Laura Kalbag

Recommended Read: Concern trolls and power grabs: Inside Big Tech’s angry, geeky, often petty war for your privacy

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 12:21:45 +0100

”Snyder and others argue these new arrivals, who drape themselves in the flag of competition, are really just concern trolls, capitalizing on fears about Big Tech’s power to cement the position of existing privacy-invasive technologies.”

… ”If the privacy advocates inside the W3C have been put off by Rosewell’s approach, he hasn’t exactly been charmed by theirs either… From his perspective, browsers have too much power over the community, and they use that power to quash conversations that might make them look bad.”

A long read where everyone comes out looking bad. (And those portrayed as the ”defenders of privacy” aren’t necessarily doing so out of the goodness of their hearts either!)

Read the original post, ‘Concern trolls and power grabs: Inside Big Tech’s angry, geeky, often petty war for your privacy’.

Recommended Read: How Long Until Citizen Gets Someone Killed?

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 09:43:34 +0100

’Jim Thatcher, an urban studies professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, is skeptical. “If you give people this power to draw attention based around a dangerous event,” Thatcher says, “then they are actually encouraged to seek out, or at worst manufacture, these dangerous events,” noting the speed with which Citizen escalated the manhunt. Like many others, Thatcher downloaded Citizen during last year’s protests. He wondered whether it might be used as a tool for “sousveillance,” a term surveillance activists use in reference to turning cameras back on authorities. That didn’t shake out. “Let’s be explicitly clear here,” he says. “The ‘frictionless’ solution provided by a for-profit company for a public health and safety issue is just…not good. There’s no outcome where this ends well.”

…

Hamid Khan, founder of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an anti-police-surveillance group, says the manhunt wasn’t Citizen gone awry; it was Citizen working as designed. Khan sees the app as part of a “culture of deputization and vigilantism” built on the “see something, say something” ethos of neighborhood watch, now “taking a more technological sort of spin.” He says tools like Citizen, with their patina of officialdom and impartial reporting, “are becoming a license to racially profile and go after some of the most vulnerable community members—particularly the unhoused—and to criminalize them.”’

Read the original post, ‘How Long Until Citizen Gets Someone Killed?’.

Recommended Read: International coalition calls for action against surveillance-based advertising

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 11:12:33 +0100

“Every day, consumers are exposed to extensive commercial surveillance online. This leads to manipulation, fraud, discrimination and privacy violations. Information about what we like, our purchases, mental and physical health, sexual orientation, location and political views are collected, combined and used under the guise of targeting advertising.

…

The collection and combination of information about us not only violates our right to privacy, but renders us vulnerable to manipulation, discrimination and fraud. This harms individuals and society as a whole, says the director of digital policy in the NCC, Finn Myrstad.”

Includes a detailed list of the consequences of surveillance-based advertising.

Read the original post, ‘International coalition calls for action against surveillance-based advertising’.

Recommended Read: Perspectives on tackling Big Tech’s market power

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 11:35:28 +0100

“Slaughter also argued that it’s important for regulators not to pile all the burden of avoiding data abuses on consumers themselves.

‘I want to sound a note of caution around approaches that are centered around user control,’ she said. ’I think transparency and control are important. I think it is really problematic to put the burden on consumers to work through the markets and the use of data, figure out who has their data, how it’s being used, make decisions… I think you end up with notice fatigue; I think you end up with decision fatigue; you get very abusive manipulation of dark patterns to push people into decisions.

‘So I really worry about a framework that is built at all around the idea of control as the central tenant or the way we solve the problem. I’ll keep coming back to the notion of what instead we need to be focusing on is where is the burden on the firms to limit their collection in the first instance, prohibit their sharing, prohibit abusive use of data and I think that that’s where we need to be focused from a policy perspective.’”

Read the original post, ‘Perspectives on tackling Big Tech’s market power’.

Recommended Read: Social media thrives on shame – but how should we handle an offensive past coming to light?

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 13:29:43 +0100

“Because one reason why there is such a visceral ‘gotcha’ response to these posts, is down to the continued dismissal of marginalised communities who want justice for the discrimination they face. Whether it’s Black people speaking out about police brutality, women who have suffered sexual assault being let down by the criminal justice system or trans people who are harassed not only in the street but in supposedly professional spaces, the problems marginalised communities face remain unaddressed. So when a trial-by-social-media does happen after old offensive posts surface, it can be a chance to see justice very publicly served, as well as prove that the discrimination you say you face, really does exist – because it’s right there to see, in a tweet.

But often, raging at individuals for long-past mistakes seems like misplaced energy. What we need to challenge are the people and institutions who continue to discriminate today, and who show no signs of changing.

…

If serious problems are found, then it’s only right that Ollie and Yorkshire CCC should be held accountable for them. In fact, tackling the systemic problems would not only help prevent the attitudes that manifest themselves as offensive posts, but move us away from a culture where we are so justice-starved that we demand to see heads roll.”

Read the original post, ‘Social media thrives on shame – but how should we handle an offensive past coming to light?’.

Recommended Read: Google’s Quest to Kill the Cookie Is Creating a Privacy Shitshow

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 13:40:34 +0100

“Digiday reported this week that some major players in the adtech industry have started drawing up plans to turn FLoC into something just as invasive as the cookies it’s supposed to quash. In some cases, this means companies amalgamating any data scraps they can get from Google with their own catalogs of user info, turning FLoC from an ”anonymous” identifier into just another piece of personal data for shady companies to compile. Others have begun pitching FLoC as a great tool for fingerprinting—an especially underhanded tracking technique that can keep pinpointing you no matter how many times you go incognito or flush your cache.

…

[W]hat if that guy regularly visits websites centered around queer or trans topics? What if he’s trying to get access to food stamps online? This kind of web browsing—just like all web browsing—gets slurped into FLoC’s algorithm, potentially tipping off countless obscure adtech operators about a person’s sexuality or financial situation. And because the world of data sharing is still a (mostly) lawless wasteland in spite of lawmaker’s best intentions, there’s not much stopping a DSP from passing off that data to the highest bidder.”

Read the original post, ‘Google’s Quest to Kill the Cookie Is Creating a Privacy Shitshow’.

Recommended Read: noyb aims to end “cookie banner terror” and issues more than 500 GDPR complaints

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 10:59:00 +0100

Missed this a couple of weeks ago, and it could make a huge difference to our browsing experiences (and compel sites to do better!)

Note: the misuse and overuse of “crazy” is unfortunate in the linked site. Self Defined dictionary recommends more appropriate, and less ableist, alternative words.

“Today, noyb.eu sent over 500 draft complaints to companies who use unlawful cookie banners - making it the largest wave of complaints since the GDPR came into force.

…

The GDPR was meant to ensure that users have full control over their data, but being online has become a frustrating experience for people all over Europe. Annoying cookie banners appear at every corner of the web, often making it extremely complicated to click anything but the “accept” button. Companies use so-called “dark patterns” to get more than 90% of users to “agree” when industry statistics show that only 3% of users actually want to agree.

…

Many internet users mistake this annoying situation as a direct outcome of the GDPR, when in fact companies misuse designs in violation of the law. The GDPR demands a simple “yes” or “no”, as reasonable people would expect, but companies often have the power over the design and narrative when implementing the GDPR.”

Read the original post, ‘noyb aims to end “cookie banner terror” and issues more than 500 GDPR complaints’.

Recommended Read: I Would Rather Die Than Let Facebook Monitor My Heart Rate

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 10:57:06 +0100

“I’m well aware that if you want your health data to remain private, smartwatches are certainly risky. But we’re way past that now. These devices can and have saved lives, and despite some early skepticism, wearables aren’t going anywhere. Why pick a smartwatch made by a company whose founder called early users ‘dumb fucks’ for trusting him? Why trust the company that had a full-page temper tantrum in several national newspapers because Apple introduced stronger privacy features? I’ve got two drawers bursting with smartwatches launched in 2020—there are plenty of lesser evils to choose from.”

Read the original post, ‘I Would Rather Die Than Let Facebook Monitor My Heart Rate’.

Recommended Read: What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 10:59:34 +0100

A very long read but a fascinating insight into how ethics research works (more specifically, doesn’t) inside Google, which I imagine can be extrapolated to other corporations.

“Gebru’s career mirrored the rapid rise of AI fairness research, and also some of its paradoxes. Almost as soon as the field sprang up, it quickly attracted eager support from giants like Google, which sponsored conferences, handed out grants, and hired the domain’s most prominent experts. Now Gebru’s sudden ejection made her and others wonder if this research, in its domesticated form, had always been doomed to a short leash. To researchers, it sent a dangerous message: AI is largely unregulated and only getting more powerful and ubiquitous, and insiders who are forthright in studying its social harms do so at the risk of exile.

…

To some, the drama at Google suggested that researchers on corporate payrolls should be subject to different rules than those from institutions not seeking to profit from AI. In April, some founding editors of a new journal of AI ethics published a paper calling for industry researchers to disclose who vetted their work and how, and for whistle-blowing mechanisms to be set up inside corporate labs. ‘We had been trying to poke on this issue already, but when Timnit got fired it catapulted into a more mainstream conversation,’ says Savannah Thais, a researcher at Princeton on the journal’s board who contributed to the paper. ‘Now a lot more people are questioning: Is it possible to do good ethics research in a corporate AI setting?’

If that mindset takes hold, in-house ethical AI research may forever be held in suspicion—much the way industrial research on pollution is viewed by environmental scientists.

…

Inioluwa Deborah Raji, whom Gebru escorted to Black in AI in 2017, and who now works as a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, says that Google’s treatment of its own researchers demands a permanent shift in perceptions. ‘There was this hope that some level of self-regulation could have happened at these tech companies,’ Raji says. ‘Everyone’s now aware that the true accountability needs to come from the outside—if you’re on the inside, there’s a limit to how much you can protect people.’

…

[Gebru]’s been thinking back to conversations she’d had with a friend who warned her not to join Google, saying it was harmful to women and impossible to change. Gebru had disagreed, claiming she could nudge things, just a little, toward a more beneficial path. ‘I kept on arguing with her,’ Gebru says. Now, she says, she concedes the point.

Read the original post, ‘What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru’.

Recommended Read: Huge Chunk of the Internet Goes Offline Thanks to One Company

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 13:11:53 +0100

“The outage will likely draw attention to how centralized our ‘decentralized’ internet really is—a depressing reminder as ransomware attacks hit at critical infrastructure around the world.”

Read the original post, ‘Huge Chunk of the Internet Goes Offline Thanks to One Company’.

Recommended Read: TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints’

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 14:09:52 +0100

“It is worth noting, however, that the new disclosure about biometric data collection follows a $92 million settlement in a class action lawsuit against TikTok, originally filed in May 2020, over the social media app’s violation of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The consolidated suit included more than 20 separate cases filed against TikTok over the platform’s collection and sharing of the personal and biometric information without user consent. … In the grand scheme of things, TikTok still has plenty of data on its users, their content and their devices, even without biometric data.

For example, TikTok policy already stated it automatically collects information about users’ devices, including location data based on your SIM card and IP addresses and GPS, your use of TikTok itself and all the content you create or upload, the data you send in messages on its app, metadata from the content you upload, cookies, the app and file names on your device, battery state and even your keystroke patterns and rhythms, among other things.

This is in addition to the ‘Information you choose to provide,‘ which comes from when you register, contact TikTok or upload content. In that case, TikTok collects your registration info (username, age, language, etc.), profile info (name, photo, social media accounts), all your user-generated content on the platform, your phone and social network contacts, payment information, plus the text, images and video found in the device’s clipboard.”

Read the original post, ‘TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints’’.

Recommended Read: Deadline draws near to avoid auto-joining Amazon's mesh network Sidewalk

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 10:49:47 +0100

“Owners of Amazon Echo assistants and Ring doorbells have until June 8 to avoid automatically opting into Sidewalk, the internet giant’s mesh network that taps into people’s broadband and may prove to be a privacy nightmare…

‘A stalker can abuse it to stalk people better. There are no mitigations mentioned’…”

Read the original post, ‘Deadline draws near to avoid auto-joining Amazon's mesh network Sidewalk’.

Recommended Read: Twitter May Start Labeling Your Tweets Based on How Wrong You Are

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 12:23:47 +0100

“It does raise concerns about censorship, particularly given how we’ve seen social media platforms bungle moderating Palestinian voices in recent weeks amid the Israel conflict. Twitter’s algorithms have screwed up before, and there’s no arguing that mislabeling inconvenient truths as ‘fake news’ could have lasting repercussions.”

Read the original post, ‘Twitter May Start Labeling Your Tweets Based on How Wrong You Are’.

