Laura’s Lens

Written by Sara Perez on TechCrunch.

“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 ‘TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints’’ on the TechCrunch site.

Written by Katyanna Quach on The Register.

“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 ‘Deadline draws near to avoid auto-joining Amazon's mesh network Sidewalk’ on the The Register site.

Written by Alyse Stanley on Gizmodo.

“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 ‘Twitter May Start Labeling Your Tweets Based on How Wrong You Are’ on the Gizmodo site.

Written by Tom McKay on Gizmodo.

“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.”

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”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.”

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“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 ‘I Sold a Tweet About My Future Cat on the Blockchain and Helped Kill the Earth in the Process’ on the Gizmodo site.

Written by Shoshana Wodinsky on Gizmodo.

“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 ‘Stop Letting Google Get Away With It’ on the Gizmodo site.

Written by Todd Feathers on The Guardian.

“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.”

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”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 ‘‘They track every move’: how US parole apps created digital prisoners’ on the The Guardian site.

Written by Alfred Ng on The Markup.

“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 ‘Can Auditing Eliminate Bias from Algorithms?’ on the The Markup site.

Written by Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin on The Markup.

“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.”

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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 ‘Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google’ on the The Markup site.

Written by Todd Feathers on Motherboard.

“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. 

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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.

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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 ‘Car Companies Want to Monitor Your Every Move With Emotion-Detecting AI’ on the Motherboard site.

Written by Chris Gilliard on OneZero.

“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.”

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

Read ‘Facebook Cannot Separate Itself From the Hate It Spreads’ on the OneZero site.