As gadgets and services get smarter, they need more data, and face the hard problem of keeping it safe. Data privacy has become a huge problem for Google, Facebook, Amazon, and any company using artificial intelligence to power its services — and a major sticking point for lawmakers looking to regulate. Here’s all the news on data privacy and how it’s changing tech.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has some thoughts about the potential TikTok ban — namely that it doesn’t address the broader social media privacy concerns at hand:
I think a lot of this is putting the cart before the horse because our first priority should be in protecting your ability to exist without social media companies harvesting and commodifying every single piece of data about you.
Good Politico piece on how cops are filing ever-expanding legal requests for Ring footage and getting it — even for footage from inside people’s homes that aren’t under investigation:
The warrant included all five of his outdoor cameras, and also added a sixth camera that was inside his house, as well as any videos from cameras associated with his account, which would include the cameras in his store. It would include footage recorded from cameras he had in his living room and bedroom, as well as the 13 cameras he had installed at his store associated with his account.
Larkin, now incensed that police were requesting footage from inside his home for an investigation that didn’t even involve him, wanted to fight the warrant. He estimated that a lawyer would have been too expensive, and he only had about seven days to challenge it before Ring would comply. He still doesn’t understand how a judge could have signed off on a warrant asking for footage from a camera inside his home, when the investigation was on his neighbor.
[POLITICO]
A security researcher says they found the file on a regional airline’s unsecured server. According to The Daily Dot, the airline has confirmed that “NoFly.csv” was indeed genuine, and from 2019.
The address to Billie Eilish’s family home was reportedly sent to 178,000 users of Citizen, an app that purports to crowdsource live crime information (to very mixed results). According to Vice, the house isn’t exactly a top-secret location, and the exact address has since been removed. Still, I can’t imagine someone with a hit song about the lack of privacy that comes with fame wants their address blasted out.
You may remember New York Times writer Kashmir Hill from episodes including hacking a stranger’s smart home via Google, lifting the veil on Facebook’s shadow profiles tracking people who don’t have Facebook accounts, and making an exhaustive attempt to live online without the big five tech companies.
Now she has announced a release date for her book on Clearview AI, the facial recognition firm she once called “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.”
Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower that has been long-feared by the civil liberties community and long-desired by governments and authoritarian regimes. And it is a powerful warning that in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, this kind of technology will fundamentally change our ability to be anonymous.
The search giant’s required to pay $9.5 million to DC and $20 million to Indiana after the states sued the company for allegedly tracking users’ locations without their consent. This $29.5 million sum adds to the $392 million Google agreed to pay to 40 states over similar allegations last month.