Recommended Read: I Sold a Tweet About My Future Cat on the Blockchain and Helped Kill the Earth in the Process

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 16:27:29 +0000

“What the buyer is really getting is less tangible: bragging rights, clout, a collector’s item, or simply a nifty new form of money laundering. And because of the meteoric rise of cryptocurrencies, just attaching words like “token” or “blockchain” or “proof of work” to random crap can make its value skyrocket.”

…

”According to CryptoArt.wtf, the Larry transaction used the equivalent of about 11 kilowatt-hours. That’s equivalent to the average electrical consumption of a European Union resident for an entire day—or approximately 21 miles (34 kilometers) of driving with a gas-powered vehicle, one month of laptop use, or a week and a half of desktop computer usage.”

…

“Those figures don’t count, as CryptoArt.wtf noted, the energy cost of “production or storage of the works, or even web hosting.” Nor do they include the energy cost of reselling the NFT, and they don’t include the infinitesimal amount I just contributed to making the blockchain suck up even more juice in the future, which I’m assuming is incalculable.”

Read the original post, ‘I Sold a Tweet About My Future Cat on the Blockchain and Helped Kill the Earth in the Process’.

Recommended Read: Stop Letting Google Get Away With It

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:20:13 +0000

“Like the majority of Google’s privacy pushes that we’ve seen until now, the FLoC proposal isn’t as user-friendly as you might think. For one thing, others have already pointed out that this proposal doesn’t necessarily stop people from being tracked across the web, it just ensures that Google’s the only one doing it.”

Read the original post, ‘Stop Letting Google Get Away With It’.

Recommended Read: ‘They track every move’: how US parole apps created digital prisoners

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 10:53:52 +0000

“Critics also argue that the data-gathering and experimental predictive analytics incorporated into some tracking apps are bound to generate false positives that lead to arrests for technical violations of probation or parole conditions.”

…

”Often it’s people of colour who are having their data extracted from them. This valuable commodity is literally the body of black individuals” -Prof Chaz Arnett, Maryland University

Read the original post, ‘‘They track every move’: how US parole apps created digital prisoners’.

Recommended Read: Can Auditing Eliminate Bias from Algorithms?

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 11:20:12 +0000

“Increasingly, companies are turning to these firms to review their algorithms, particularly when they’ve faced criticism for biased outcomes, but it’s not clear whether such audits are actually making algorithms less biased—or if they’re simply good PR.”

Read the original post, ‘Can Auditing Eliminate Bias from Algorithms?’.

Recommended Read: Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:37:27 +0100

“We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls ‘direct answers,’ which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.”

…

Cummings, of SpanishDict.com, said something similar. “Google delivers the traffic for the whole internet. Unless your name is Facebook, you rely on Google,” he said. “It’s very risky to speak out at Google because you don’t know what type of retaliation you’ll face.”

Read the original post, ‘Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google’.

Recommended Read: Car Companies Want to Monitor Your Every Move With Emotion-Detecting AI

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 17:48:25 +0100

“Very soon, Cerence announced, it plans to deepen that data mining operation with in-cabin cameras linked to emotion-detecting AI—algorithms that monitor minute changes in facial expression in order to determine a person’s emotional state at any given time.

…

But safety is only one attraction of in-cabin monitoring. The systems also hold huge potential for harvesting the kind of behavioral data that Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists have exploited to target ads and influence purchasing habits.

…

Eyeris CEO Modar Alaoui likewise told Motherboard that while his company’s technology is primarily designed to improve safety, “we do foresee at some point that [automakers] will try to leverage the data for several use cases, whether it be for advertising or [determining] insurance” premiums.”

Read the original post, ‘Car Companies Want to Monitor Your Every Move With Emotion-Detecting AI’.

Recommended Read: Facebook Cannot Separate Itself From the Hate It Spreads

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 18:09:53 +0100

“Even a cursory look at Facebook’s “mistakes,” as they refer to them (or “Facebook’s business model” as it is known to most everyone outside of the company), includes redlining users, enabling age discrimination in hiring, offering “Jew haters” as an advertising category, promoting the “boogaloo” movement, fueling genocide in Myanmar, and aiding Duterte’s rise in the Philippines. It’s not so much that the problem of hate on Facebook is new, so much as that each new revelation is met mostly with an apology and a “promise” to do better moving forward. Facebook has been apologizing and promising this way since at least 2007. Yet the “mistakes” continue.”

…

“A company whose business model necessitates that it consistently discharge poison into the environment should be dismantled.”

Read the original post, ‘Facebook Cannot Separate Itself From the Hate It Spreads’.

Recommended Read: The Loss Of Public Goods To Big Tech

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 16:18:12 +0100

“Investments in anti-democratic technologies come at an incredible cost to the public at a time when deeper investments should be made in public health, education, public media and abolitionist approaches in the tech sector.”

Read the original post, ‘The Loss Of Public Goods To Big Tech’.

Recommended Read: Thousands of contracts highlight quiet ties between Big Tech and U.S. military

Wed, 08 Jul 2020 18:13:23 +0100

“Tech Inquiry’s research comes as technology companies have ramped up efforts to win large military and law enforcement contracts, despite employee activism against the work.”

…

“It’s important to recognize that the marketing that happens inside of these companies, assuring workers that what they’re doing is good and that their surveillance program is used for disaster relief and not drone targeting, for instance, is much like the marketing targeted at the public,” [Meredith Whittaker] said.

Read the original post, ‘Thousands of contracts highlight quiet ties between Big Tech and U.S. military’.

Recommended Read: Technological Elites, the Meritocracy, and Post-Racial Myths in Silicon Valley

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 18:18:38 +0100

“What we learn from consistently studying the discourses of Silicon Valley is that its successes come at the expense of a growing number of communities. The costs to these communities are masked by investments in an imagined post-racial, post-gender, post-class reality that is seemingly sympathetic to inclusion, but resists it in material, quantifiable and cultural terms.”

Read the original post, ‘Technological Elites, the Meritocracy, and Post-Racial Myths in Silicon Valley’.

Recommended Read: ‘Normal’ Was Actually Not Great for a Lot of People

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 19:27:59 +0100

“In this critical time, when scarcity is a reality, you see the hierarchy. Certain groups are valued over others. This is the world that so many disabled and chronically ill people already live in. Our lives are still seen as expendable. Now the magnitude is much greater.”

…

“My hope for coming out of this pandemic is that we don’t return to the status quo. Many don’t realize that “normal” was actually not great for a lot of people. Just because all of the nondisabled people go back to work—or to Burning Man, or to Coachella—that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about accessibility.”

Read the original post, ‘‘Normal’ Was Actually Not Great for a Lot of People’.

Recommended Read: Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 17:19:56 +0100

“We’ve been active in trying to sound the alarm bells around facial recognition, both as a threat to privacy when it works and a racist threat to everyone when it doesn’t,” said Phil Mayor, an attorney at [American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan]. “We know these stories are out there, but they’re hard to hear about because people don’t usually realize they’ve been the victim of a bad facial recognition search.”

Read the original post, ‘Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm’.

Recommended Read: Building the Woke Web: Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:30:20 +0100

“Not having access to the internet is expensive, locking you out of essential services and a surfeit of helpful information. Giving people full access to the splendors and knowledge of the online world should be imperative for everyone who works on it.”

…

“People with disabilities are more likely to be a captive audience to apps and websites using their data inappropriately or engaging in other unethical practices. This may be because they rely on a particular site to interact with other people with disabilities, because they lack the tools to visit other sites, or lack other suitable websites or apps to use.”

…

“All the tenets of intersectional feminism, web accessibility, and diversity and inclusion are inextricably tied up in making the web a better place, for all and by all.”

Read the original post, ‘Building the Woke Web: Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice’.

Recommended Read: Humans are not the virus: don’t be an eco-fascist

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 18:22:29 +0100

“Eco-fascist rhetoric works to obscure the responsibility of white colonialism and its long history of destruction, as well as imperialist presences in predominantly black and brown countries”

Read the original post, ‘Humans are not the virus: don’t be an eco-fascist’.

Recommended Read: Tracking everyone’s whereabouts won’t stop COVID-19

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 18:21:45 +0100

“Rather than simply accepting tracking with open arms, Americans should be wary of geeks bearing gifts. Today’s startups could do more than squander venture capital dollars—their misguided COVID-19 surveillance measures may cost lives and undermine our democracy.

… This points to one of the most fundamental concerns in any new health surveillance tool: Who else gets the data? Even if a tool is shown to be effective, even if it’s deployable at scale, how else might the data be used by government agencies?”

Read the original post, ‘Tracking everyone’s whereabouts won’t stop COVID-19’.

Recommended Read: Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts: Are Your Remote Work Apps Spying on You?

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 17:28:15 +0000

“It’s no secret that connecting with co-workers and management through tools like Slack, Zoom, and Google Hangouts is just not the same as going into the office. But technical glitches aren’t the only area of concern as meetings are relegated to bits and bytes. User privacy is, as well.”

Read the original post, ‘Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts: Are Your Remote Work Apps Spying on You?’.

Recommended Read: Panic, Pandemic, and the Body Politic

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 17:26:18 +0000

“The diseases that are most successful in the coming century will, as always, be the diseases that exploit our major failure modes and popular delusions.

…

If you design a world economy that rewards self-interest and makes altruism unaffordable, it’s unsurprising that some people start acting like they’re in the prisoner’s dilemma.”

Read the original post, ‘Panic, Pandemic, and the Body Politic’.

Recommended Read: Coronavirus, facial recognition, and the future of privacy

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 14:49:05 +0000

“If quarantines are ineffective or improperly carried out, millions of people could die, according to some estimates, but that doesn’t mean we can throw civil liberties out the window.

…

Aside from the spread of COVID-19, the other prevailing story this week was a rush of revelations about companies peddling AI-powered surveillance technology to businesses, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

…

Global economies are bracing for recession, and no one knows exactly how the spread of COVID-19 will impact global supply chains, public events, travel, and other industries. And even as we’re actively discussing whether a company like Clearview AI will mean the end of privacy, COVID-19 could easily be used as an excuse to spread mass surveillance.

This is not intended to be alarmist, but it’s important to keep an eye on mission creep in this space.”

Read the original post, ‘Coronavirus, facial recognition, and the future of privacy’.

Recommended Read: OK Google, Black History Month Is Over. What Now?

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 15:37:58 +0000

“Despite the benefits Google has received from the Black community, the company has refused to or has been slow to correct the discriminatory algorithmic practices at YouTube, such as its language filter, ads, and its search algorithms. Whether intentional or unconscious, all of these biases have harmed the Black community. For some people, Google is the internet. Civil rights considerations must be central to big data and the platforms they drive. Google should not celebrate the contributions of Black people without also making their platforms welcoming to them.

…

Technology will not be the silver bullet solving the problem of content moderation. Neither will sensitivity training nor diverse hiring. Dismantling these structures will require racial literacy and more multifaceted changes.

…

To say the internet has a huge impact on our society is an understatement. And the data and privacy missteps committed by Big Tech disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities.”

Read the original post, ‘OK Google, Black History Month Is Over. What Now?’.

Recommended Read: The Prodigal Techbro

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 16:18:21 +0000

“Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse… It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.

…

(While we’re thinking about the neatly elided parts of the prodigal tech bro story, let’s dwell for one moment on the deletion of the entire stories of so many women and people of color barely given a first chance in Silicon Valley, let alone multiple reinventions.)

…

The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent.”

The lot of this is infinitely quotable. And if you’re a person in tech who is starting to care about justice, equality, ethics and so on, please please read the exceptional advice at the end of the article.

Read the original post, ‘The Prodigal Techbro’.

Recommended Read: Spotify’s Weird LinkedIn Playlists Sound Like a Cash Register

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 16:40:21 +0000

“[W]hen you look into the way Spotify’s slowly morphed its playlists into data-mining machines, suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

…

See, to Spotify, playlists and podcasts aren’t just what you’re listening to, but who you are… In the process of tapping into Spotify day after day after day with some variation of this routine, I’m giving the company not only my emotional state but also my entire schedule.

…

Since going public in 2018, Spotify hasn’t been quiet about its push into the big data space, partnering with third party after third party (after third party) to bulk up the intel it can already guesstimate from its user base. More and more, it’s starting to look like Spotify’s less about knowing my “mood” and more about knowing the car I’m most likely to drive, the beer I’m most likely to order at a bar, whether I still live with my parents, and the exact location where I’m binge-eating Baskin Robin’s.”

Read the original post, ‘Spotify’s Weird LinkedIn Playlists Sound Like a Cash Register’.

