The tech industry, not surprisingly, discovered that they could put anything in their stated policies and no one would read them. They are not the first -- that's where the term "fine print" came from, probably hundreds of years ago.
The producers of browser extensions know all about this; plus, they (or some of them) apparently just violate their stated terms and expect to get away with it.
If that's all it takes to get their hands on their customers' data, the choice is easy. You can sell that personal data, after all.
Bob.
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Workers hear drug deals, medical details and people having sex, says whistleblower
Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or “grading”, the company’s Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned.
Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. They are tasked with grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri’s response was appropriate.
Apple says the data “is used to help Siri and dictation … understand you better and recognise what you say”.
But the company does not explicitly state that that work is undertaken by humans who listen to the pseudonymised recordings.
Apple told the Guardian: “A small portion of Siri requests are analysed to improve Siri and dictation. User requests are not associated with the user’s Apple ID. Siri responses are analysed in secure facilities and all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements.” The company added that a very small random subset, less than 1% of daily Siri activations, are used for grading, and those used are typically only a few seconds long.
A whistleblower working for the firm, who asked to remain anonymous due to fears over their job, expressed concerns about this lack of disclosure, particularly given the frequency with which accidental activations pick up extremely sensitive personal information.
Siri can be accidentally activated when it mistakenly hears its “wake word”, the phrase “hey Siri”. Those mistakes can be understandable – a BBC interview about Syria was interrupted by the assistant last year – or less so. “The sound of a zip, Siri often hears as a trigger,” the contractor said. The service can also be activated in other ways. For instance, if an Apple Watch detects it has been raised and then hears speech, Siri is automatically activated.
The whistleblower said: “There have been countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on. These recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details, and app data.”
Last night I watched The Great Hack, (trailer here)
While for the past 10 years I have had plenty of time to be disgusted about the themes of privacy invasion being talked about in this documentary, I couldn't help but feeling a sense of dread because of the many threats to democracy around the world.
I found online a transcript of the documentary and, to give readers an idea of the impact that this stuff has had, I'm going to quote a passage from it.
This is Cambridge Analytica's staff talking:
The documentary ends with
But the hardest part in all of this...
...is that these wreckage sites...
...and crippling divisions...
begin with the manipulation
of one individual.
Then another.
And another.
So, I can't help but ask myself:
Can I be manipulated?
Can you?
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I watched it recently as well. While the subject matter is obviously terrifying, I thought the film itself was poor. Rather than being an in-depth documentary I think it was something designed to do little more than shock the uniformed. I say the uniformed because anybody who knew much on the subject already, probably learnt little that was new. It was slow, boring and little more than Brittany Kaiser trying to save face, something she failed to do when it came out that she had also met with both Assange and the Russians something she never openly revealed. The Carroll & Cadwalladr elements added little also. If Carroll had actually got his data, and we could see what it was, where it came from and how it was used it would have been interesting, but he didn’t so it wasn’t. Instead a large part of the movie was wasted just to find out he never got his data! Where was the discussion on how they used the data, how does this weapons grade targeting actually work? I would also have like to see more of Julian Wheatland and Alexander Nix. As Wheatland basically said, this is going on, CA were just the ones that got caught!
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Good points - I still think it's worthwhile for the people who might still need to be educated about how social media today invades people's privacy de facto.
As a parallel to what's going on with the environment, where I am starting to see a lot more people talking about it - whether we are doing something useful about it is another matter but we are talking about it and that's progress - I think we are a few years behind the environment with the privacy conversation, but this sort of documentary is useful to get us to talk about it. At least.
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Although it sometimes feels like shouting in the wilderness, it's still important to keep this topic alive.
Just saw this one:
---------------
"Facebook said on Friday that it had suspended tens of thousands of apps for improperly sucking up users’ personal information and other transgressions, a tacit admission that the scale of its data privacy issues was far larger than it had previously acknowledged.
