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.
Kind of! The Senate can’t agree on amendments to the bill that reauthorizes the warrantless surveillance program, so it’s looking like we’re about to hit the midnight expiration deadline without a bill for Biden to sign.
But technically speaking, the FISA court recently granted a government request to allow the program to continue until April 2025.
The amendment would reverse a provision included in the recent House bill reauthorizing Section 702 of FISA that expands the definition of “electronic communications service provider,” which critics say would force Americans to essentially spy for the government.
“Forcing ordinary Americans and small businesses to conduct secret, warrantless spying is what authoritarian countries do, not democracies,” Wyden said in a statement.
The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act has been circulating since at least 2020, seeking to close this loophole in constitutional privacy protections. A version of the bill finally passed Wednesday evening, in a 212–199 vote.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — a controversial law that allows warrantless surveillance on “foreign” targets — is set to expire on April 19th. The GOP, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, failed to move the bill forward the last three times, but I guess fourth time’s the charm.
Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and House Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Oregon) announced a new, national data privacy bill called The American Privacy Rights Act (PDF) today.
According to their release, the bill would, among other things, “require affirmative express consent sensitive data can be transferred to a third party.” The two were behind a since-stalled version of the bill back in 2022.
[House Committee on Energy and Commerce]
Facebook’s “In App Panel” program ran from 2016 to 2019 using Onavo’s technology as a man-in-the-middle attack to decrypt secured Snapchat traffic. Court documents unsealed as part of an ongoing class-action antitrust lawsuit show how the program came together.
A June 2016 email included in the documents from Mark Zuckerberg says:
Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . .
Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.
A decade ago, San Jose broke up “The Jungle,” reportedly the biggest homeless encampment in the US; the feds estimate San Jose still has the highest proportions of unsheltered homeless and homeless youth. It’s not unusual to see a sidestreet filled with sunbaked RVs, or tents lining a creek or underpass.
Now, under new pressure to solve the homelessness emergency that’s never gone away, San Jose is quietly training AI to detect lived-in vehicles. More:
TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker has been pushing the company for answers, now that the massive cache of customer data is circulating once again. But although a known hacker claimed responsibility in 2021, AT&T still claims its systems weren’t breached at all — and yet it wouldn’t give Whittaker any other explanation for where the data came from.
Kids are big business for brands looking to partner with influencers — and yet, Illinois is the only state in the US where kids appearing in sponcon are entitled to a cut of earnings.
This Cosmopolitan piece illustrates the longterm psychological effects of being a child working on online content. It also shows that our legal system has a lot of catching up to do with influencer culture.
A driver’s insurance rate went up based on a 130-page report detailing his Chevy Bolt’s drives over six months, shared by GM with data broker LexisNexis through the OnStar Smart Driver program, reports The New York Times.
According to the Times, Kia, Subaru, and Mitsubishi also contribute to the LexisNexis data portal, while another company, Verisk partners with Ford, Honda, and Hyundai. Subaru says it only shares odometer data when authorized, while Ford says it will share data for usage-based programs based on a customer’s in-car menu confirmation.
Update March 12th, 2024, 2:42PM ET: Added details on the partnerships and what data is shared.
That’s according to WABetaInfo, which spotted that a new “end-to-end encrypted” indicator that appears briefly at the top of chat threads was under development in late January. Yesterday, the outlet reported that the test is now rolling out to beta testers.
The change is being tested as Meta rolls out third-party chat interoperability in the EU.
The privacy-focused Brave browser launched its AI assistant, Leo, last year on the desktop, and now it’s available for Android, following other mobile AI-connected browsers like Edge and Arc (only on iOS).
Leo promises summaries, transcriptions, translations, coding, and more (while acknowledging that LLMs may “hallucinate” erroneous info). As for privacy, Brave claims, “Inputs are always submitted anonymously through a reverse-proxy and are not retained or used for training.”
The Washington Post describes how law enforcers have gotten companies like Google to hand over data associated with push notifications. Investigators use the code to track down child predators, even through encrypted apps, per the Post, but law enforcement around the world could use the tactic to track down activists and others too.
It also sheds light on why Apple might have chosen to update its law enforcement guidelines late last year to require a court order to provide customers’ push notification data.
[The Washington Post]
State Attorney General Aaron Darnell Ford filed last week to stop Meta from offering end-to-end encryption to children as a matter of “extreme urgency,” claiming E2EE keeps police from protecting kids from predators.
This is just one of a slew of lawsuits filed against social media companies lately. Legal expert Riana Pfefferkorn, who discussed the case in Kim Zetter’s Zero Day blog and on Mastodon, calls it a particularly “bonkers assault on encryption.”
We’ve reached out to Meta and Nevada’s AG for more information.
Alessandro Paluzzi, who discovers a lot of Instagram features before they’re announced, posted an update on something he’d spotted in the app months ago: the ability to see where your friends are on a map. Snap’s Snap Map is similar, as are features built into Android and iOS.
According to the images Paluzzi posted, Friend Map would be opt-in, and location data end-to-end encrypted.