Recommended Read: Planned Parenthood let Facebook track how often I logged my period

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 15:47:33 +0000

[L]ots of health companies use Facebook to advertise. As my “off Facebook activity” download showed, much of what gets shared with Facebook is indirect information, such as dates and times I visited a website or app, products, or prescriptions I have looked at or purchased, and products I put in a digital shopping cart.

But glued together, these scraps of information create a collage of my overall health, which Facebook can then sell advertisements against. In collecting data about my health behavior and interests, Facebook probably knows more about my health than my doctor.

…

At the end of last year, Planned Parenthood decided to stop using Facebook’s mobile software development kit to make ads for its period tracking app Spot On. When I downloaded my off-Facebook data in January, an outdated version of the Spot On app on my phone had recently pinged Facebook’s servers (this stopped once I updated the app).

…

The organization decided that it was worth losing access to some of Facebook’s targeting capabilities in exchange for better user privacy in this instance.

Good on Planned Parenthood for doing the right thing and removing the Facebook tracking. But it’s shocking that developers are ignorant to the tracking embedded in these frameworks and libraries.

Read the original post, ‘Planned Parenthood let Facebook track how often I logged my period’.

Recommended Read: Here’s the File Clearview AI Has Been Keeping on Me, and Probably on You Too

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 16:54:34 +0000

“You may have forgotten about the photos you uploaded to a then-popular social media site ten or fifteen years ago… but Clearview hasn’t,” Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, wrote in an email. “A lot of data about individuals can quickly become ‘stale’ and thus low-value by those seeking to monetize it. Jobs, salaries, addresses, phone numbers, those all change. But photos are different: your face doesn’t go stale.”

…

“What is clear is that this information is available to far more people than Clearview likes to acknowledge, and that they have future, as-yet-unannounced plans for their photos of your face.”

…

“The face search results show exactly why we need a moratorium on face surveillance. In a democratic society, we should not accept our images being secretly collected and retained to create a mass surveillance database to be used, disclosed, and analyzed at the whim of an unaccountable company.”—Jeramie D. Scott

Read the original post, ‘Here’s the File Clearview AI Has Been Keeping on Me, and Probably on You Too’.

Recommended Read: Will My Data Be Online Forever?

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 19:15:18 +0000

“We should not be scared of permanent records. We should be scared of informational power dynamics that bring immediate, harmful consequences and a serious lack of preservation infrastructure for contemporary culture.”—Meg Leta Jones

“Rather than focus on data (as in the term “data protection”), shouldn’t we be focused on people and communities and the good and the harm that can be done to them with data? I would argue it is far more useful and more practical to focus on what can be done with data, no matter how old or how collected—how can that data be used? So we could identify uses that are harmful or objectionable or likely to cause offense, and either prohibit them outright or require explicit, opt-in consent.”—Fred H. Cate

“A company may have to ask you for consent to collect your geolocation data, but you have no idea what’s being inferred from it. And this is important, because the potential for privacy-invasive harms don’t necessarily occur at the input stage, where you volunteer information to a company. The interesting stage comes afterwards, once machine learning and AI are applied to that data, a process that can derive a lot of potentially very intimate information: your sexual orientation, your housing status, your religion, your political beliefs, potential disabilities, your gender identity. The user often has no idea that the data they’ve surrendered can actually disclose those things.”—Sandra Wachter

Read the original post, ‘Will My Data Be Online Forever?’.

Recommended Read: Facebook didn’t mark ads as ads for blind people for almost 2 years

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 16:56:06 +0000

“Americans with disabilities should not be an afterthought for tech companies. There is no justification for forcing them to spend extra time and effort to navigate past online ads,” said Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. And they should be able to easily learn why they were targeted by those ads, just like everyone else.”

…

“Not including legible labels on ads “certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] and raises questions about whether Facebook is engaging in deceptive practices under the FTC Act,” said Blake Reid, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder who studies accessibility and technology law.

Via Claire Brotherton on Twitter.

Read the original post, ‘Facebook didn’t mark ads as ads for blind people for almost 2 years’.

Recommended Read: A Letter from the President (at The Markup)

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 17:09:22 +0000

“You also deserve to hear these facts from an independent source. We want to investigate the ecosystem of data exploitation, and we don’t think we can do that while shackled to it. And so we make a privacy promise to you, our readers: We will not track you. Unlike many companies, we put your privacy first. We collect the minimum amount of data possible when you visit our site, and we will never monetize this data. We won’t display advertisements on our site, because they too often contain tracking technology. This makes our work more complicated and more expensive—but your privacy is worth it.”

A media organisation that’s leading on privacy. This is SO COOL.

Read the original post, ‘A Letter from the President (at The Markup)’.

Recommended Read: Chrome is ditching third-party cookies because Google wants your data all to itself

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 18:52:05 +0000

“They’re not really changing underlying tactics [of how they track us], they’re just channeling it all through Google,” [Elizabeth] Renieris told Digital Trends.

…

“At least we knew how cookies worked. Instead, Google will shore up its surveillance power with even less oversight and accountability, black-boxed behind its proprietary technology. Not good news at all.”[— Christopher Chan]

…

This means Google will now have full functional, filled out profiles on every single movement and purchase that every one of its billions of users makes across the internet.

Read the original post, ‘Chrome is ditching third-party cookies because Google wants your data all to itself’.

Recommended Read: Google’s decision to shift control of UK user data to the US looks like a calculated political bet that Brexit will be a privacy disaster

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 15:35:19 +0000

“UK users remain protected by Europe’s strict privacy rules for now, even if their data is legally controlled by a US entity. It does, however, raise the specter of reduced privacy in future if a post-Brexit UK alters its laws to become less privacy-oriented.”

…

“That political context is critical to understanding Google’s decision. This is not the action of a company which believes the UK will secure an adequacy agreement or intends to continue aligning itself with the European data protection framework and its user rights. They are moving fast on that belief, and it’s safe to say they are not engaging in this work out of a concern for UK citizens’ human rights,” said [Heather] Burns.

…

“Google mentioning law enforcement at all in the Reuters announcement was a bit of a red herring, in other words, to distract from the everyday user data at stake,” Burns added.

Every tech policy article needs Heather Burns doing bullshit detection.

Read the original post, ‘Google’s decision to shift control of UK user data to the US looks like a calculated political bet that Brexit will be a privacy disaster’.

Recommended Read: Chinese Hacking Is Alarming. So Are Data Brokers.

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 18:02:03 +0000

“Using the personal data of millions of Americans against their will is certainly alarming. But what’s the difference between the Chinese government stealing all that information and a data broker amassing it legally without user consent and selling it on the open market?”

Via Aral.

Read the original post, ‘Chinese Hacking Is Alarming. So Are Data Brokers.’.

Recommended Read: Mental health websites don't have to sell your data. Most still do.

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 14:18:13 +0000

“In other words, whenever you visit a number of websites dedicated to mental health to read about depression or take a test, dozens of third-parties may receive this information and bid money to show you a targeted ad. Interestingly, some of these websites seem to include marketing trackers without displaying any ads, meaning they simply allow data collection on their site, which in turn may be used for advanced profiling of their users.

…

It is highly disturbing that we still have to have to say this, but websites dealing with such sensitive topics should not track their users for marketing purposes. Your mental health is not and should never be for sale.”

I went to add this article to the lens, then saw it goes on to recommend our tracker blocker, Better Blocker. Kismet!

Read the original post, ‘Mental health websites don't have to sell your data. Most still do.’.

Recommended Read: Why you can’t escape dark patterns

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 17:28:09 +0000

“[N]ew research suggests that only 11% of major sites are designing these so-called consent notices to meet the minimum requirements set by law.”

…

“So are design patterns that prevent the user from making an easy and clear privacy decision examples of simply poor design, or are these design patterns intentionally nudging users to share data?” “It has to be intentional because anyone who’s actually read the GDPR in an honest way would know that it’s not right,” says [David] Carroll. “Both the design and the functionality of them are very manipulative in favor of the first- and third-party collectors where possible.”

…

“It’s a design problem,” Carroll says, “but it’s a business model problem first and foremost.”

Related: as Tatiana Mac points out, we need to stop using “dark pattern”. For the practices in this particular article, I prefer “deceptive pattern”, “malicious pattern” or “anti-consent pattern” 🙃

Read the original post, ‘Why you can’t escape dark patterns’.

Recommended Read: How Algorithmic Bias Hurts People With Disabilities

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 15:52:28 +0000

“In hiring, for example, new algorithm-driven tools will identify characteristics shared by a company’s “successful” existing employees, then look for those traits when they evaluate new hires. But as the model treats underrepresented traits as undesired traits to receive less weighting, people with disabilities—like other marginalized groups—risk being excluded as a matter of course.

…

While some have called to fix this data problem by collecting more detailed information about job candidates’ disabilities, further collection raises its own distinct and very real concerns about privacy and discrimination.

These problems exist for others, too: people who have marginalized sexual orientations or nonbinary gender identities, those who fall outside U.S. definitions of race and ethnicity, and for people who are members of multiple, intersecting marginalized communities.”

Read the original post, ‘How Algorithmic Bias Hurts People With Disabilities’.

Recommended Read: Teens have figured out how to mess with Instagram's tracking algorithm

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 11:27:55 +0000

“These teenagers are relying on a sophisticated network of trusted Instagram users to post content from multiple different devices, from multiple different locations.

…

Teens shouldn’t have to go to those lengths to socialize privately on Instagram, said Liz O’Sullivan, technology director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. … ‘I love that the younger generation is thinking along these lines, but it bothers me when we have to come up with these strategies to avoid being tracked,’ O’Sullivan said. ‘She shouldn’t have to have these psyop [psychological operations] networks with multiple people working to hide her identity from Instagram.’”

Read the original post, ‘Teens have figured out how to mess with Instagram's tracking algorithm’.

Recommended Read: Researchers Find ‘Anonymized’ Data Is Even Less Anonymous Than We Thought

Tue, 04 Feb 2020 15:12:50 +0000

“They told Motherboard their tool analyzed thousands of datasets from data scandals ranging from the 2015 hack of Experian, to the hacks and breaches that have plagued services from MyHeritage to porn websites. Despite many of these datasets containing “anonymized” data, the students say that identifying actual users wasn’t all that difficult.

…

For example, while one company might only store usernames, passwords, email addresses, and other basic account information, another company may have stored information on your browsing or location data. Independently they may not identify you, but collectively they reveal numerous intimate details even your closest friends and family may not know.

…

The problem is compounded by the fact that the United States still doesn’t have even a basic privacy law for the internet era, thanks in part to relentless lobbying from a cross-industry coalition of corporations eager to keep this profitable status quo intact. As a result, penalties for data breaches and lax security are often too pathetic to drive meaningful change.”

Read the original post, ‘Researchers Find ‘Anonymized’ Data Is Even Less Anonymous Than We Thought’.

Recommended Read: I’m a trans woman. Google Photos doesn’t know how to categorize me

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 15:53:59 +0000

“The same data set that could be used to build a system to prevent showing trans folks photos from before they started transition could be trivially used and weaponized by an authoritarian state to identify trans people from street cameras,” [Penelope] Phippen says.

With this dystopian future in mind, coupled with the fact that federal agencies like ICE already use facial recognition technology for immigration enforcement, do we even want machine learning to piece together a coherent identity from both pre- and post-transition images?

…

With trans people facing daily harassment simply for existing as ourselves, the stakes seem too high to risk teaching these systems how to recognize us”

This made me think of Tatiana Mac’s brilliant ‘The Banal Binary’ talk at New Adventures conference two weeks ago.

Read the original post, ‘I’m a trans woman. Google Photos doesn’t know how to categorize me’.

Recommended Read: Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 18:11:09 +0000

“The data obtained by Motherboard and PCMag includes Google searches, lookups of locations and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, people visiting companies' LinkedIn pages, particular YouTube videos, and people visiting porn websites. It is possible to determine from the collected data what date and time the anonymized user visited YouPorn and PornHub, and in some cases what search term they entered into the porn site and which specific video they watched.”

LK: I read all claims of “anonymised”/“can’t be de-anonymised” with skepticism.

Read the original post, ‘Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data’.

Recommended Read: Tinder's New Panic Button Is Sharing Your Data With Ad-Tech Companies

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 18:45:11 +0000

““The kinds of people that are gonna be coerced into downloading [the safety app] are exactly the kind of people that are put most at risk by the data that they’re sharing…”

Read the original post, ‘Tinder's New Panic Button Is Sharing Your Data With Ad-Tech Companies’.

Recommended Read: You Are Now Remotely Controlled

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 17:36:40 +0000

“In Wonderland, we celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policy, but we’ve begun to understand that “privacy” policies are actually surveillance policies.