"The social network said in a blog post that an investigation it began in March 2018 — following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy, had retrieved and used people’s Facebook information without their permission — had resulted in the suspension of “tens of thousands” of apps that were associated with about 400 developers. That was far bigger than the last number that Facebook had disclosed of 400 app suspensions in August 2018.
"The extent of how many apps Facebook had cut off was revealed in court filings that were unsealed later on Friday by a state court in Boston, as part of an investigation by the Massachusetts attorney general into the technology company. The documents showed that Facebook had suspended 69,000 apps. Of those, the majority were terminated because the developers did not cooperate with Facebook’s investigation; 10,000 were flagged for potentially misappropriating personal data from Facebook users."
I also recently watched "The Great Hack" & agree with the previous comments about it. It may open some peoples eyes who are unaware that "they are the product" & how their data is used. Those who are already aware in this area may find the film less engaging in terms of learning new stuff.
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You can't have privacy in digital age, its not just your website data or social profiles that are being tracked, everything you speak around your favorite alexa or google helper is always recorded. You think that's too absurd? What if I told you that your phone also records keywords to find interests that you may have? Ever wonder why you are suddenly getting online coupons for baby trolley/toys even though you have not really searched for it online exclusively and you are still at discussion stage with your wife/better half about whether to have one or not?
Not a conspiracy theory, those things are indeed recorded, even random selfie at MacD outlet with your buddies can leak ton of info about you. That includes, whether you are married or not, how much you might be earning, how much health aware you are (maybe not much here since its MacD ), what religion you might belong too, what might be your education level, possibility of you coming to that place again, approximate location of your housing, kind of place you work at or go to uni to etc and much much more...
All these can be captured in a single careless selfie, everyone is collecting data about you, your pc, your mobile, your insurance policy company, you favorite liquor company, that little restaurant you always pass by on corner, they all watch your every move. To be very honest, I don't think its something we can stop anymore, unless you want to go completely off the grid in Alaska or something where even sat phones may not work. Fyi, still google, amazon and bunch of other people may know that you went to Alaska even if you didn't tell your wife.
There is no way to completely stop it, and its not always bad per say so there is no real need to go that far either. But you can deploy various measures to be relatively secure, which includes deploying proxy, ad-blockers, cookie blockers, using duck duck go instead of google or yahoo, using ghostery or if you can manage maybe straight up script blocker. Going beyond that and being aware of what you are posting yourself, you will drive yourself paranoid if you tried to maintain "privacy", and you know what? You would still fail in it.
I've marketing MBA from very prominent University here and we have done the said experiment ourselves for one of our private company projects. I can't link you to that but just simple google will lead you to many such experiments.
Our conclusion is that it does get recorded in a streams of large data hoarding machines, we have experienced it. So I'm allowed to say that. I'm pretty sure there is one thread on reddit about this as well, I'm not able to find it atm, so lets keep it for some other time
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Thanks @LastDino, assuming it's a real video, that was very interesting. I've always heard this 'allegation' but never seen anything to support it, hence why I asked.
He did say "They left the Facebook App running in the background". I assume if you shut the app down completely that this would stop the listening. Still can't do that with Alexa or Google Home.
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You give number of apps access to lot of things, this is one of the drawbacks of having lot of alluring things on playstore for free. Its like trading, the more number of fancy indicators you see, the more chance of you not keeping your pocket money.
But then again, like I said in my original post, its not something to be taken to paranoid level, most of these things are done by machines, no other human is hearing on other side, maximum your info is doing is provide one more data point in very large data set (we roughly produce each year more data than start of humanity till the last year, in numbers if you had to spell that I don't even know how to, just say its a LOOOOTTTTT). Which is funny enough, because most data scientists will have to spend days to clean the data and reduce number of such data points because it can skew the results.
