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.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on the history of the NSA and mass surveillance in America, and why Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon should worry us.
While end-to-end encryption can keep an account’s data private and hidden even from a service provider, the name of who paid for the account and other metadata is harder to hide.
Anyone else notice that ICE isn’t worried about getting doxed by Meta?
The security camera maker’s Search Party feature, advertised during the Super Bowl, has sparked a surveillance backlash.
Ring’s Super Bowl ad focused on how its cameras could be networked to find a missing dog, but for a lot of people, it highlighted the surveillance power hiding in those devices. Now Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has sent a letter to Amazon saying, “Get this creepy technology away from our homes.”
You can read it in full here, but here’s a snippet:
Yesterday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) publicly sent the director of the CIA an unclassified letter referring to a classified letter he had previously sent him, describing it as one “in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities.”
Wyden is known to do this — as a legislator with a security clearance and a seat on the Senate intelligence committee, he is very careful not to disclose classified information — but when he sees something wild, he send up a vague signal flare that something is wrong. Spencer Ackerman recounts one of the previous times this happened, back in 2011: “It would take Edward Snowden, two years later, to reveal what Wyden was talking about.”
The fine, a measly £247,590 (about $335,000), is because Imgur owner MediaLab wasn’t checking users ages, and so handled young kids’ data without proper consent measures. After the ICO warned a fine was coming last September, Imgur started blocking UK users entirely — a ban which is still in effect.
Key privacy settings and best practices.
When Intuit Dome opened last season, the arena staff assumed only a third of fans would opt-in to scanning, but close to 75 percent of venue attendees enrolled. The Clippers promise they are not using facial recognition — sorry, they call it “facial authentication” — for security purposes.
Early facial ticketing pilots were met with some protests. And energy still exists to create more state or federal oversight. But as the technology’s penetration has expanded, pushback seemingly hasn’t. A demand for security is leading venue operators to test out the newest tech, while a desire for convenience and personalization has seen fans increasingly getting in line.
Beyond part one’s exposure of affiliate revenue hijacking, MegaLag digs into Honey’s “extortion” by adding limited-use “friends and family” type discounts and lying to the store owners about never removing codes for unaffiliated businesses while trying to sign them up as partners.
Other misdeeds described include marketing Honey’s for-adult-use-only browser extension to kids in partnership with channels like Mr Beast, who encouraged kids to install it everywhere they could, while collecting data on everyone who installed its extension, even if they never signed up. And despite a cease-and-desist from PayPal’s lawyers, this series isn’t over yet.
Who could have seen that coming? UK regulator Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report shows that major porn sites took a traffic hit following the introduction of mandatory age checks, while VPN use shot up — but has been steadily declining since, which may ease fears that a VPN ban is next on the agenda.
An exposed dataset from the license plate surveillance company Flock, which is known to work with the US Border Patrol and ICE via local police, showed that some of the AI annotators paid to classify American license plates are located in the Philippines.
After 404 Media contacted Flock for comment, the dataset disappeared.
This Associated Press report explains that after getting authorization for a domestic license plate reader in 2017, the readers “have become a major — and in some places permanent — fixture of the border region.”
Readers are operated by the DEA, local law enforcement paid via federal grants, and at least three companies: Rekor, Vigilant Solutions, and Flock Safety.
OpenTable is sharing your dining habits, both good and bad.
Ring’s ‘chief inventor’ on AI, lost dogs, and why cameras aren’t dystopian.
European officials are reportedly planning to touch the “third rail” of EU policy later this month: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A draft proposal obtained by Politico would create carve outs for AI companies to train on specified categories of personal data, as Europe seeks to remain competitive globally.
The late vice president was a fierce champion of the Patriot Act and a powerful proponent of mass surveillance. In his obituary for Cheney, Spencer Ackerman recounts the many achievements of George W. Bush’s VP, including a legal justification for NSA bulk collection, which “established a warrantless digital dragnet of phone and internet metadata generated by the communications of practically every American.”
Bulk collection of telephone call metadata ended in 2015, but Cheney’s work ushered in an era of government surveillance, an unforgettable legacy that continues to define the present.