…

All of these delusions rest on the most treacherous hallucination of them all: the belief that privacy is private. We have imagined that we can choose our degree of privacy with an individual calculation in which a bit of personal information is traded for valued services — a reasonable quid pro quo.

…

The lesson is that privacy is public — it is a collective good that is logically and morally inseparable from the values of human autonomy and self-determination upon which privacy depends and without which a democratic society is unimaginable.”

Read the original post, ‘You Are Now Remotely Controlled’.

Recommended Read: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 18:07:17 +0000

“His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

…

The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.”

Read the original post, ‘The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It’.

Recommended Read: Google Nest or Amazon Ring? Just reject these corporations' surveillance and a dystopic future

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 13:55:24 +0000

“Fight for the Future is joining other consumer privacy and civil liberties experts and issuing an official product warning encouraging people to not buy Amazon Ring cameras because of the clear threat that they pose to all of our privacy, safety, and security.

For too long, we’ve been sold a false choice between privacy and security. It’s more clear every day that more surveillance does not mean more safety, especially for the most vulnerable. Talk to your family and friends and encourage them to do their research before putting any private company’s surveillance devices on your door or in your home. In the end, companies like Amazon and Google don’t care about keeping our communities safe; they care about making money.”

Read the original post, ‘Google Nest or Amazon Ring? Just reject these corporations' surveillance and a dystopic future’.

Recommended Read: Mass surveillance for national security does conflict with EU privacy rights, court advisor suggests

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 11:41:54 +0000

“If the Court agrees with the [Advocate general]’s opinion, then unlawful bulk surveillance schemes, including one operated by the UK, will be reined in.”

Read the original post, ‘Mass surveillance for national security does conflict with EU privacy rights, court advisor suggests’.

Recommended Read: Systemic Algorithmic Harms

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 17:08:47 +0000

“Because both ‘stereotype’ and ‘bias’ are theories of individual perception, our discussions do not adequately prioritize naming and locating the systemic harms of the technologies we build. When we stop overusing the word ‘bias,’ we can begin to use language that has been designed to theorize at the level of structural oppression, both in terms of identifying the scope of the harm and who experiences it.”

Read the original post, ‘Systemic Algorithmic Harms’.

Recommended Read: Grindr Shares Location, Sexual Orientation Data, Study Shows

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 14:33:13 +0000

“Grindr is sharing detailed personal data with thousands of advertising partners, allowing them to receive information about users’ location, age, gender and sexual orientation…” … “‘Every time you open an app like Grindr, advertisement networks get your GPS location, device identifiers and even the fact that you use a gay dating app,’ said Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems.”

Read the original post, ‘Grindr Shares Location, Sexual Orientation Data, Study Shows’.

Recommended Read: Technology Can't Fix Algorithmic Injustice

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 18:57:43 +0000

“Some contend that strong AI may be only decades away, but this focus obscures the reality that “weak” (or “narrow”) AI is already reshaping existing social and political institutions. Algorithmic decision making and decision support systems are currently being deployed in many high-stakes domains, from criminal justice, law enforcement, and employment decisions to credit scoring, school assignment mechanisms, health care, and public benefits eligibility assessments. Never mind the far-off specter of doomsday; AI is already here, working behind the scenes of many of our social systems.

What responsibilities and obligations do we bear for AI’s social consequences in the present—not just in the distant future? To answer this question, we must resist the learned helplessness that has come to see AI development as inevitable. Instead, we should recognize that developing and deploying weak AI involves making consequential choices—choices that demand greater democratic oversight not just from AI developers and designers, but from all members of society.

…

There may be some machine learning systems that should not be deployed in the first place, no matter how much we can optimize them.”

Read the original post, ‘Technology Can't Fix Algorithmic Injustice’.

Recommended Read: How “Good Intent” Undermines Diversity and Inclusion

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 17:16:01 +0000

“‘Assume good intent’ is a particularly pernicious positive expectation that will undermine your code of conduct. The implied inverse of this is that not assuming good intent is against the rules.

…

The harm is that telling people to “assume good intent” is a sign that if they come to you with a concern, you will minimize their feelings, police their reactions, and question their perceptions. It tells marginalized people that you don’t see codes of conduct as tools to address systemic discrimination, but as tools to manage personal conflicts without taking power differences into account. Telling people to “assume good intent” sends a message about whose feelings you plan to center when an issue arises in your community.

…

If you want to build a culture of ‘assuming good intent,’ start by assuming good intent in marginalized people.”

Read the original post, ‘How “Good Intent” Undermines Diversity and Inclusion’.

Recommended Read: Google’s Acquisition of Fitbit Has Implications for Health and Fitness Data

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 17:23:18 +0000

“Even if the Silicon Valley tech giant doesn’t plan to use that health and fitness data to show you ads, you can rest assured that Google has plenty of other uses for that data.”

Read the original post, ‘Google’s Acquisition of Fitbit Has Implications for Health and Fitness Data’.

Recommended Read: Why Are You Publicly Sharing Your Child’s DNA Information?

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 13:48:04 +0000

The problem with these tests is twofold. First, parents are testing their children in ways that could have serious implications as they grow older — and they are not old enough to consent. Second, by sharing their children’s genetic information on public websites, parents are forever exposing their personal health data.

…

Dr. Louanne Hudgins, a geneticist at Stanford, cautions parents to consider the long-term privacy of their child’s health information collected through home genetic kits. Their children’s DNA and other health data, she has warned, could be sold to other companies — marketing firms, data brokers, insurance companies — in the same way that social media sites and search engines collect and share data about their users.

…

The sharing of DNA results on open-source genealogy databases to find long-lost relatives poses another privacy risk: When parents share their children’s DNA on these sites, they are effectively sharing it with the world, including with the government and law enforcement investigators.

Read the original post, ‘Why Are You Publicly Sharing Your Child’s DNA Information?’.

Recommended Read: Big Data and the Underground Railroad

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 15:49:26 +0000

“Far too often, today’s discrimination was yesterday’s national security or public health necessity. An approach that advocates ubiquitous data collection and protects privacy solely through post-collection use restrictions doesn’t account for that.”

Read the original post, ‘Big Data and the Underground Railroad’.

Recommended Read: How Big Tech Manipulates Academia to Avoid Regulation

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 18:53:39 +0000

“There is now an enormous amount of work under the rubric of “AI ethics.” To be fair, some of the research is useful and nuanced, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But the majority of well-funded work on “ethical AI” is aligned with the tech lobby’s agenda: to voluntarily or moderately adjust, rather than legally restrict, the deployment of controversial technologies.

…

No defensible claim to “ethics” can sidestep the urgency of legally enforceable restrictions to the deployment of technologies of mass surveillance and systemic violence.”

Read the original post, ‘How Big Tech Manipulates Academia to Avoid Regulation’.

Recommended Read: Big Mood Machine

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 16:21:57 +0000

“[M]usic streaming platforms are in a unique position within the greater platform economy: they have troves of data related to our emotional states, moods, and feelings. It’s a matter of unprecedented access to our interior lives, which is buffered by the flimsy illusion of privacy.

…

Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions. Further, since 2016, Spotify has shared this mood data directly with the world’s biggest marketing and advertising firms.

…

“At Spotify we have a personal relationship with over 191 million people who show us their true colors with zero filter,” reads a current advertising deck. “That’s a lot of authentic engagement with our audience: billions of data points every day across devices! This data fuels Spotify’s streaming intelligence—our secret weapon that gives brands the edge to be relevant in real-time moments.”

…

In Spotify’s world, listening data has become the oil that fuels a monetizable metrics machine, pumping the numbers that lure advertisers to the platform. In a data-driven listening environment, the commodity is no longer music. The commodity is listening. The commodity is users and their moods. The commodity is listening habits as behavioral data. Indeed, what Spotify calls “streaming intelligence” should be understood as surveillance of its users to fuel its own growth and ability to sell mood-and-moment data to brands.

…

What’s in question here isn’t just how Spotify monitors and mines data on our listening in order to use their “audience segments” as a form of currency—but also how it then creates environments more suitable for advertisers through what it recommends, manipulating future listening on the platform.”

Read the original post, ‘Big Mood Machine’.

Recommended Read: Who Listens to the Listeners?

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 17:37:13 +0000

“And thus, in the guise of a seemingly innocuous tradeoff (in which the user thinks they’re really getting the benefit), the user accepts being subjected to high-tech corporate surveillance.

Importantly, this is one of the primary ways in which such surveillance gets normalized.

…

High-tech surveillance succeeds by slowly chipping away at the obstacles to its acceptance. It does not start with the total takeover, rather it begins on a smaller scale, presenting itself as harmless and enjoyable. As people steadily grow accustomed to this sort of surveillance, as they come to see themselves as its beneficiaries instead of as its victims, they become open to a little bit more surveillance, and a little bit more surveillance, and a little bit more. This is the steady wearing down of defenses, the slow transformation of corporate creepiness into cultural complacency, that allows rampant high-tech surveillance to progress.”

Read the original post, ‘Who Listens to the Listeners?’.

Recommended Read: The biggest myths about the next billion internet users

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 17:38:41 +0000

“We need to de-exoticize these users if we are going to genuinely have a healthy global digital culture. They need to be humanized, understood, and kept in mind when designing inclusive platforms. The internet is a critical public resource that is meant for all users—and that includes the world’s poor.”

Read the original post, ‘The biggest myths about the next billion internet users’.

Recommended Read: AI thinks like a corporation—and that’s worrying

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 18:15:52 +0000

“After the 2010 BP oil spill, for example, which killed 11 people and devastated the Gulf of Mexico, no one went to jail. The threat that Mr Runciman cautions against is that AI techniques, like playbooks for escaping corporate liability, will be used with impunity.

Today, pioneering researchers such as Julia Angwin, Virginia Eubanks and Cathy O’Neil reveal how various algorithmic systems calcify oppression, erode human dignity and undermine basic democratic mechanisms like accountability when engineered irresponsibly. Harm need not be deliberate; biased data-sets used to train predictive models also wreak havoc.

…

A central promise of AI is that it enables large-scale automated categorisation… This “promise” becomes a menace when directed at the complexities of everyday life. Careless labels can oppress and do harm when they assert false authority.”

Read the original post, ‘AI thinks like a corporation—and that’s worrying’.

Recommended Read: My Fight With a Sidewalk Robot

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 14:25:14 +0000

“The advancement of robotics, AI, and other “futuristic” technologies has ushered in a new era in the ongoing struggle for representation of people with disabilities in large-scale decision-making settings.

…

We need to build a technological future that benefits disabled people without disadvantaging them along the way.

…

Accessible design should not depend on the ability of an able-bodied design team to understand someone else’s experience or foresee problems that they’ve never had. The burden of change should not rest on the user (or in my case, the bystander) and their ability to communicate their issues.

…

A solution that works for most at the expense of another is not enough.”

Read the original post, ‘My Fight With a Sidewalk Robot’.

Recommended Read: Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 15:29:54 +0000

“Surveillance Giants lays out how the surveillance-based business model of Facebook and Google is inherently incompatible with the right to privacy and poses a systemic threat to a range of other rights including freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.

…

The tech giants offer these services to billions without charging users a fee. Instead, individuals pay for the services with their intimate personal data, being constantly tracked across the web and in the physical world as well, for example, through connected devices.

…

The technology behind the internet is not incompatible with our rights, but the business model Facebook and Google have chosen is”

Read the original post, ‘Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights’.

Recommended Read: The Risks of Using AI to Interpret Human Emotions

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 15:47:28 +0000

“Because of the subjective nature of emotions, emotional AI is especially prone to bias. For example, one study found that emotional analysis technology assigns more negative emotions to people of certain ethnicities than to others. Consider the ramifications in the workplace, where an algorithm consistently identifying an individual as exhibiting negative emotions might affect career progression.

…

In short, if left unaddressed, conscious or unconscious emotional bias can perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions at an unprecedented scale.”

Read the original post, ‘The Risks of Using AI to Interpret Human Emotions’.

Recommended Read: These Black Women Are Fighting For Justice In A World Of Biased Algorithms

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 15:49:16 +0000

“By rooting out bias in technology, these Black women engineers, professors and government experts are on the front lines of the civil rights movement of our time.”

Read the original post, ‘These Black Women Are Fighting For Justice In A World Of Biased Algorithms’.

Recommended Read: No one should buy the Facebook Portal TV

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 15:10:36 +0000

“It’s a complete anomaly – a solidly performing, decently priced device that just isn’t suited for anyone because of the privacy concerns and increasingly alarming issues plaguing the social networking site.”

Read the original post, ‘No one should buy the Facebook Portal TV’.

