PhD student Mariel García-Montes researches the internet’s far-reaching impact on society, especially regarding privacy and young people.
Austin Chen | MIT News correspondent
After the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, a single Tweet or Facebook post was able to mobilize thousands in a matter of hours. In 2012, protests came to the streets of Mexico as young people demonstrated against the results of the general election.
A recent college graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mariel García-Montes had classmates who were nonviolently participating in the protests. One was arrested and jailed, and as García-Montes pored over online surveillance videos and photos to help free her, she was struck by the power of the tools at her disposal.
“Videos and maps and photographs placed her at a different location at the time that her arraignment said,” García-Montes says. “When she was able to walk out of jail partly because of technological evidence, I thought, ‘Maybe this is a window of opportunity to use technology for social good.’”
Over a decade later, García-Montes is still looking for more of those windows. She first came to MIT in 2016 to pursue a master’s degree in comparative media studies and is currently working with Professor Eden Medina on a PhD thesis in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, which will chart the history of technology’s influence on surveillance and privacy, particularly in her home country.
“I would love for my work, theoretical and practical, to build into these global movements for necessary and proportionate surveillance,” she says. “It needs to have counterweights and limits, and it needs to be really thought through to preserve people’s privacy and other rights, not just security.”
“More broadly,” she continues, “I would love to be part of a generation thinking about what technology would look like if we put the public interest first.”
Growing up alongside the internet
García-Montes has been thinking about justice and the public for much of her life, thanks in large part to her mother, who taught philosophy at the university level.
“She was the ultimate professor for me,” she says. “She provided me with a moral compass and intellectual curiosity, and I’m grateful I get to live her dreams.”
Her mother was also instrumental in piquing her interest in the internet. As a professor, she had access to the internet at a time when few Mexicans did, and set García-Montes up with an email account and allowed her to use the computer at the university when she was a child. The experience was formative, as she noticed the “vast difference” between those who had access and those who did not. For example, she recalls learning online about a devastating tsunami in Asia, while none of her peers had any idea that it was happening.
As time passed and more and more people did gain internet access, the online landscape changed, particularly for young people. García-Montes quickly realized that someone needed to take responsibility for keeping those young people safe and internet-literate, and she worked with a number of organizations that did just that, such as UNICEF and Global Changemakers. The issues have only compounded since then, but she isn’t letting up either.
“There’s no silver bullet,” she says. “We need to rethink the entire ecosystem. We cannot put it on parents to teach their kids. We cannot put it on teachers. We cannot put it on online users. Instead of only centering profit and only centering page views or engagement, we need to also center pro-social behavior and the public interest.”
Raised by women — her mom, her aunt, her cousin, and her grandmother — García-Montes incorporates the feminist ideals of her upbringing into her academic work wherever she can. In 2022, she helped write a paper with MIT associate professor of urban science and planning Catherine D’Ignazio that examined the ways activists around the world are trying to address the deficiencies in government data on gender-related violence against women. The data are often absent or incomplete, so she and her co-authors highlighted the vital work being done to fill in the gaps.
“When Catherine started to work with feminicide data activists, I knew a bunch of them because I had worked with them previously,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, the day has finally come that these people can have the prominence that they’ve long deserved.’ The hours of work that they put in and the emotional toll it takes on them is just outstanding, and they weren’t really getting the recognition for that labor and their technical expertise.”
Her dissertation is a study of the history of surveillance technologies in Mexico. Specifically, she is looking at the ways contemporary debates on information technologies, such as spyware and facial recognition, interact with existing governance and infrastructures.
The future of privacy and community
Her thesis research has instilled in García-Montes a deep concern for where things are headed for the average citizen.
“Different types of data collection continue to be developed because of the data broker industry,” she says. “Your power bill can be an instrument of surveillance, and facial recognition has been appearing in airports. The forms of data collection are becoming much more nuanced, much more pervasive, and much harder to evade.”
This pervasiveness has led to a general acceptance among the population, she says, but she’s also encouraged by the advocacy groups that have continued to fight on. She agrees with those groups that it should not be left to individuals to protect their own data, and that ultimately, there needs to be a legislative and cultural environment that values the preservation of privacy.
“The awareness of fights that have been won is rising,” she says. “The awareness of the loss of privacy is also rising, and so I don’t think that it’s going to be a clear win for privacy-violating companies.”
While her studies at MIT fill most of her time, García-Montes also finds purpose participating in community life in her Greater-Boston neighborhood. During the coronavirus pandemic, García-Montes and her neighbors forged bonds as they provided mutual aid for the essential workers and vulnerable people of their neighborhood. The camaraderie they developed persists today.
Whether online or in real life, “There is joy in community,” she says. “At the root of it, I want to be around people. I want to know my neighbors, and being able to use technology to solve some of our mutual aid needs helps me feel good.”
