Tag: privacy
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Mental health websites don't have to sell your data. Most still do.
Written by Privacy International on Privacy International.
“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.
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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!
Tagged with: mental health, tracking, privacy.
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Teens have figured out how to mess with Instagram's tracking algorithm
Written by Alfred Ng on CNET.
“These teenagers are relying on a sophisticated network of trusted Instagram users to post content from multiple different devices, from multiple different locations.
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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 ‘Teens have figured out how to mess with Instagram's tracking algorithm’ on the CNET site.
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Researchers Find ‘Anonymized’ Data Is Even Less Anonymous Than We Thought
Written by Karl Bode on Motherboard.
“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.
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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.
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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.”
Tagged with: anonymisation, privacy, security.
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You Are Now Remotely Controlled
Written by Shoshana Zuboff on New York Times.
“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.
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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.
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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 ‘You Are Now Remotely Controlled’ on the New York Times site.
Tagged with: surveillance capitalism, privacy, inequality.
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The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
Written by Kashmir Hill on New York Times.
“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.
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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 Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It’ on the New York Times site.
Tagged with: Clearview AI, facial recognition, privacy.
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I don’t track you
When you visit this website, I don’t track you.
Read more…
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Mass surveillance for national security does conflict with EU privacy rights, court advisor suggests
Written by Natasha Lomas on Techcrunch.
“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.”
Tagged with: mass surveillance, government surveillance, privacy.
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Grindr Shares Location, Sexual Orientation Data, Study Shows
Written by Sarah Syed , Natalia Drozdiak , and Nate Lanxon on Bloomberg.
“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 ‘Grindr Shares Location, Sexual Orientation Data, Study Shows’ on the Bloomberg site.
Tagged with: Grindr, surveillance capitalism, privacy.
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Google’s Acquisition of Fitbit Has Implications for Health and Fitness Data
Written by Nicole Lindsey on CPO Magazine.
“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.”
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Why Are You Publicly Sharing Your Child’s DNA Information?
Written by Nila Bala on The New York Times.
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.
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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.
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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 ‘Why Are You Publicly Sharing Your Child’s DNA Information?’ on the The New York Times site.