Recommended Read: I worked on political ads at Facebook. They profit by manipulating us.

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 17:47:04 +0000

“[T]rue transparency would include information about the tools that differentiate advertising on Facebook from traditional print and television, and in fact make it more dangerous: Can I see if a political advertiser used the custom audience tool, and if so, if my email address was uploaded? Can I see what look-alike audience advertisers are seeking? Can I see a true, verified name of the advertiser in the disclaimer? Can I see if and how your algorithms amplified the ad? If not, the claim that Facebook is simply providing a level playing field for free expression is a myth.

…

Free political speech is core to our democratic principles, and it’s true that social media companies should not be the arbiters of truth. But the only way Facebook or other companies that use our behavioral data to potentially manipulate us through targeted advertising can prevent abuse of their platform to harm our electoral process is to end their most egregious targeting and amplification practices and provide real transparency.

…

We need lawmakers and regulators to help protect our children, our cognitive capabilities, our public square and our democracy by creating guardrails and rules to deal directly with the incentives and business models of these platforms and the societal harms they are causing.”

Read the original post, ‘I worked on political ads at Facebook. They profit by manipulating us.’.

Recommended Read: Smart home tech can help evict renters, surveillance company tells landlords

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 15:09:26 +0000

“While the features that come with smart locks or doorbell cameras offer conveniences for homeowners, they open up concerns about privacy for renters – who might not have signed on for constant surveillance.”

…

“Facial recognition and emerging forms of AI give landlords alarming power to harass rent-stabilized tenants.”

Read the original post, ‘Smart home tech can help evict renters, surveillance company tells landlords’.

Recommended Read: ‘Alexa, are you invading my privacy?’ – the dark side of our voice assistants

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 15:06:41 +0000

“You are building an infrastructure that can be later co-opted in undesirable ways by large multinationals and state surveillance apparatus, and compromised by malicious hackers,” says Dr Michael Veale, a lecturer in digital rights and regulation at UCL Faculty of Laws at University College London.

Read the original post, ‘‘Alexa, are you invading my privacy?’ – the dark side of our voice assistants’.

Recommended Read: When Binary Code Won’t Accommodate Nonbinary People

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 17:00:26 +0000

“This is not about math, but about human social values being superimposed on a mathematical system. The question becomes: Whose values are encoded in the system?”

…

“That trans and gender nonconforming people are excluded from or subjugated to information systems is a phenomenon [Anna Lauren Hoffmann] labels data violence, or ‘Harm inflicted on trans and gender nonconforming people not only by government-run systems, but also the information systems that permeate our everyday social lives.’”

Read the original post, ‘When Binary Code Won’t Accommodate Nonbinary People’.

Recommended Read: Don’t Regulate Facial Recognition. Ban It.

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 14:45:05 +0100

“The surveillance dystopia is on the horizon, and companies like Microsoft and Amazon are helping build it. Despite their platitudes of caution and ethics, we’ve seen the consequences of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos. And if we don’t stop the spread of facial recognition, its latest lucrative surveillance product, we’ll soon count our most basic freedoms among the things they’ve broken.”

…

“Company after company in Silicon Valley has been pushing furiously ahead with the development of face-scanning surveillance tools. They see money to be made selling this tech to governments, airlines, and other private businesses. Facing growing concern from the public and lawmakers, the industry has disingenuously asked for “regulation.” This is straight out of Big Tech’s lobbying playbook — asking Congress to pass laws and then swooping in to help write them. By doing so, they hope to avoid the real debate: whether facial recognition surveillance should be allowed at all.”

…

“There is no time to waste. Authoritarian surveillance programs are always used to target the most vulnerable and marginalized, and facial recognition enables the automation of oppression.”

Read the original post, ‘Don’t Regulate Facial Recognition. Ban It.’.

Recommended Read: Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids

Tue, 22 Oct 2019 14:21:20 +0100

“Unlike gun control, Marlow said, ‘Surveillance is politically palatable, and so they’re pursuing surveillance as a way you can demonstrate action, even though there’s no evidence that it will positively impact the problem.’” … “Some people think that technology is magic, that artificial intelligence will save us,” Vance said. “A lot of the questions and a lot of the privacy concerns haven’t [been] thought of, let alone addressed.” … “For black students, and students with disabilities, who already face a disproportionate amount of harsh disciplinary measures, the introduction of new kinds of surveillance may be especially harmful, privacy experts said.”

Read the original post, ‘Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids’.

Recommended Read: The Creators Of Pokémon Go Mapped The World. Now They're Mapping You

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 14:12:17 +0100

“Ubiquitous computing is still a fantasy, but not because the technology isn’t ready. It is. The fantasy is that any system mediating someone’s personal experience of the physical world that uses a modern corporation’s digital infrastructure would be objective or neutral. Humans are data and data is money, and this is the business model of many of the technology firms up to the task of ubiquitous computing.”

Read the original post, ‘The Creators Of Pokémon Go Mapped The World. Now They're Mapping You’.

Recommended Read: Is a Tech Company Ever Neutral?

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 15:23:03 +0100

“Yes, all markets require a level of privacy in order to operate. You can’t know the political leaning of everyone you buy a sandwich from. Vendors can decide what they do or don’t want to disclose or ask of their customers. But when they do know, they have no obligation to proceed with that business. Activists and tech critics sometimes use the word complicit when talking about companies that look the other way when their inventions are causing harm. Assistive might be more accurate. Providing database and web services—even just email—to a cruel immigration regime assists in the cruelty.”

…

“These companies can do what they want with the software they sell. But they should stop pretending that what they sell is neutral.”

Read the original post, ‘Is a Tech Company Ever Neutral?’.

Recommended Read: Tech platforms are where public life is increasingly constructed, and their motivations are far from neutral

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 11:54:15 +0100

“Note that I haven’t asked: “What’s the impact of technology on society?” That’s the wrong question. Platforms are societies of intertwined people and machines. There is no such thing as “online life” versus “real life.” We give massive ground if we pretend that these companies are simply having an “effect” or “impact” on some separate society.”

Read the original post, ‘Tech platforms are where public life is increasingly constructed, and their motivations are far from neutral’.

Recommended Read: The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 16:19:45 +0100

“[T]he assertion that technology companies can’t possibly be shaped or restrained with the public’s interest in mind is to argue that they are fundamentally different from any other industry. They’re not.”

…

“There’s a growing chasm between how everyday users feel about the technology around them and how companies decide what to make. And yet, these companies say they have our best interests in mind. We can’t go back, they say. We can’t stop the “natural evolution of technology.” But the “natural evolution of technology” was never a thing to begin with, and it’s time to question what “progress” actually means.”

Read the original post, ‘The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us’.

Recommended Read: ‘We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 11:13:44 +0100

“Out in the wider world, anonymity is no longer guaranteed. Facial recognition gives police and companies the means of identifying and tracking people of interest, while others are free to go about their business. The real question is: who gets that privilege?”

Read the original post, ‘‘We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology’.

Recommended Read: Cheap smartphones have a disturbing secret

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 15:50:26 +0100

“Seventeen dollars for a smartphone sounds like a great deal, especially for people living in poverty who can barely afford rent.

But there’s a problem: low-cost smartphones are privacy nightmares.”

“The MYA2 also has apps that can’t be updated or deleted, and those apps contain multiple security and privacy flaws. One of those pre-installed apps that can’t be removed, Facebook Lite, gets default permission to track everywhere you go, upload all your contacts, and read your phone’s calendar.”

“While companies like Apple are to be lauded for prioritizing privacy protections, people around the world should not be reliant on tech giants building privacy safeguards for only a population that can afford it.”

Read the original post, ‘Cheap smartphones have a disturbing secret’.

Recommended Read: How ICE Picks Its Targets in the Surveillance Age

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 16:42:36 +0100

“For decades, the overriding objective of American business and government has been to remove friction from the tracking system, by linking networks, by speeding connections, by eliminating barriers. But friction is the only thing that has ever made privacy, let alone obscurity, possible. If there’s no friction, if we can all be profiled instantly and intimately, then there’s nothing to stop any of our neighbors from being targeted — nothing, that is, except our priorities.”

A long, sickening, read.

Read the original post, ‘How ICE Picks Its Targets in the Surveillance Age’.

Recommended Read: Europe’s top court says active consent is needed for tracking cookies

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 10:16:17 +0100

“Europe’s top court has ruled that pre-checked consent boxes for dropping cookies are not legally valid.

Consent must be obtained prior to storing or accessing non-essential cookies, such as tracking cookies for targeted advertising. Consent cannot be implied or assumed.”

“Sites that have relied upon opting EU users into ad-tracking cookies in the hopes they’ll just click okay to make the cookie banner go away are in for a rude awakening.”

Read the original post, ‘Europe’s top court says active consent is needed for tracking cookies’.

Recommended Read: Sorry, But Male Geniuses Are Replaceable

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 10:50:10 +0100

“Perhaps it’s easier to separate the scientist from his science when you’re not, and never will be, affected personally by misogyny and sexism.”

“Unfortunately, many women in STEM are adversely affected by misogynists and sexists when those men are highly regarded and respected within the scientific community. After all, sexual harassment isn’t really about sex — it’s about power.”

“[W]hat’s worth more, the contributions of a lone male genius who assaults and harasses and discriminates against women, or the contributions of a large scientific community unhindered by a misogynistic and unsafe environment?”

The same goes for the tech community… and also for the racist and white supremacist ideologies held within.

Read the original post, ‘Sorry, But Male Geniuses Are Replaceable’.

Recommended Read: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 13:11:01 +0100

“We are often sold a similar bill of goods: big tech companies talk incessantly about how ‘AI’ and digitization will bring a better future. In the present tense, however, putting computers everywhere is bad for most people. It enables advertisers, employers and cops to exercise more control over us – in addition to helping heat the planet.”

“Training models isn’t the only way [machine learning] contributes to the cooking of our planet. It has also stimulated a hunger for data that is probably the single biggest driver of the digitization of everything. Corporations and governments now have an incentive to acquire as much data as possible, because that data, with the help of [machine learning], might yield valuable patterns. It might tell them who to fire, who to arrest, when to perform maintenance on a machine or how to promote a new product.”

Read the original post, ‘To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution’.

Recommended Read: The Rise of Networked Vigilante Surveillance

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 16:10:14 +0100

“Neighborhoods armed with Ring videos, Flock readers, and NextDoor posts have the power to create networked engines of suspicion, sometimes ill-founded or erroneous, that may embolden residents to take actions they should not.”

Read the original post, ‘The Rise of Networked Vigilante Surveillance’.

Recommended Read: No Body's Business But Mine: How Menstruation Apps Are Sharing Your Data

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 11:40:49 +0100

“Feeling anxious? Got lucky last night? Having some health issues? Tell Maya and they’ll let Facebook and others know (oh, and they’ll share your diary too!)”

There is a reason why advertisers are so interested in your mood; understanding when a person is in a vulnerable state of mind means you can strategically target them. Knowing when a teenager is feeling low means an advertiser might try and sell them a food supplement that is supposed to make them feel strong and focused. Understanding people’s mood is an entry point for manipulating them. And that is all the more worrying in an age when Facebook is having so much impact on our democracies, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed. Indeed, it is not just advertisers that will want to know how we feel; as elections approach, political parties may want to know if we feel anxious, stressed or excited so that they can adapt their narratives accordingly.

Read the original post, ‘No Body's Business But Mine: How Menstruation Apps Are Sharing Your Data’.

Recommended Read: At the Border of Europe's Surveillance State

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 14:36:08 +0100

“[E]ven if not lawless, historically, borders have been vulnerable places for human rights—particularly the right to privacy—as border guards extend government intrusion into our private lives with the authority of upholding national security. Now, data collection and artificial intelligence are threatening to turn borders into an underregulated free-for-all.”

Read the original post, ‘At the Border of Europe's Surveillance State’.

Recommended Read: Social Media Censorship Is Hurting Those on the Margins

Tue, 21 May 2019 09:21:45 +0100

“A lot of people think there’s an easy solution, and that the [solution is] for the platforms to ‘do something.’ Social media companies do not have a good history in this arena, and there are so many reasons not to trust these giant companies, why should we trust them to decide what speech is acceptable?”

Read the original post, ‘Social Media Censorship Is Hurting Those on the Margins’.

Recommended Read: The Doorbell Company That’s Selling Fear

Tue, 14 May 2019 11:20:37 +0100

“News organizations have multiple and sometimes conflicting incentives that might affect how they present the local police blotter. A company that sells security-optimized doorbells has only one incentive: emphasizing that the world is a scary place, and you need to buy our products to protect you.”