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Smile
A new report analyzing municipal surveillance found that six U.S. cities cracked the top fifty when it came to security camera use, which from 2012 to 2016 had been estimated to have grown from 33 million to 62 million in the U.S. Eight of the top ten cities were in China, the other two being London (68.4 cameras per 1,000 people) and Atlanta (15.56 cameras per thousand). Other U.S. cities in the top 50 were Chicago (13.06 cameras per person) which beat out Baghdad (12.3) and Washington D.C. (5.61) which came out just north of St. Petersburg (5.53). China is the surveillance capital of the world, as by 2020 anywhere from 200 million to 626 million cameras will be in use, up to one CCTV camera for every two people.
Emma Coleman, Route Fifty, Paul Bischoff, Comparitech
Yup, that snowden one was even causing a bit of ruckus on internet, but I guess its more to do with his repo than the info he revealed. However I liked the previous video more, often people ignore it and that dude is very well respected gadget reviewer, so it was something I could understand and relate to more.
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here is the challenge that we face Kodak at the height of its power , the photography company employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. In 2014 a share was worth $36.88 today $2.66 the new face of photography are mobile phones and Instagram . Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012 and employed 13 people. As with Facebook Instagram value comes from the millions of users contribute to those network without being paid and there information is then data mined and then sold on.
The greatest fortunes in history have been created recently by using network technology" Google, Facebook" as a way to concentrate information therefore wealth and power.
The data is mined without paying for it . The data is then analyzed using the most powerful computers , run by the very best available technicians . The primary business of networks is the creation of ultra secret mega dossiers on individuals and using this information to manipulate and to concentrate power and wealth.
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We have talked a lot about the problem and its not a secrete anymore that it is there to stay for very long haul.
So whats the solution? Or at least walk around?
Here is one example of it
Watch the whole video even if you do not plan to do it, you will have better understanding of how google links and collects everything
Warning: Do not do this on your primary phone, while side loading different roms have become easy over the years it is still warranty killer and sometimes phone killer. There are also region specific implications, you can get away with it in my part of the world but not necessarily in yours, so check that out locally.
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Is this the end of privacy? Not sure about the 'might end' in the title. This is already out there. Can you put the rabbit back in the hat or is it now forever loose?
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From the Police Chief's latest email....
ALPR is their Car License Plate reading Camera's....
Yesterday at 1430 Hours, officers responded to the area of Voss and Beinhorn after being alerted of an ALPR hit on a vehicle stolen during an armed robbery. Officers located the stolen vehicle traveling southbound on Voss at Memorial and initiated a traffic stop taking 2 suspects into custody. The vehicle was confirmed stolen out of Houston. HPD was contacted and responded to take over the investigation of the robbery suspects. Officers also recovered the gun used in the Robbery.
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I wanted to share one of the best analogies I have read about privacy. It's typically used in response to those who say "well what do you have to hide?"
Imagine your home with all the windows but no blinds. Nothing obstructing the view of anyone looking into your home while walking out front or down your neighborhood sidewalk. Would that make you feel comfortable?
Now imagine your email inbox with the same analogy. Your emails are within your personal "home" but the windows are not covered. Anyone around could just look into your conversations.
To me, we have lost all aspects of privacy in this era. We've traded convenience of technology for basic privacy.
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Copied from Bloomberg Technology, Fully Charged Newsletter, for Wed May 13th. I don't normally like copying the full contents of a new story because a) not sure I think that's fair to the news outlet and b) takes up to much space here. But in this case its a newsletter and there isn't a weblink to use.
Hey, it’s Ryan on the Bloomberg Tech cybersecurity team. With coronavirus dominating the news recently, a lot of other interesting developments have slipped under the radar. One of them was buried in 1,700 pages of court documents, released late last month by the U.S. Justice Department, which revealed a little-known FBI data-grabbing tactic that has alarmed civil liberties advocates.
The trove of documents was from the FBI’s investigation of Roger Stone, the veteran Republican operative and one-time adviser to President Donald Trump. During former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Stone was in the bureau’s crosshairs. Last year he was convicted on seven felony charges, including lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering.
