Searching for "data privacy"
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/04/congress-could-help-prevent-another-jan-6-data-privacy-law-say-campaigners
“Facebook’s business model has evolved into social engineering via psychological warfare,” she declared. “The platform weaponizes user data to fuel algorithmic manipulation in order to maximize ad sales—not just for products, but for ideas like the disinformation that led to the conspiracy theories associated with the January 6 Capitol attack.”
“One thing is clear: Facebook and the other digital platforms that rely on an extractive business model will not change on their own,” the letter states. “Congress needs to step in.”
“The secretive collection, sale, and algorithmic manipulation of our personal data by platforms like Facebook must end,” he said. “It is a primary driver of the virality of the misinformation, hate speech, and online radicalization that people across the political spectrum are worried about.”
Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China
Apple built the world’s most valuable business on top of China. Now it has to answer to the Chinese government.
https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.amp.html
Two decades ago, as Apple’s operations chief, Mr. Cook spearheaded the company’s entrance into China, a move that helped make Apple the most valuable company in the world and made him the heir apparent to Steve Jobs. Apple now assembles nearly all of its products and earns a fifth of its revenue in the China region. But just as Mr. Cook figured out how to make China work for Apple, China is making Apple work for the Chinese government.
Mr. Cook often talks about Apple’s commitment to civil liberties and privacy. But to stay on the right side of Chinese regulators, his company has put the data of its Chinese customers at risk
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more on Apple in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=apple+
Facebook Says It’s Your Fault That Hackers Got Half a Billion User Phone Numbers from r/technology
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88awzp/facebook-says-its-your-fault-that-hackers-got-half-a-billion-user-phone-numbers
Facebook has become accustomed to dealing with multiple massive privacy breaches in recent years, and data belonging to hundreds of millions of its users has been leaked or stolen by hackers.
Facebook does not plan to notify half-billion users affected by data leak from r/worldnews
https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2BU2ZY
The July 2019 FTC settlement requires Facebook to report details about unauthorized access to data on 500 or more users within 30 days of confirming an incident.
The Facebook spokesman declined to comment on the company’s conversations with regulators but said it was in contact to answer their questions.
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more on facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/whatsapp-ceo-on-the-controversy-surrounding-proposed-german-communications-laws-a-2e6f4c52-4a39-4117-8199-1606e1f3ac87
Cathcart: Let me be very clear: We cannot read your messages, we cannot listen to your calls. When you send your location over WhatsApp, we do not know where you are.
DER SPIEGEL: But you do save data about your users like the device ID, the phone model, the WhatsApp user name, the phone book and thereby also the numbers of all their contacts, right?
DER SPIEGEL: Apple has recently introduced privacy labels that resemble nutritional labels about what kind of data an app collects and what it doesn’t. Why don’t you do something similar?
DER SPIEGEL: A new German law, if passed, would mean that WhatsApp would have to hand over account data to law enforcement. Do you hand over data about your customers to government agencies?
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more on WhatsApp in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=whatsapp
WhatsApp loses millions of users after terms update from r/worldnews
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/24/whatsapp-loses-millions-of-users-after-terms-update
A poorly explained update to its terms of service has pushed WhatsApp users to adopt alternative services such as Signal and Telegram in their millions.
Apps like Signal, Telegram, Wickr, and WhatsApp offer privacy features ranging from end-to-end encrypted data transfer to ‘self-destructing messages’.”
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Fast-Growing Alternative To Facebook And Twitter Finds Post-Trump Surge ‘Messy’
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/22/958877682/fast-growing-alternative-to-facebook-twitter-finds-right-wing-surge-messy
MeWe markets itself as privacy forward. It doesn’t harness users’ data to sell ads or decide what content to show them. My note: but has to charge somehow, so, differently from FB Messenger, one needs to pay, in order to do audio call in MeWe.
MeWe’s Weinstein resists the comparison to Parler or Gab, which tout themselves as free-speech sites. For one thing, he says, MeWe is serious about putting limits on what people can say.
The tech website OneZero uncovered right-wing militia groups on MeWe as well as a “Stop the Steal” group that discussed shooting people. The company removed the groups after OneZero flagged them.