Read the original post, ‘The Doorbell Company That’s Selling Fear’.

Recommended Read: Millions of people uploaded photos to the Ever app. Then the company used them to develop facial recognition tools.

Thu, 09 May 2019 15:41:13 +0100

“Ever AI promises prospective military clients that it can ‘enhance surveillance capabilities’ and ‘identify and act on threats.’ It offers law enforcement the ability to identify faces in body-cam recordings or live video feeds.”

Read the original post, ‘Millions of people uploaded photos to the Ever app. Then the company used them to develop facial recognition tools.’.

Recommended Read: The creeping threat of facial recognition

Wed, 08 May 2019 09:30:54 +0100

“Once facial recognition and other AI becomes pervasive—and in the absence of serious enforceable laws that can put guardrails on the technology—we will be unprotected, and as such will be subjected to any purpose to which the government or business wants to put our identities and locations. This is where greed, profit, and power come into play as motivators.”

Read the original post, ‘The creeping threat of facial recognition’.

Recommended Read: These Ads Think They Know You

Tue, 07 May 2019 10:50:27 +0100

“Today’s data providers can receive information from almost every imaginable part of your life: your activity on the internet, the places you visit, the stores you walk through, the things you buy, the things you like, who your friends are, the places your friends go, the things your friends do, and on and on.”

Read the original post, ‘These Ads Think They Know You’.

Recommended Read: The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 17:55:48 +0100

“The poor experience these two extremes — hypervisibility and invisibility — while often lacking the agency or resources to challenge unfair outcomes. For instance, they may be unfairly targeted by predictive policing tools designed with biased training data or unfairly excluded from hiring algorithms that scour social media networks to make determinations about potential candidates. In this increasingly complex ecosystem of “networked privacy harms,” one-size-fits-all privacy solutions will not serve all communities equally. Efforts to create a more ethical technology sector must take the unique experiences of vulnerable and marginalized users into account.”

Read the original post, ‘The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age’.

Recommended Read: Facebook while black: Users call it getting ‘Zucked,’ say talking about racism is censored as hate speech

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 08:45:14 +0100

“Facebook is not looking to protect me or any other person of color or any other marginalized citizen who are being attacked by hate speech,” [Carolyn Wysinger] says. “We get trolls all the time. People who troll your page and say hateful things. But nobody is looking to protect us from it. They are just looking to protect their bottom line.”

Read the original post, ‘Facebook while black: Users call it getting ‘Zucked,’ say talking about racism is censored as hate speech’.

Recommended Read: How Big Tech’s cozy relationship with Ireland threatens data privacy around the world

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 13:44:03 +0100

“Ireland’s failure to safeguard huge stores of personal information looms larger now that the country is the primary regulator responsible for protecting the health information, email addresses, financial records, relationship status, search histories and friend lists for hundreds of millions of Americans, Europeans and other users around the globe.”

“Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of catering to the very companies it is supposed to oversee…”

Read the original post, ‘How Big Tech’s cozy relationship with Ireland threatens data privacy around the world’.

Recommended Read: That mental health app might share your data without telling you

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 16:19:53 +0100

“33 of the 36 apps shared information that could give advertisers or data analytics companies insights into people’s digital behavior. And a few shared very sensitive information, like health diary entries, self reports about substance use, and usernames.”

“Potentially advertisers could use this to compromise someone’s privacy and sway their treatment decisions…”

Read the original post, ‘That mental health app might share your data without telling you’.

Recommended Read: Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 10:48:20 +0100

“Obscurity bridges this privacy gap with the idea that the parts of our lives that are hard or unlikely to be found or understood are relatively safe. It is a combination of the privacy you have in public and the privacy you have in groups. Obscurity is a barrier that can shield you from government, corporate and social snoops. And until lawmakers, corporate leaders and citizens embrace obscurity and move to protect it, your freedom and opportunities to flourish will be in jeopardy.”

Read the original post, ‘Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd’.

Recommended Read: Communities at risk: How security fails are endangering the LBGTIQ+ community

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 10:03:52 +0100

“This enables governments and companies to construct profiles of them, using these highly sensitive details to make inferences or predictions that may or may not be accurate. Increasingly, profiles are being used to make or inform consequential decisions, from credit scoring, to hiring, to policing.”

Read the original post, ‘Communities at risk: How security fails are endangering the LBGTIQ+ community’.

Recommended Read: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 13:27:41 +0100

“Technology companies have for years responded to court orders for specific users’ information. The new warrants go further, suggesting possible suspects and witnesses in the absence of other clues. Often, Google employees said, the company responds to a single warrant with location information on dozens or hundreds of devices.”

“The technique illustrates a phenomenon privacy advocates have long referred to as the “if you build it, they will come” principle — anytime a technology company creates a system that could be used in surveillance, law enforcement inevitably comes knocking. Sensorvault, according to Google employees, includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”

Read the original post, ‘Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police’.

Recommended Read: Discrimination’s Digital Frontier

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 14:57:29 +0100

“A recent study led by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Southern California shows that, given a large group of people who might be eligible to see an advertisement, Facebook will pick among them based on its own profit-maximizing calculations, sometimes serving ads to audiences that are skewed heavily by race and gender.”

“An ad system that is designed to maximize clicks, and to maximize profits for Facebook, will naturally reinforce these social inequities and so serve as a barrier to equal opportunity.”

Read the original post, ‘Discrimination’s Digital Frontier’.

Recommended Read: Are you serious Mr Zuckerberg?

Tue, 02 Apr 2019 09:07:31 +0100

“Facebook is seeking yet again to apportion blame for its failures elsewhere - this time on governments for failing to regulate. Yet Facebook continually obstructs regulatory reform with its powerful lobbying capabilities, appeals against regulatory judgments and then investigates its critics.”

Read the original post, ‘Are you serious Mr Zuckerberg?’.

Recommended Read: Privacy’s not an abstraction

Thu, 28 Mar 2019 10:24:35 +0000

“Privacy for marginalized populations has never been, and will never be an abstract. Being surveilled, whether by private actors, or the state, is often the gateway to very tangible harms–violence in the form of police brutality, incarceration, or deportation. And there can be more subliminal, insidious impacts, too.”

“The idea that surveillance would be used as an assignment on those with no options for consent speaks to how broken our ideas about consent have become, trivializing what to many people is a life and death matter of their lived existence.”

Read the original post, ‘Privacy’s not an abstraction’.

Recommended Read: State websites are aiding a disgraceful silent surveillance

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 16:58:52 +0000

“Of ‘special concern’ is that, by cross-referencing such data to the vast trove of personally-identifying information Google also holds from services like Gmail, Android apps, and Search, Google can ‘easily associate web activity with the identities of real people’, the report warns.”

Read the original post, ‘State websites are aiding a disgraceful silent surveillance’.

Recommended Read: Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 09:39:46 +0000

“We, by way of our platforms, give agency and credence to these acts of violence, then pilfer profits from them. Tech is a money-making accomplice to these hate crimes.”

Read the original post, ‘Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate’.

Recommended Read: Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 08:40:27 +0000

“Personal data is used to deny low-income people access to resources or opportunities, but it’s also used to target them with predatory marketing for payday loans or even straight-up scams.”

“ Undocumented immigrants, day laborers, homeless people, and those with criminal convictions suffer from another data extreme: living beyond the reach of the data collection systems needed to thrive in society, they gain so much “privacy” that they become increasingly invisible. Living in this surveillance gap can be as damaging as living under constant surveillance, and is often a reaction to it.”

Read the original post, ‘Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor’.

Recommended Read: How the tragic death of Do Not Track ruined the web for everyone

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 09:44:52 +0000

“the prospect of federal legislation brought ad players to the table. But when that legislation didn’t materialize, “the prolonged negotiations in fact proved useful to the industry to create the illusion of a voluntary self-regulatory process, seemingly preempting the need for regulation.”

Read the original post, ‘How the tragic death of Do Not Track ruined the web for everyone’.

Recommended Read: Tech giants do not face enough competition, new report says

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 09:04:36 +0000

“As for forcing the big companies to provide access to their customers' data troves to other companies, we urge significant caution. Personal data is not just any other economic asset. Privacy and the protection of personal data are fundamental human rights.”

Read the original post, ‘Tech giants do not face enough competition, new report says’.

Recommended Read: Why beating your phone addiction may come at a cost

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 09:19:51 +0000

“as this burgeoning movement becomes an industry, some worry that the “wellness” approach and its emphasis on personal responsibility is whitewashing deeper structural issues within the tech industry.”

Read the original post, ‘Why beating your phone addiction may come at a cost’.

Recommended Read: Reclaiming privacy: a feminist manifesto

Mon, 11 Mar 2019 08:45:57 +0000

“So, what does privacy have to do with this? This question calls for another question: whose privacy are we fighting for when we say we defend the right to privacy? Talking about privacy in the abstract – as if we all benefit from the same rights, as if we are all equal – means taking the risk of defending the rights of only the most privileged ones in society – with privilege coming in different forms from having a voice to be heard to socio-economic status.”

Read the original post, ‘Reclaiming privacy: a feminist manifesto’.

Recommended Read: A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 13:35:26 +0000

“The list of concerns about self-driving cars just got longer.

In addition to worrying about how safe they are, how they’d handle tricky moral trade-offs on the road, and how they might make traffic worse, we also need to worry about how they could harm people of color.

If you’re a person with dark skin, you may be more likely than your white friends to get hit by a self-driving car, according to a new study out of the Georgia Institute of Technology. That’s because automated vehicles may be better at detecting pedestrians with lighter skin tones.”

Read the original post, ‘A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians’.

Recommended Read: Mark Zuckerberg discovers privacy

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 09:43:44 +0000

But can Facebook reform its 15-year legacy as devourer of all things private with a single sweeping, underedited screed from its copycat visionary and dark-pattern technocrat?

Fuck no, of course it can’t.”

Read the original post, ‘Mark Zuckerberg discovers privacy’.

Recommended Read: Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 08:58:19 +0000

“By buying or licensing data or scraping public records, third-party data companies can assemble thousands of attributes each for billions of people… These days, if you use a smartphone or a credit card, it’s not difficult for a company to determine if you’ve just gone through a break-up, if you’re pregnant or trying to lose weight, whether you’re an extrovert, what medicine you take, where you’ve been, and even how you swipe and tap on your smartphone.

All that information can be used to create profiles of you—think of them as virtual, possibly erroneous versions of you—that can be used to target you with ads, classify the riskiness of your lifestyle, or help determine your eligibility for a job. Like the companies themselves, the risks can be hard to see. Apart from the dangers of merely collecting and storing all that data, detailed (and often erroneous) consumer profiles can lead to race or income-based discrimination, in a high-tech version of redlining.)”

Read the original post, ‘Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information’.

Recommended Read: Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 09:40:23 +0000

“The documents… reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU.”

Also worth reading the longer article on Computer Weekly.

Read the original post, ‘Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws’.

Recommended Read: Privacy complaints received by tech giants’ favorite EU watchdog up more than 2x since GDPR

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 11:09:52 +0000

“‘The phenomenon that is the [GDPR] has demonstrated one thing above all else: people’s interest in and appetite for understanding and controlling use of their personal data is anything but a reflection of apathy and fatalism,’ writes Helen Dixon, Ireland’s commissioner for data protection.”

Read the original post, ‘Privacy complaints received by tech giants’ favorite EU watchdog up more than 2x since GDPR’.

Recommended Read: The real reason why Facebook and Google won’t change

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 17:01:05 +0000

“These histories illustrate Facebook’s radical indifference, my term for the formal relationship between surveillance capitalists and their users. Facebook doesn’t care about disinformation, or mental health, or any of the other issues on Zuckerberg’s list of resolutions. Users are not customers, nor are they ‘the product.’ They are merely free sources of raw material.”

Read the original post, ‘The real reason why Facebook and Google won’t change’.

Recommended Read: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 11:30:36 +0000

“That people don’t know there are human beings doing this work is, of course, by design. Facebook would rather talk about its advancements in artificial intelligence, and dangle the prospect that its reliance on human moderators will decline over time.

But given the limits of the technology, and the infinite varieties of human speech, such a day appears to be very far away. In the meantime, the call center model of content moderation is taking an ugly toll on many of its workers.”

Read the original post, ‘The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America’.

Recommended Read: You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 07:30:58 +0000

“The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook…”

“At the heart of the issue is an analytics tool Facebook offers developers, which allows them to see statistics about their users’ activities—and to target those users with Facebook ads.”

Read the original post, ‘You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook’.

Recommended Read: Even the IAB warned adtech risks EU privacy rules

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 08:32:13 +0000

“The IAB is certainly seeking to deploy pro-privacy arguments to try to dilute Europeans’ privacy rights.