In its investigation of Stone, the bureau’s special agents used many of the normal methods you would expect in a serious criminal case: They obtained search warrants to raid Stone’s home in South Florida, and they interviewed people close to him. They also obtained copies of his emails, Twitter messages and iCloud data.
But one thing the FBI did was unusual. According to an affidavit from Special Agent Andrew Mitchell, the bureau asked Google to turn over records on anyone who had searched for particular terms associated with the Russian hackers—"dcleaks," "guccifer" and ''guccifer june.” The records allowed investigators to determine that Stone, from a computer in Florida, appeared to have searched for some of these phrases prior to the publication of the leaked emails from Guccifer and DCLeaks, indicating he had prior knowledge of their disclosure.
Patrick Toomey, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said he has never seen the FBI publicly admit to using this method before. For him, the disclosure raised some important questions: Is the FBI now routinely identifying criminal suspects on the basis of search terms they have entered into Google? And is that constitutional under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures?
The tactic raises “serious constitutional concerns,” Toomey said, because its use amounts to “digital fishing expeditions, potentially sweeping up the private Google searches of many innocent people and subjecting them to FBI scrutiny.” Warrants to obtain private data are supposed to be narrowly drawn and based on probable cause, he said, “but it's unclear from the public record how the FBI met either of those requirements here."
The FBI declined to comment, and Google wouldn’t provide any information on the number of times it has received similar requests to turn over search records. A company spokesperson said that Google “requires federal warrants to be signed by a judge, and we push back regularly on overly broad demands.”
The controversial nature of the tactic may be one reason why the FBI hasn't trumpeted it. But the practice does not appear to be restricted to federal agencies. In 2017, police in Edina, a town outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, obtained a court order requiring Google to hand over information on people who searched for the name of a particular financial fraud victim. On that occasion, the search giant said that it fought against the request and “significantly narrowed its scope.” It’s unclear if Google managed to do the same in the Stone investigation, or in other investigations like it.
Catherine Crump, assistant clinical professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, said that obtaining records showing searches for particular words or phrases could be an ingenious way to identify people who have special, insider knowledge. When it involves a “very unique search,” judges may be inclined to sign off on warrants to give law enforcement agencies the data, she added. “In general, though, government requests for data designed to reveal people who searched for certain terms is alarming,” Crump said. “People type things into Google that they wouldn’t tell their doctors and spouses." — Ryan Gallagher
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I would not be surprised if there were already routine data grab algos of anyone who might Google phrases like "how do I kill the President" or "how to make a bomb", which would be then cross-checked with other intelligence data.
In such cases, personally I see this as part of the FBI/CIA/NSA core job.
The article above seems to point to a similar approach, unless I'm missing something.
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Yes, and not just these regular browsers, even Tor, if you download anything, be it images, videos, or something else, leave behind tracks and they can eventually be traced back to you.
This was the reason why the whole culture of having Tor or other similar systems on USB and operating on a machine which is not your personal machine came about. Point is, even Tor doesn't necessarily always keep your identity private.
In fact, there is a new sentiment that law agencies want criminals on tor, since criminals think they are safe it's easier to catch them.
Nothing is truly anonymous.
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Interesting piece on ALPRs/automated license plate readers. I continue to be surprised how many criminals the small local police capture through the use of ALPRs. Drive past one and it alerts them. Commit a crime and the quickly identify which vehicle did it, where they came from and how they exited the area. Of course they could also easily be abused, which is what the article addresses a little. Examples of over zealous HOA officials using it ways they probably shouldn't.
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One of the few upsides of the digital age... this is due to video camera's rather than the license plate reading system ... From my weekly police chiefs email.