“I think we all still treat social media companies like they’re these inexpensive startups, but maybe they need to be treated more like starting an airplane company or a company that makes cars,” said Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who studies online extremists. “You’ve got to think about seat belts.”
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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media
DuckDuckGo surpasses 100 million daily search queries for the first time from r/technology
https://www.zdnet.com/article/duckduckgo-surpasses-100-million-daily-search-queries-for-the-first-time/
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Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo grew by 62% in 2020 from r/technology
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/privacy-focused-search-engine-duckduckgo-grew-by-62-percent-in-2020/
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that builds its search index using its DuckDuckBot crawler, indexing WikiPedia, and through partners like Bing. The search engine does not use any data from Google.
What makes DuckDuckGo stand out is that they do not track your searches to build a user profile or share any personal or identifying data with third-party companies, including ad networks.
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more on DuckDuckGo in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=duckduckgo
The Smoking Gun in the Facebook Antitrust Case
The government wants to break up the world’s biggest social network. Internal company emails show why.
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-ftc-antitrust-case-smoking-gun/
At first blush, privacy and antitrust might seem like separate issues—two different chapters in a textbook about big tech. But the decline in Facebook’s privacy protections plays a central role in the states’ case. Antitrust is a complicated field built on a simple premise: When a company doesn’t face real competition, it will be free to do bad things.
a conceptual breakthrough on that front. In a paper titled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” the legal scholar Dina Srinivasan argued that Facebook’s takeover of the social networking market has inflicted a very specific harm on consumers: It has forced them to accept ever worse privacy settings. Facebook, Srinivasan pointed out, began its existence in 2004 by differentiating itself on privacy. Unlike then-dominant MySpace, for example, where profiles were visible to anyone by default, Facebook profiles could be seen only by your friends or people at the same school
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Facebook hit with antitrust probe for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/facebook-hit-with-antitrust-probe-for-tying-oculus-use-to-facebook-accounts
In recent years Facebook has been pushing to add a ‘social layer’ to the VR platform — but the heavy-handed requirement for Oculus users to have a Facebook account has not proved popular with gamers.
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
Chris Hughes
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/05/09/break-up-facebook/
https://www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/digital-violence-olimpia-coral-s-fight-on-behalf-of-the-women-of-mexico-a-b1da72f2-b720-4102-849a-d5a02def7d58
The recently published report “Free to Be Online?” by Plan International found that more than half of the 14,000 girls and young women surveyed worldwide have experienced online harassment or abuse.
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more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy
Michael Sandel: ‘The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit’
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/06/michael-sandel-the-populist-backlash-has-been-a-revolt-against-the-tyranny-of-merit
Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing.
Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own. “On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.”
“Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively. They hadn’t got a university degree and so on.” As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified.
Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure. Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”
Does he empathise, then, with Trumpism? “I have no sympathy whatsoever for Donald Trump, who is a pernicious character. But my book conveys a sympathetic understanding of the people who voted for him. For all the thousands and thousands of lies Trump tells, the one authentic thing about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment against elites, which he thinks have looked down upon him throughout his life. That does provide a very important clue to his political appeal.
“Am I tough on the Democrats? Yes, because it was their uncritical embrace of market assumptions and meritocracy that prepared the way for Trump. Even if Trump is defeated in the next election and is somehow extracted from the Oval Office, the Democratic party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to be more attentive to legitimate grievances and resentment, to which progressive politics contributed during the era of globalisation.”
“We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity,” he says, “which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice. It would be a serious mistake to leave the issue of investment in vocational training and apprenticeships to the right. Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven’t been to university.”
A new respect and status for the non-credentialed, he says, should be accompanied by a belated humility on the part of the winners in the supposedly meritocratic race.