Despite its own claimed reservations about there being no technical fix to get consent for programmatic trading under GDPR, the IAB nonetheless went on to launch a technical mechanism for managing — and, it claimed — complying with GDPR consent requirements in April 2018, when it urged the industry to use its GDPR ‘Consent & Transparency Framework.’”

This is why an IAB membership badge is a big red flag for me when checking if a third-party service is a tracker.

Read the original post, ‘Even the IAB warned adtech risks EU privacy rules’.

Recommended Read: Nest Secure had a secret microphone, can now be a Google Assistant

Thu, 21 Feb 2019 09:00:20 +0000

“If your IoT device secretly contained a microphone, which was previously undocumented, would you be happy when the device maker announced an over-the-air update that can enable the microphone for virtual assistant voice functionality? That’s what happened with the security alarm system Nest Secure.”

Read the original post, ‘Nest Secure had a secret microphone, can now be a Google Assistant’.

Recommended Read: Why a focus on “fake news” and Facebook misses the internet's real problems - and solutions

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 14:10:27 +0000

“The biggest oversight… is in diagnosing disinformation as essentially a problem with Facebook, rather than a systemic issue emerging in part from the pollution of online spaces by the business model that Facebook shares with others: the surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit.”

Read the original post, ‘Why a focus on “fake news” and Facebook misses the internet's real problems - and solutions’.

Recommended Read: Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news

Mon, 18 Feb 2019 09:01:32 +0000

“Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as ‘digital gangsters’.”

Read the original post, ‘Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news’.

Recommended Read: Most Online ‘Terms of Service’ Are Incomprehensible to Adults, Study Finds

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 15:36:59 +0000

“‘While consumers are legally expected or presumed to read their contracts, businesses are not required to write readable ones. This asymmetry—and its potential consequences—puzzled us,’ wrote co-author Samuel Becher, a law professor at Victoria University of Wellington”

Read the original post, ‘Most Online ‘Terms of Service’ Are Incomprehensible to Adults, Study Finds’.

Recommended Read: In healthcare, better data demands better privacy protections

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 09:10:25 +0000

“How can we explain what is going on here? One possibility is that startup nation advocates pushed hard to ratify the plan as soon as possible, because of its contribution to innovation; these advocates view considerations of privacy as obstacles.”

Read the original post, ‘In healthcare, better data demands better privacy protections’.

Recommended Read: Is Europe closing in on an antitrust fix for surveillance technologists?

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 17:57:55 +0000

“The EU’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, requires consent to be specific, informed and freely given. That standard supports challenges to Facebook’s (still fixed) entry ‘price’ to its social services. To play you still have to agree to hand over your personal data so it can sell your attention to advertisers. But legal experts contend that’s neither privacy by design nor default.”

“So there are now two lines of legal attack — antitrust and privacy law — threatening Facebook (and indeed other adtech companies’) surveillance-based business model across Europe.” “…the German FCO decision against Facebook hints at an alternative way forward for regulating the dominance of digital monopolies: Structural remedies that focus on controlling access to data which can be relatively swiftly configured and applied.”

Read the original post, ‘Is Europe closing in on an antitrust fix for surveillance technologists?’.

Recommended Read: German Regulators Just Outlawed Facebook's Whole Ad Business

Fri, 08 Feb 2019 17:12:39 +0000

“Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts…”

“If Facebook loses the appeal, then Germany will become a grand experiment in whether the surveillance economy is actually essential to the operation of social media. Other Europeans and Americans may demand they are given the same option.”

Read the original post, ‘German Regulators Just Outlawed Facebook's Whole Ad Business’.

Recommended Read: Apple Is Removing 'Do Not Track' From Safari

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 10:04:57 +0000

“Almost every internet browser has an option in its privacy settings called “Do Not Track,” which, if you turn it on, sends an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. It’s been around for years, but as Gizmodo recently reported, it doesn’t do anything because almost no websites actually honor the request not to be tracked because the government never forced them to comply with it.”

“For that story, we asked all the browser-providing companies why they still had the option, given that it could mislead users into thinking it was actually protecting their privacy.”

Read the original post, ‘Apple Is Removing 'Do Not Track' From Safari’.

Recommended Read: How Silicon Valley Puts the ‘Con’ in Consent

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 16:18:44 +0000

“Data is powerful and can inform on us in unexpected ways. Companies learn all about you, but also all about your friends who haven’t signed up for these services.”

Read the original post, ‘How Silicon Valley Puts the ‘Con’ in Consent’.

Recommended Read: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 17:08:57 +0000

“Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.”

Read the original post, ‘As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants’.

Recommended Read: To a man with an algorithm all things look like an advertising opportunity

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 17:31:44 +0000

“It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your algorithms are, when you treat pregnancy as an advertising event, an opportunity to be monetized, you will get situations like this. When your engineers consist largely of twentysomething dudes, you will get situations like this. When you think about your users as data-points rather than thinking, feeling, complex human beings, you will get situations like this.”

Read the original post, ‘To a man with an algorithm all things look like an advertising opportunity’.

Recommended Read: This early GDPR adtech strike puts the spotlight on consent

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 13:46:38 +0000

“In Fidzup’s case, complying with GDPR has had a major impact on its business because offering a genuine choice means it’s not always able to obtain consent.”

Fascinating to see what is a genuinely GDPR-compliant consent flow. Hopefully the complexity of which will make businesses see the collection of people’s data as risky and expensive.

Read the original post, ‘This early GDPR adtech strike puts the spotlight on consent’.

Recommended Read: Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 17:52:15 +0000

“At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States”

Read the original post, ‘Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret’.

Recommended Read: Seized cache of Facebook docs raise competition and consent questions

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 17:30:24 +0000

“The files also spotlight several issues of concern relating to privacy and data protection law, with internal documents raising fresh questions over how or even whether (in the case of Facebook’s whitelisting agreements with certain developers) it obtained consent from users to process their personal data.”

Read the original post, ‘Seized cache of Facebook docs raise competition and consent questions’.

Recommended Read: ‘Good for the world’? Facebook emails reveal what really drives the site

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 13:10:01 +0000

“The emails provide an uncommon window into the thinking of Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives as they sought revenue streams amid an industry-shaking shift from desktop to mobile computing. Executives considered charging developers fees to gain access to user data – something Facebook now claims it would never do – and discussed other schemes to leverage the company’s scale and vast troves of user data into revenue. At one point, Zuckerberg mused about how Facebook could mimic financial institutions as an “informational bank” whose assets were user’s personal information rather than money.”

Read Aral’s Twitter thread about the emails.

Read the original post, ‘‘Good for the world’? Facebook emails reveal what really drives the site’.

Recommended Read: Google faces GDPR complaint over ‘deceptive’ location tracking

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 17:17:14 +0000

“Google is processing incredibly detailed and extensive personal data without proper legal grounds, and the data has been acquired through manipulation techniques,” said Gro Mette Moen, acting head of the Norwegian Consumer Council’s digital services unit in a statement.

“When we carry our phones, Google is recording where we go, down to which floor we are on and how we are moving. This can be combined with other information about us, such as what we search for, and what websites we visit. Such information can in turn be used for things such as targeted advertising meant to affect us when we are receptive or vulnerable.”

Read the original post, ‘Google faces GDPR complaint over ‘deceptive’ location tracking’.

Recommended Read: Can Facebook be forced to comply with privacy laws?

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 16:52:13 +0000

“Facebook is accused of undermining democratic institutions, but its CEO fails to face up to MPs at a hearing in London.”

Al Jazeera Inside Story featuring @aral.

Read the original post, ‘Can Facebook be forced to comply with privacy laws?’.

Recommended Read: The City of the Future Is a Data-Collection Machine

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 17:00:35 +0000

“The city is literally built to collect data about its residents and visitors, which Cavoukian was clear-eyed about when she signed on to be an adviser. She’s worried about Sidewalk using all these cameras and sensors to track people on an individual level, to create real-life versions of the personal profiles Google already uses to track people online. Without anonymization, she said, a single person’s activities could be connected across multiple sources and varying databases to track his movements over the course of the day.”

Read the original post, ‘The City of the Future Is a Data-Collection Machine’.

Recommended Read: Wanted: The ‘perfect babysitter.’ Must pass AI scan for respect and attitude.

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 18:07:29 +0000

“The systems depend on black-box algorithms that give little detail about how they reduced the complexities of a person’s inner life into a calculation of virtue or harm. And even as Predictim’s technology influences parents’ thinking, it remains entirely unproven, largely unexplained and vulnerable to quiet biases over how an appropriate babysitter should share, look and speak.”

Read the original post, ‘Wanted: The ‘perfect babysitter.’ Must pass AI scan for respect and attitude.’.

Recommended Read: The Next Data Mine Is Your Bedroom

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 15:21:02 +0000

“The language of these patents makes it clear that Google is acutely aware of the powers of inference it has already, even without cameras, by augmenting speakers to recognize the noises you make as you move around the house.”

Read the original post, ‘The Next Data Mine Is Your Bedroom’.

Recommended Read: LinkedIn processed 18 million email addresses of non-users for targeted advertising

Fri, 23 Nov 2018 17:14:42 +0000

“LinkedIn processed the email addresses of 18 million non-members and targeted them with advertising on Facebook without permission, an audit by the [Irish] Data Protection Commissioner has found.”

Read the original post, ‘LinkedIn processed 18 million email addresses of non-users for targeted advertising’.

Recommended Read: How a small French privacy ruling could remake adtech for good

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 10:50:31 +0000

“this is being interpreted by data experts as the regulator stating that consent to processing personal data cannot be gained through a framework arrangement which bundles a number of uses behind a single “I agree” button that, when clicked, passes consent to partners via a contractual relationship.”

Read the original post, ‘How a small French privacy ruling could remake adtech for good’.

Recommended Read: Students protest Zuckerberg-backed digital learning program and ask him: ‘What gives you this right?’

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 16:15:15 +0000

“What gives you this right, and why weren’t we asked about this before you and Summit invaded our privacy in this way?”

Read the original post, ‘Students protest Zuckerberg-backed digital learning program and ask him: ‘What gives you this right?’’.

Recommended Read: Privacy Activists Take On Oracle and Equifax Over Shadowy Profiling

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 17:04:28 +0000

“‘The world is being rebuilt by companies and governments so that they can exploit data. Without urgent and continuous action, data will be used in ways that people cannot now even imagine, to define and manipulate our lives without us beginning to understand why or being able to effectively fight back,’ said Frederike Kaltheuner, who heads up Privacy International’s data exploitation program.”

Read the original post, ‘Privacy Activists Take On Oracle and Equifax Over Shadowy Profiling’.

Recommended Read: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 10:29:32 +0000

“As evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.”

Read the original post, ‘Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis’.

Recommended Read: Google ‘betrays patient trust’ with DeepMind Health move

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 13:37:04 +0000

“Now that Streams is a Google product itself, that promise appears to have been broken, says privacy researcher Julia Powles: ‘Making this about semantics is a sleight of hand. DeepMind said it would never connect Streams with Google. The whole Streams app is now a Google product. That is an atrocious breach of trust, for an already beleaguered product.’”

Read the original post, ‘Google ‘betrays patient trust’ with DeepMind Health move’.

Recommended Read: The quest to design an ethical social media platform

Sat, 03 Nov 2018 16:50:43 +0000

“Ads are the traditional funding source for social platforms; they take users' personal data and serve it to advertisers who want their ads to reach a specific audience. This virtually ensures a fundamentally exploitative business model based on surveillance, says Laura Kalbag, a designer and the co-founder of digital justice not-for-profit Ind.ie.”

Read the original post, ‘The quest to design an ethical social media platform’.

Recommended Read: We posed as 100 senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them.

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 17:28:16 +0000

“these tests show that compliance with the feature is entirely voluntary, meaning a tool that Facebook introduced to increase trust in advertising can also be used as a vector for misinformation, and another way bad actors can game Facebook’s platform.”

Read the original post, ‘We posed as 100 senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them.’.

Recommended Read: Facebook and Google are run by today’s robber barons. Break them up

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 17:42:53 +0000

“Today, we have a new set of robber barons, running digital monopolies and again receiving disproportionate benefits from the disruption brought about by new technology. History tells us we will need to regulate their monopolies just as we regulated previous monopolies.”

It’s another one of those very-quotable articles.

Read the original post, ‘Facebook and Google are run by today’s robber barons. Break them up’.

Recommended Read: This Thermometer Tells Your Temperature, Then Tells Firms Where to Advertise

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 17:44:55 +0000

“Kinsa sells its data to other companies under the name Kinsa Insights. While Mr. Singh declined to share the names of other customers, citing confidentiality agreements, he said other companies had used the data to target advertising.”