This week we had some great police work that resulted in the apprehension and identification of some area auto thieves. As you may recall, recently I have been talking about the thefts of some high-end SUV vehicles from the area. We had identified a vehicle of interest that was a White pick-up truck with dual rear wheels. Area residents had provided us with some video surveillance footage of vehicles that matched the same description that had been in the area at the time of some the thefts. Some of these videos were of a very good quality and provided unique vehicle characteristics. On Tuesday night, one of our evening officers noticed a vehicle matching this description driving in XXX near midnight and initiated a traffic stop. The officer had a suspicion that something just was not right with the subjects inside of the truck and called Commander YYY who was home asleep.
By chance after reading last week’s V-LINC another resident had sent some photos of our suspect vehicle that he had seen posted on another neighborhood social media web site. The commander had seen these pictures and knew even more about our suspect vehicle due to reviewing those photos Saturday morning. The commander was able to determine upon talking with the unit at the scene of the traffic stop, that this was indeed our suspect vehicle due to some very unique and specific characteristics. This was enough to effect an arrest. A search of the suspect vehicle subsequent to the arrest, located multiple sets of master key fobs and several vehicle “brain blockers” that are plugged into stolen vehicles to block GPS and other vehicle anti-theft software and technologies from working.
A call to HPD auto theft detectives also excited them as they too have been looking for this crew of thieves. The crew of 4 will be facing a litany of charges as several area agencies are putting together charges for this active group of criminals and their criminal enterprise. Great work by our officers by staying observant, by our residents for being engaged and for sharing their videos and photos, specifically by one resident for sharing information and pictures from another social media web site
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Technologies will be properly used when the aim is to use them in a way that is beneficial. They will be improperly used when the aim is exploitive or repressive. What it takes is the actual intention to be beneficial. (As with everything else. )
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
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Kind of serious change in privacy policy happening right under our nose, but then again, this was probably already happening and now its being made official to avoid legal complications .
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From a New York Times piece I just read...
While it was no secret that cameras were documenting the attack, another type of technology was also keeping a close watch — and making a detailed record — of the people who walked from the National Mall, where the president gave his speech, to the halls of the Capitol building. This location data, consisting of millions of pings — a record of the location of a given smartphone at a given time — was being dutifully collected by companies that specialize in such things.
The data is supposed to be anonymous. But, as past reporting from Times Opinion has demonstrated, it’s ludicrous to describe it this way. The movement history of each smartphone is as unique as a fingerprint. In the case of the riot, the smartphones they carried could be traced from the Capitol back to the owner’s home in many instances. That’s why it was so easy for my colleagues Charlie Warzel and Stuart Thompson to match smartphones with their owners, after a source shared a leaked data set containing millions of pings from Jan. 6.
The availability of this data raises its own set of questions. The source was outraged by the attack on the Capitol but also outraged that the tracking technology is now as pervasive as it is unregulated. What today could be used to identify insurrectionists could just as easily be turned against peaceful demonstrators and other innocent Americans.
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I just discovered this thread... and remind me of an interesting company that produces laptop that are focused on privacy: https://puri.sm/
It is well described in this youtube video:
I have never been worried about privacy, but lately I am getting more and more interested in this subject because I feel there is too much control over the people here in Italy. Basically the state knows everything and it's becoming quite annoying, this is in part due to the mafia being very present all over Italy and in part because of policies becoming stricter all over Europe.
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Hi,
I am newbie here and I am thinking about to migrate from WhatsApp to another WhatsApp alternative, eg Telegram, signal, Bip, etc. so can someone help me to suggest a better alternative of WhatsApp. thanks in advnace.
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I have signal as well. My understanding is that it has none of the known data privacy and security issues that any of the other apps have. Unfortunately I don't use it much, as so few people I correspond with have it.
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From what I know Signal is clone of Whatsapp, which was created by creator of whatsapp as soon as it was sold to FB. So there probably wont be better alternative.
Signal is way more secure than WhatsApp. They absolutely don't store any data nor share it. WhatsApp says they have to share data with Facebook later on, that's why everyone's running away!
), what religion you might belong too, what might be your education level, possibility of you coming to that place again, approximate location of your housing, kind of place you work at or go to uni to etc and much much more...
