Zeynep Tufekci spends her days telling people just exactly how much data Facebook, Google and others are collecting on them. But before you shrug and say that's how the world works now, she wants you to understand why that could be damaging.

The professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studies digital surveillance, how technology guides social movements and how complex algorithms influence our culture. She'll touch on these topics, and the strengths and weaknesses of social movements in the social media age, when she speaks in Indianapolis this weekend.

And if time permits, Tufekci, who's also a contributor to The New York Times op-ed section, will talk about artificial intelligence and how its decisions affect the public sphere.

"We're switching from a world of gatekeepers of one kind to a world of gatekeepers of another kind, and we're just not doing a great job at it," Tufekci told IndyStar.

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Tufekci will lead the Annual Public Conversation for the Spirit & Place Festival at 3:30 p.m. Sunday at the Indiana State Museum. Here's what she has to say about how programmers don't fully understand the algorithms they create, what Facebook data collects and what we need to do to protect our privacy online.

Facebook saves what you type and delete

Have you ever typed something in Facebook's search bar, thought better of it, and then deleted it before pressing "Enter"? The social network still saves what you typed anyway, Tufekci said. Companies also record what your cursor hovers over, she said.

"Facebook had a patent that would match your purchases, like they would want to recognize you, say, if you entered a store, and then match it to your Facebook ID," Tufekci told IndyStar.

"So it's not even just online. This kind of surveillance is rapidly expanding, which is what I'm concerned about. I don't think this is how we should do things. And especially given how people don't even know this is going on."

Thinking that governments won't use this information is naive

That authoritarian governments are using the information people search is not hard to believe. But Tufekci said U.S. citizens should be concerned as well. She uses her book "Twitter and Tear Gas" — where she discusses trolls, harassment and misinformation — as proof.

"When I first published ("Twitter and Tear Gas"), I thought, 'OK, here's my book. It's an academic press from Yale University, and hopefully I'll get tenure. But I thought maybe American audiences might not really appreciate what's going on here because they don't have this experience," Tufekci said.

"Well, lo and behold, the 2016 election happened. And it turns out all those things are pretty relevant here, too."

Advertising business models that use surveillance to capture people's habits and sell them more shoes, clothes, gadgetry, etc., are creating authoritarianism, she said.

"If you build a technology that has this kind of potential, the idea that the powerful, government, will not want a part of this, that they will not go for this, that they will not want to use this for their purpose is historically naive."

Programmers don't fully understand how complex algorithms work

The infrastructures programmers build use enormous amounts of data to learn the characteristics of people who have bought a certain product, Tufekci said at a September 2017 TEDGlobal talk in New York City. They then use that to find new customers.

The problem is that programmers can't possibly know how, exactly, the algorithms will play out, she said. To make her point, she used an example of selling plane tickets to Las Vegas. Many people who are targeted with these ads can click away. But that task is much more difficult for people with bipolar disorder who are about to enter a manic phase, when they are more likely to overspend and compulsively gamble, she said.

"We no longer really understand how these complex algorithms work," Tufekci said at TEDGlobal.

"It's giant matrices, thousands of rows and columns, maybe millions of rows and columns, and not the programmers and not anyone who looks at it, even if you have all the data, understand anymore how exactly it's operating any more than you'd know what I was thinking right now if you were shown a cross-section of my brain."

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Improving our privacy is doable

Tufekci advocates asking politicians to pass data privacy legislation at a national level. People can take personal privacy protection steps as well.

"I can't really give a short answer," Tufekci told IndyStar. "There's a bunch of stuff that a person can do, that I do. But I'm an expert, and I just don't know how to protect myself fully. So I find (it) unrealistic that a regular person would be able to fully protect themselves."

But those don't offer enough protection unless the legislation is changed, she said.

"It's like you have cars, you need to have seatbelts on them. You need to put (on) emission controls," Tufekci said.

"It's certainly fine to be driving safer. It's good. But if there are no seatbelts, if there are no emission controls, if the cars just blow up, if other cars run into you, there isn't that much you can do. So we need the infrastructure of safety here that we don't have for the industry."

If you go

Find the full lineup for the 2018 Spirit & Place Festival at spiritandplace.org.

Call IndyStar reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 317-444-7339. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.