebook and Others Should Pay Us for Our Data. Here’s One Way
Bloomberg , Peter Coy , May 2021 Article link
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How to poison the data that Big Tech use to surveil you
MIT Technology Review , Karen Hao , Mar 2021 Article link
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Your data is a weapon that can help change corporate behavior
Fortune , Jonathan Vanian, Jeremy Kahn , Feb 2021 Article link
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Is it time for Netflix subscribers to go on strike?
Quartz , Nicolás Rivero , Jul 2020 Article link
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YouTube May Add to the Burdens of Humble Wikipedia
New York Times , John Herrman , Mar 2018 Article link