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Why meritocracy isn’t working
https://www.ft.com/content/f881fb55-8f06-4508-a812-815a10505077
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https://www.ft.com/content/f881fb55-8f06-4508-a812-815a10505077?fbclid=IwAR2HQMUKx08RtkWhvBG0cthd8akylp704oEgsNIwdA_JjWGYZgGA9SQJdOo
As we “knowledge workers” know, clever people aren’t always the most collaborative. And what they have in brainpower, they often lack in empathy. We live, after all, in a cognitive meritocracy in which IQ is valued much more highly than EQ (emotional intelligence) or most physical abilities.
political analyst David Goodhart, whose new book Head, Hand, Heart
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Over the past several decades, as traditional class structures in countries such as the US and the UK began to break down, they were replaced by a new system of educational and professional advancement based on test scores, grades and intelligence, at least as narrowly defined by IQ. Suddenly, smart working-class kids could become part of a meritocratic elite.
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But there was a dark side. As British sociologist Michael Young observed when he coined the term in his prescient book of dystopian fiction The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958),
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members of the working class must judge themselves not by their own standards — in which traits of character, experience, common sense and grit are often as important as test-based intelligence — but by the standards of the meritocratic elite. Without the appropriate degrees, professional qualifications and opinions sanctioned by their educated overlords, they were all too often deemed unworthy — or as Hillary Clinton once put it in a quip that helped end her political career, “deplorables”.
In their book Deaths of Despair, Anne Case and Angus Deaton spelt out the toll this has taken on working-class white men in particular. Contempt can be just as lethal as poverty — low status in a hierarchy produces the stress and anxiety that trigger immune system-damaging cortisol to be released in the body.
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more on populism in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=populism
on meritocracty in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=meritocracy
LITA listserv exchange on “Raspberry PI Counter for Library Users”
On 7/10/20, 10:05 AM, “lita-l-request@lists.ala.org on behalf of Hammer, Erich F” <lita-l-request@lists.ala.org on behalf of erich@albany.edu> wrote:
Jason,
I think that is a very interesting project. If I understand how it works (comparing reference images to live images), it should still work if a “fuzzy” or translucent filter were placed on the lens as a privacy measure, correct? You could even make the fuzzy video publicly accessible to prove to folks that privacy is protected.
If that’s the case, IMHO, it really is a commercially viable idea and it would have a market far beyond libraries. Open source code and hardware designs and sales of pre-packaged hardware and support. Time for some crowdsource funding! 🙂
Erich
On Friday, July 10, 2020 at 10:14, Jason Griffey eloquently inscribed:
I ran a multi-year project to do counting (as well as attention measurement)
called Measure the Future (http://.measurethefuture.net). That project is i
desperate need of updating….there has been some work done on it at the
> University of OK libraries, but we haven’t seen their code push et. As the
> code stands on GitHub, it isn’t usable….the installation is broken based on
> some underlying dependencies. The Univ of OK code fixes the issue, but it
> hasn’t been pushed yet. But if you want to see the general code and way we
> approached it, that is all available. > Jason
> On Jul 8, 2020, 1:37 PM -0500, Mitchell, James Ray
> <jmitchell20@una.edu>, wrote:
> Hi Kun,
> I don’t know if this will be useful to you or not, but Code4Lib journal
> had an article a couple years ago that might be helpful. It’s called
> “Testing Three Type of Raspberry Pi People Counters.” The link to the
> article is https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjournal.code4lib.org%2Farticles%2F12947&data=02%7C01%7Cpmiltenoff%40stcloudstate.edu%7C8d2342df6f3d4d83766508d824e29f23%7C5011c7c60ab446ab9ef4fae74a921a7f%7C0%7C1%7C637299903041974052&sdata=f9qeftEvktqHakDqWY%2BxHTj3kei7idOFAJnROp%2FiOCU%3D&reserved=0
> Regards > James
My note:
In 2018, following the university president’s call for ANY possible savings, the library administrator was send a proposal requesting information regarding the license for the current library counters and proposing the save the money for the license by creating an in-house Arduino counter. The blueprints for such counter were share (as per another LITA listserv exchange). SCSU Physics professor agreement to lead the project was secured as well as the opportunity for SCSU Physics students to develop the project as part of their individual study plan. The proposal was never addressed neither by the middle nor the upper management.
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more on raspberry pi in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=raspberry
more on arduino in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=arduino