Privacy – Page 2 – Hyperbolic

Creepy isn’t the half of it

Jun 102016

We should be so lucky that it is only the government making unfathomable decisions about us based on data they harvest without explanation for how it is used, as you might draw from today’s Washington Post article Creepy startup will help landlords, employers and online dates strip-mine intimate data from your Facebook page. (Also as linked from Slashdot, which tipped us off first.)

As a condition of doing business, the prospective clients, tenants or customers of participating firms must turn over all social media access to the startup which will profile and analyze the applicant in order to delivery a “more accurate” picture of the applicant’s ability to pay bills. (And probably a lot more.) We’ve seen this before, where social media data can contribute to one’s credit rating, so the present development just takes it to new heights … err, depths.

This is an unregulated area, with greatest impact on people who probably have the least ability to push back against inappropriate intrusions. But once businesses get you to dance to their tune, it is difficult to see where things stop, as tenants in Utah found recently (Apartment in US asks tenants to ‘like’ Facebook page or face action).

Data will make it easier to condemn the past

Government, Liberty, Privacy No Responses »

Mar 202016

The war on impure thoughts continues down its slippery slope.

Harvard Law School will ~~ban~~ retire its seal because it derived from the emblem of a slave-holding family … never mind that the family funded the school’s first professorship 200 years ago. The way ahead is described in a very nice piece of writing by a scholar who studied other problematic icons associated with Harvard.

It will be easier in the future. Today’s digital era, in which so much data are kept, will make it far easier for tomorrow’s enlightened people to reach back and study our private thoughts in order to recognize which of us must be condemned for violating that era’s sensibilities.

They will know better then than we do today.

Big data techniques analyze TWI violations

Privacy, Technology No Responses »

Mar 172016

… as in Tweeting While Intoxicated.

Just in time for St Patrick’s Day festivities too.

Down on the Baidu

Privacy, Security, Technology No Responses »

Feb 232016

Researchers deconstructed some of the workings of the Baidu browser, and report back with an inventory of serious privacy and security flaws … some would say unsurprisingly so. The linked article is to commentary from the same site, and that in turn can bring you to the detail of their work, which is a very credible bit of research.

Big Brother likes IoT for home surveillance

Government, Liberty, Privacy No Responses »

Feb 092016

We appreciate the candor of DNI chief James Clapper in confirming what the tin-foil-beanie crowd might have assumed all along: The Internet of Things will be spectacular for collecting fine grain intelligence about people in their homes. It isn’t like Google and others competing for these data have not already figured this out. Why would the government not want on board too?

Students file lawsuit against Google for illegal email scanning

Commerce, Education, Privacy, Security No Responses »

Feb 022016

Students and alumni at UC Berkeley have filed a lawsuit against Google for its practices of data mining and profiling their email traffic through Google’s “Apps for Education” services which it promotes widely – including on this campus. The suit claims this is a violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Google appears to confirm the practice but asserts that while profiles are created for everyone who uses these tools, it does not target individuals for advertising based directly on the user’s information. However the company has so far been silent on how it uses these data for its other purposes, and presumably at some point will need to argue that those uses, while profitable and exploitative, are technically not a violation.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, so for users who obtain services at no direct charge from Google, it is not clear what they think is the business value to Google if not to train fairly elaborate models to recognize someone having exactly the individual’s features, and then sell use of that model to companies or government officials who want people identified. Those uses are surely good for Google, corporations and officials, but for consumers, not so much.

Google’s practices have been the open elephant in a room that few involved have an interest in acknowledging. School officials in particular have strong motivation to pay for their digital infrastructure out of their students’ liberty and pockets, and interests of those students be damned. (At UM, the message is also employee interests be damned, as we convert faculty and staff services to Google over the course of this year.)

What brings the present case forward is an assertion by the students that an earlier Google representation (that they would stop direct advertising based on the student data) was an admission that the were violating the Act in contrast to promises made at the time. Those promises are not unlike those made to students on this campus when we directed all traffic through Google servers.

Big Brother at UK universities

Education, Privacy No Responses »

Jan 212016

The extent to which big data can both help and intrude on lives becomes greater all the time, and we see the next concrete examples of this in a Guardian article about fine grain tracking of university students. A Higher Education Commission report From Bricks to Clicks: The Potential of Data and Analytics in Higher Education tells of “personalized” offerings to students, but not just on courses but for lifestyle behaviors and more. All the social media data which are available can factor in to analysis of outcomes, so the recipients of this governmental largesse might get digital nagging about time spent in bars, sleep habits, eating and, well, the sky is the limit here.

Your safety determined by social media

Commerce, Government, Liberty, Privacy No Responses »

Jan 102016

The Washington Post reports on the cutting edge software police are starting to use for identifying people who are possible threats. One example of its use involved flagging someone as a threat based on a 911 call, so officers could call in a heavier response. It is all based on searching police records and social media.

Anyone who thinks the social media part is searched in real time once a name or address turns up in a query will be sadly mistaken. An immense amount of static information is compiled and added to continuously so it will be available at a moment’s notice – like in a 911 call.

One of the several dangers of course is that they get it wrong, and your innocent actions become misinterpreted, with potentially deadly consequences. Oops. But can you control this? No. As with so many “homeland security” systems these days, police cloak the actual computation in commercial operations, where the algorithms, data sources and records are not subject to public information requests or challenge. It will only be a matter of time until the equivalent of a ‘Google Bomb’ is dropped on someone through social media, after which the next interaction with police could involve trying to persuade a tactical team you are not a threat … while zip tied face down on your living room carpet.

Where is Darknet today?

Government, Privacy, Security No Responses »

Oct 312015

Rolling Stone carries a nice capsule summary of Tor, or ‘the onion router’, and its history. What is its future? Probably its security has been cracked already in pretty fundamental ways, but the cost of doing so for any one or another individual target remains higher than would commonly be paid by any but nation states having serious ‘national assets’ to deploy in the process.

Scope of telco sharing of your data is enormous

Commerce, Privacy No Responses »

Oct 282015

While the practice is not widely acknowledged, recent reports shed some light on the immense scope of telephone company use of information about you. Especially with mobile devices, usage data paints a sharp and clear picture of you, and this in turn is readily monetized.

How very generous of you to share your shopping, location and personal network information with these data wholesalers for free, since they use these data to take even more value from you later.

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