Quest 2 with multi user accounts
categories: VR
Oculus Quest 2 is Getting Multi-User Accounts and App Sharing Next Month
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more on FB decision for Quest in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=oculus+quest
Posts Tagged ‘privacy’
DuckDuckGo celebrate
categories: information technology
DuckDuckGo surpasses 100 million daily search queries for the first time from r/technology
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Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo grew by 62% in 2020 from r/technology
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
US user data from zoom to China
categories: information literacy, media literacy
https://www.ntd.com/zoom-shared-us-user-data-with-beijing_544087.html
Former Zoom executive Jin Xinjiang worked with Chinese authorities to provide data on users outside of China. Court documents say this allowed Zoom to keep market access in China.
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more on Zoom in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=zoom
social media tech and user data
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more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy
Facebook antitrust lawsuit
categories: Digital literacy, educational technology, Facebook, information technology, social media
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
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/
S Korea Facebook privacy
categories: Facebook
S. Korea fines Facebook 6.7 bln won for sharing users’ info without consent from r/technology
https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20201125006500320
South Korea’s information watchdog on Wednesday fined Facebook Inc. 6.7 billion won (US$6 million) for passing information of at least 3.3 million South Koreans to other companies in its first crackdown on the U.S. tech giant.
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more on Facebook privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook+privacy
Facebook and child sex abuse
Facebook responsible for 94% of 69 million child sex abuse images reported by tech firms. from r/news
Some 16.9 million referrals were made by US tech firms to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) last year, including 69 million images of children being abused – up 50% on the previous year.
Some 94% of the reports, which include the worst category of images, came from Facebook
the National Crime Agency (NCA) has warned the number could drop to zero if Facebook presses ahead with end-to-end encryption.
“The end-to-end encryption model that’s being proposed takes out of the game one of the most successful ways for us to identify leads, and that layers on more complexity to our investigations, our digital media, our digital forensics, our profiling of individuals and our live intelligence leads, which allow us to identify victims and safeguard them.
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
ed tech companies
+++++++++++++++Even with their services in huge demand, some smaller ed tech firms are running out of cash. https://t.co/2TbzxpRAUx (via @JonMarcusBoston)
— The Hechinger Report (@hechingerreport) September 6, 2020
Investment continues to flow to ed tech, with $803 million injected during the first six months of the year, according to the industry news website EdSurge. But half of that went to just six companies, including the celebrity tutorial provider MasterClass, the online learning platform Udemy and the school and college review site Niche.
From the outside, the ed-tech sector may appear as if “there’s a bonanza and it’s like the dot-com boom again and everybody’s printing money,” said Michael Hansen, CEO of the K-12 and higher education digital learning provider Cengage. “That is not the case.”
Even if they want to buy more ed-tech tools, meanwhile, schools and colleges are short on cash. Expenses for measures to deal with Covid-19 are up, while budgets are expected to be down.
Analysts and industry insiders now expect a wave of acquisitions as already-dominant brands like these seek to corner even more of the market by snatching up smaller players that provide services they don’t.
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Tech-based contact tracing could put schools in murky privacy territory
- A white paper from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) suggests the use of contact tracing technology by schools could erode student privacy and may not be effective in preventing the spread of coronavirus.
Despite the pandemic, schools still must conform to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and other laws governing student privacy. Districts can disclose information to public health officials, for example, but information can’t be released to the general public without written consent from parents.
The Safely Reopen Schools mobile app is one tool available for automating contact tracing. The idea is that if two mobile phones are close enough to connect via Bluetooth, the phone owners are close enough to transmit the virus. The app includes daily health check-ins and educational notifications, but no personal information is exchanged between the phones, and the app won’t disclose who tested positive.
Colleges are also using apps to help trace and track students’ exposure to coronavirus. In August, 20,000 participants from the University of Alabama at Birmingham were asked to test the GuideSafe mobile app, which will alert them if they’ve been in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. The app determines the proximity of two people through cell phone signal strength. If someone reports they contracted the virus, an alert will be sent to anyone who has been within six feet of them for at least 15 minutes over the previous two weeks.
Critics of the technology claim these apps aren’t actually capable of contract tracing and could undermine manual efforts to do so.
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more on ed tech in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=educational+technology
facial recognition unlawfully used
Facial recognition has been used unlawfully and violated human rights, UK Court of Appeal rules in landmark case from r/technology
A British police force violated human rights by unlawfully using facial recognition technology, the Court of Appeal has ruled in a landmark case.
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more on facial recognition in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facial+recognition
students data privacy
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Students fear for their data privacy after University of California invests in private equity firm
A financial link between a virtual classroom platform and the University of California system is raising eyebrows
Instructure has made it clear through their own language that they view the student data they aggregated as one of their chief assets, although they have also insisted that they do not use that data improperly. My note: “improperly” is relative and requires defining.
Yet an article published in the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, titled “Transparency and the Marketplace for Student Data,” pointed out that there is “an overall lack of transparency in the student information commercial marketplace and an absence of law to protect student information.” As such, some students at the University of California are concerned that — despite reassurances to the contrary — their institution’s new financial relationship with Thoma Bravo will mean their personal data can be sold or otherwise misused.
The students’ concerns over surveillance and privacy are not unwarranted. Previously, the University of California used military surveillance technology to help quell the grad student strikes at UC Santa Cruz and other campuses