“I can just think of how cigarette and alcohol companies could use strategies like this, or other industries that could really have more harmful effects on people,” [Christine Bannan, the consumer protection counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center] said.

Read the original post, ‘This Thermometer Tells Your Temperature, Then Tells Firms Where to Advertise’.

Recommended Read: Surveillance capitalism has led us into a dystopia

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 10:00:19 +0100

“In this opinion piece, activist Aral Balkan says we’re living in a world where data companies have become factory farms for human beings.”

Aral recorded this video with BBC Ideas back in July. It gives a brief introduction to surveillance capitalism, complete with animation.

Read the original post, ‘Surveillance capitalism has led us into a dystopia’.

Recommended Read: Facebook Isn’t Sorry — It Just Wants Your Data

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 16:17:18 +0100

“To observers, these might seem like easily avoidable errors, but to Facebook, whose very identity and foundational mandate is the instinctual drive to amass personal data, they make perfect sense.”

Read the original post, ‘Facebook Isn’t Sorry — It Just Wants Your Data’.

Recommended Read: Just Don’t Call It Privacy

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 16:41:12 +0100

“What is at stake here isn’t privacy, the right not to be observed. It’s how companies can use our data to invisibly shunt us in directions that may benefit them more than us.”

Read the original post, ‘Just Don’t Call It Privacy’.

Recommended Read: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 08:42:17 +0100

“Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

Read the original post, ‘Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information’.

Recommended Read: Google Says It Continues to Allow Apps to Scan Data From Gmail Accounts

Thu, 27 Sep 2018 11:06:56 +0100

“Google Inc. told lawmakers it continues to allow other companies to scan and share data from Gmail accounts… The company also disclosed that app developers generally are free to share the data with others”

Read the original post, ‘Google Says It Continues to Allow Apps to Scan Data From Gmail Accounts’.

Recommended Read: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 17:32:46 +0100

“At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton says. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”

A fascinating read that doesn’t exactly paint Acton as a hero (he’s a billionaire—he’s got more money than he could ever possibly need, he never really criticises Facebook) but does show Facebook’s ruthless greed.

Read the original post, ‘WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook’.

Recommended Read: Apple moves to thwart Facebook tracking

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 13:40:53 +0100

“Notably, these protections won’t do privacy-conscious consumers any good while they’re logged into Facebook, but it will help to protect them from the social network’s ever-expanding grasp while they’re logged out.”

Read the original post, ‘Apple moves to thwart Facebook tracking’.

Recommended Read: Campaigners win vital battle against UK mass surveillance at European Court of Human Rights

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 15:41:49 +0100

Caroline Wilson Palow, General Counsel at Privacy International, said:

“Today’s judgment rightly criticises the UK’s bulk interception regime for giving far too much leeway to the intelligence agencies to choose who to spy on and when. It confirms that just because it is technically feasible to intercept all of our personal communications, it does not mean that it is lawful to do so.

The judgment also rightly recognises that collecting communications data - the who, what, and where of our communications - is as intrusive as collecting the content. This is a significant and important enhancement of our privacy protections.”

Read the original post, ‘Campaigners win vital battle against UK mass surveillance at European Court of Human Rights’.

Recommended Read: Feedbin: Private by Default

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 14:20:04 +0100

“Since Feedbin is 100% funded by paying customers, I can focus solely on making the best product possible without compromises. Therefore, Feedbin can be private by default.”

Read the original post, ‘Feedbin: Private by Default’.

Recommended Read: How to fix the Copyright Directive lobbying disaster

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 18:13:32 +0100

“Today’s EU copyright vote went about as badly as could be feared: MEPs approved articles 11 and 13, meaning that unless member states push back (and good luck with that), it will likely become illegal to link to an article using the headline for that article, and all but the smallest websites will need to install upload filters to weed out copyright-protected content.”

Read the original post, ‘How to fix the Copyright Directive lobbying disaster’.

Recommended Read: Why Facebook Will Never Be Free of Fakes

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 16:34:50 +0100

“She should lower expectations and declare that there is nothing Facebook can do to exterminate all the pests. With 2.2 billion profiles in more than 100 languages, even a small error rate can wreak havoc. With algorithms amplifying content that generates passionate responses, the crazy conspiratorial stuff will always rocket around Facebook faster and farther than the thoughtful condolence or the cute pictures of golden retrievers. And with that powerful advertising system, Facebook will always be the platform of choice for dishonest or hateful parties.”

Read the original post, ‘Why Facebook Will Never Be Free of Fakes’.

Recommended Read: IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage to Develop Technology That Lets Police Search By Skin Color

Thu, 06 Sep 2018 17:15:07 +0100

“Civil liberties advocates say they are alarmed by the NYPD’s secrecy in helping to develop a program with the potential capacity for mass racial profiling.”

“Civil liberties advocates contend that New Yorkers should have been made aware of the potential use of their physical data for a private company’s development of surveillance technology.”

Read the original post, ‘IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage to Develop Technology That Lets Police Search By Skin Color’.

Recommended Read: Five-Eyes nations to force encryption backdoors

Wed, 05 Sep 2018 17:13:24 +0100

“While the rhetoric is sharp, the specifics are vague.”

“Creating so-called backdoors in applications and services to enable communications interception capabilities for law enforcement has persistently been criticised by cryptography and security experts as dangerous for decades now.”

“Despite the criticism and concerns that backdoors in Western equipment and services could be exploited and abused by totalitarian regimes elsewhere in the world, the Five-Eyes countries have pursued interception capabilities, saying not having these would undermine the rule of law.”

As it has been said before, a backdoor is just another door. You either have encryption or you don’t. There is no halfway.

Read the original post, ‘Five-Eyes nations to force encryption backdoors’.

Recommended Read: How Facebook Helps Shady Advertisers Pollute the Internet

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 12:17:13 +0100

“Granted anonymity, affiliates were happy to detail their tricks. They told me that Facebook had revolutionized scamming. The company built tools with its trove of user data that made it the go-to platform for big brands. Affiliates hijacked them. Facebook’s targeting algorithm is so powerful, they said, they don’t need to identify suckers themselves—Facebook does it automatically. And they boasted that Russia’s dezinformatsiya agents were using tactics their community had pioneered.”

A long and very quotable read.

“Affiliates say Facebook has sent mixed signals over the years. Their accounts would get banned, but company salespeople would also come to their meetups and parties and encourage them to buy more ads. Two former Facebook employees who worked in the Toronto sales office said it was common knowledge there that some of their best clients were affiliates who used deception.”

“In a sense, affiliate scammers are much like Cambridge Analytica. Because Facebook is so effective at vacuuming up people and information about them, anyone who lacks scruples and knows how to access the system can begin to wreak havoc or earn money at astonishing scale.”

“But affiliates, he continued, aren’t really to blame. They’re just taking advantage of opportunities created by large corporations in a capitalistic system built around persuading people to buy things they don’t need.”

Read the original post, ‘How Facebook Helps Shady Advertisers Pollute the Internet’.

Recommended Read: Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales

Mon, 03 Sep 2018 17:36:06 +0100

“the deal, which has not been previously reported, could raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb.”

Read the original post, ‘Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales’.

Recommended Read: US Department of Housing and Urban Development Hits Facebook For Allowing Housing Discrimination

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 16:54:16 +0100

“According to the complaint, Facebook permitted advertisers to discriminate based on disability by blocking ads to users the company categorized as having interests in “mobility scooter” or “deaf culture.” It similarly discriminates based on familial status by not showing ads to users that were labeled as being interested in “child care” or “parenting,” according to the complaint.”

When someone from Trump’s government tells you you’re being discriminatory against people on grounds of race, religion, sex, and disability, it must be extreme.

Read the original post, ‘US Department of Housing and Urban Development Hits Facebook For Allowing Housing Discrimination’.

Recommended Read: The looming deluge of connected dildos is a security nightmare

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 14:13:48 +0100

“Alongside having the best security and privacy technologies, smart sex toy makers should have the most robust privacy policies. The less that’s collected, the less that can be abused, after all.”

Read the original post, ‘The looming deluge of connected dildos is a security nightmare’.

Recommended Read: GDPR Cuts Tracking Cookies in Europe

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:11:15 +0100

“This does not prove that GDPR caused the decline, but it may have prompted websites to look at the cookies they were using, and for which they now had to obtain consent… However, American technology companies generally evaded the cull. Most sites retained cookies from Google (96 percent), Facebook (70 percent), and Amazon (57 percent).

This is pretty good news.

Read the original post, ‘GDPR Cuts Tracking Cookies in Europe’.

Recommended Read: Clashes Over Ethics at Major Tech Companies Are Causing Problems for Recruiters

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 16:47:49 +0100

“The actions of a handful of individuals are unlikely to steer corporate policy, but the trend could signal a looming recruiting pipeline problem if the companies don’t change tack.”

Read the original post, ‘Clashes Over Ethics at Major Tech Companies Are Causing Problems for Recruiters’.

Recommended Read: Algorithms alone can’t meaningfully hold other algorithms accountable

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 17:58:18 +0100

“The debate over the terms and goals of accountability must not stop at questions like “Is the data processing fairer if its error rate is the same for all races and genders?” We must consider broader questions, such as whether these tools should be developed and deployed at all.”

“The dispute over how to reform or restrict algorithms is rooted in a conflict over to whom algorithmic processes should be accountable. If it’s to a community of engineers and technocrats, then accountability will usually mean more comprehensive data collection to produce less biased algorithms. If it is accountability to the public at large, there are broader issues to consider, such as what limits should be placed on these tools’ use and commercialization, if they should even be developed at all.”

It’s all too quotable.

Frank Pasquale also recommends reading Safiya Umoja Noble and Virginia Eubanks:

“Scholars like Noble and Eubanks need to be at the center of future conversations about algorithmic accountability. They have exposed deep problems at the core of the political economy of information, in data-driven social control. They diversify the forms of expertise and authority that should be recognized in the development of better socio-technical systems. And they are not afraid to question the goals — and not simply the methods — of powerful firms and governments, foregrounding the question of to whom algorithmic systems are accountable.”

Read the original post, ‘Algorithms alone can’t meaningfully hold other algorithms accountable’.

Recommended Read: Google Data Collection Research

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 17:39:03 +0100

“Google has the ability to associate anonymous data collected through passive means with the personal information of the user. Google makes this association largely through advertising technologies, many of which Google controls.”

Read the original post, ‘Google Data Collection Research’.

Recommended Read: Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 18:17:04 +0100

“Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.”

“The uptick in violence did not correlate with general web use or other related factors; this was not about the internet as an open platform for mobilization or communication. It was particular to Facebook.”

Read the original post, ‘Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests’.

Recommended Read: Emma’s Diary fined £140,000 for selling personal information for political campaigning

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 18:02:18 +0100

“The data broking company, which provides advice on pregnancy and childcare, sold the information to Experian Marketing Services, a branch of the credit reference agency, specifically for use by the Labour Party. Experian then created a database which the party used to profile the new mums in the run up to the 2017 General Election.”

Read the original post, ‘Emma’s Diary fined £140,000 for selling personal information for political campaigning’.

Recommended Read: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 16:34:33 +0100

“Google’s search service cannot currently be accessed by most internet users in China because it is blocked by the country’s so-called Great Firewall. The app Google is building for China will comply with the country’s strict censorship laws, restricting access to content that Xi Jinping’s Communist Party regime deems unfavorable.”

“The Chinese government blocks information on the internet about political opponents, free speech, sex, news, and academic studies. It bans websites about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, for instance, and references to ‘anticommunism’ and ‘dissidents.’ Mentions of books that negatively portray authoritarian governments, like George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, have been prohibited on Weibo, a Chinese social media website.”

Read the original post, ‘Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China’.

Recommended Read: John Oliver: Facebook

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 18:21:48 +0100

“Facebook was doing literally exactly what it was built for. That’s why it was worth six hundred billion dollars. You didn’t build history’s most profitable data harvesting machine by accident.”

John Oliver tells it how it is about Facebook.

Read the original post, ‘John Oliver: Facebook’.

Recommended Read: A reporter went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was trained not to delete certain racist memes and images of child abuse

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 18:05:48 +0100

Channel 4 spoke with Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who has become a critic of the company over issues including the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. He said Facebook stood to benefit from extreme content.

“It’s the really extreme, really dangerous form of content that attracts the most highly engaged people on the platform," he said. “Facebook understood that it was desirable to have people spend more time on site if you’re going to have an advertising-based business.”

Read the original post, ‘A reporter went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was trained not to delete certain racist memes and images of child abuse’.