Skip to main content

Home/ Future of the Web/ Group items tagged Data

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

EU is negotiating about new data privacy laws | # Take Part - 0 views

lobbyplag.eu/map

privacy rights contact MEP Internet freedom fight take part participate

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 08 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 08 Jun 13
     
    [ Currently the EU is negotiating about new data privacy laws. This new EU Regulation will replace all existing national laws on data privacy. Here you can see a general overview which Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are pushing for more or less data privacy. Choose a country, a political group or a MEP from the "Top 10" list to find out more. ...]
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Lobbies on dataprotection - La Quadrature du Net - 0 views

www.laquadrature.net/...Lobbies_on_dataprotection

lobby lobbies lobbying data protection Laws Europe ITRE

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 23 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 23 Jan 13
     
    [This page lists the different lobbies' s documents calling for an extensive definition of personal data, upon the revision of the data protection directive (see the ITRE draft opinion on the Proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation). The indicated month is when the position has been sent to Members of the European Parliament. ]
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Going behind the scenes at Data.gov | Jen Wike | Opensource.com - 0 views

opensource.com/...datagov-citizen-participation

Jeanne Holm interview opensource gov't people change world

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 23 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 23 Sep 14
     
    [Interview Jeanne Holm of Data.gov project] "Data.gov wants to be the fuel that helps power the organizations and people that will change the world."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 23 Sep 14
     
    [Interview Jeanne Holm of Data.gov project] "Data.gov wants to be the fuel that helps power the organizations and people that will change the world."
Paul Merrell

High Court Rules UK's Surveillance Powers Violate Human Rights - 0 views

www.tomshardware.com/...ourt-dripa-unlawful,29615.html

surveillance state GCHQ UK litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • UK's High Court found the rushed Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) to be illegal under the European Convention on Human Rights and EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, both of which require respect for private and family life, as well as protection of personal data in the case of the latter. DRIPA was challenged by two members of Parliament (MPs), Labor's Tom Watson and the Conservative David Davis, who argued that the surveillance of communications wasn't limited to serious crimes, that individual notices for data collection were kept secret, and that no provision existed to protect those who need professional confidentiality, such as lawyers and journalists. DRIPA was pushed through in three days last year after the European Court of Justice ruled that the EU data retention powers were disproportionate, which invalidated the previous data retention law in the UK. The UK High Court also ruled that sections 1 and 2 of DRIPA were unlawful based on the fact that they fail to provide precise policies to ensure that data is only accessed for the purpose of investigating serious crimes. Another major point against DRIPA was that it didn't require judicial approval, which could limit access to only the data that is strictly necessary for investigations.
  • DRIPA passed in only three days, but the Court allowed it to continue for another nine months, to give the UK government enough time to draft new legislation. Although this almost doubles the time in which this law will exist, it might be better in the long term, as it gives the members of Parliament enough time to debate its successor, without having to rush yet another law fearing that the government's surveillance powers will expire. This court ruling arrived at the right time, as the UK government is currently preparing the draft for the Investigative Powers Bill (also called Snooper's Charter by many), which further expands the government's surveillance powers and may even request encryption backdoors. It also joins other recent reviews of the government's surveillance laws that called for much stricter oversight done by judges rather than the government's own members. "Campaigners, MPs across the political spectrum, the Government's own reviewer of terrorism legislation are all calling for judicial oversight and clearer safeguards," said James Welch, Legal Director for Liberty, a human rights organization.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Jul 15
     
    The Dark State takes another hit.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

CISPA is back! - 0 views

www.cispaisback.org/?t=dXNlcmlkPTUxNzA2MjIyLGVtYWlsaWQ9OTg5OA==

CISPA CISA spying citizens security excuse private companies banks governments sharin sensible data

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Jul 15
     
    "The bill gives legal immunity to companies that share personal data with the government in the name of cyber security. In reality, the government would use the data they receive under the bill in a scheme to justify warrantless mass surveillance of domestic Internet traffic. It's purely a surveillance bill -- nothing in it is actually designed to improve security."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Jul 15
     
    "The bill gives legal immunity to companies that share personal data with the government in the name of cyber security. In reality, the government would use the data they receive under the bill in a scheme to justify warrantless mass surveillance of domestic Internet traffic. It's purely a surveillance bill -- nothing in it is actually designed to improve security."
Paul Merrell

Obama lawyers asked secret court to ignore public court's decision on spying | US news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...urt-surveillance-phone-records

surveillance state NSA Obama phone-metadata litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months. The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.
  • But Carlin asked the Fisa court to set aside a landmark declaration by the second circuit court of appeals. Decided on 7 May, the appeals court ruled that the government had erroneously interpreted the Patriot Act’s authorization of data collection as “relevant” to an ongoing investigation to permit bulk collection. Carlin, in his filing, wrote that the Patriot Act provision remained “in effect” during the transition period. “This court may certainly consider ACLU v Clapper as part of its evaluation of the government’s application, but second circuit rulings do not constitute controlling precedent for this court,” Carlin wrote in the 2 June application. Instead, the government asked the court to rely on its own body of once-secret precedent stretching back to 2006, which Carlin called “the better interpretation of the statute”.
  • But the Fisa court must first decide whether the new bulk-surveillance request is lawful. On Friday, the conservative group FreedomWorks filed a rare motion before the Fisa court, asking it to reject the government’s surveillance request as a violation of the fourth amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Fisa court judge Michael Moseman gave the justice department until this coming Friday to respond – and explicitly barred the government from arguing that FreedomWorks lacks the standing to petition the secret court.
Paul Merrell

Facebook's Deepface Software Has Gotten Them in Deep Trouble | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...as-gotten-them-in-deep-trouble

surveillance state Facebook litigation facial-recognition biometrics

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • In a Chicago court, several Facebook users filed a class-action lawsuit against the social media giant for allegedly violating its users’ privacy rights to acquire the largest privately held stash of biometric face-recognition data in the world. The court documents reveal claims that “Facebook began violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (IBIPA) of 2008 in 2010, in a purported attempt to make the process of tagging friends easier.”
  • This was accomplished through the “tag suggestions” feature provided by Facebook which “scans all pictures uploaded by users and identifies any Facebook friends they may want to tag.” The Facebook users maintain that this feature is a “form of data mining [that] violates user’s privacy”. One plaintiff said this is a “brazen disregard for its users’ privacy rights,” through which Facebook has “secretly amassed the world’s largest privately held database of consumer biometrics data.” Because “Facebook actively conceals” their protocol using “faceprint databases” to identify Facebook users in photos, and “doesn’t disclose its wholesale biometrics data collection practices in its privacy policies, nor does it even ask users to acknowledge them.”
  • This would be a violation of the IBIPA which states it is “unlawful to collect biometric data without written notice to the subject stating the purpose and length of the data collection, and without obtaining the subject’s written release.” Because all users are automatically part of the “faceprint’ facial recognition program, this is an illegal act in the state of Illinois, according to the complaint. Jay Edelson, attorney for the plaintiffs, asserts the opt-out ability to prevent other Facebook users from tagging them in photos is “insufficient”.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Deepface is the name of the new technology researchers at Facebook created in order to identify people in pictures; mimicking the way humans recognize the differences in each other’s faces. Facebook has already implemented facial recognition software (FRS) to suggest names for tagging photos; however Deepface can “identify faces from a side view” as well as when the person is directly facing the camera in the picture. In 2013, Erin Egan, chief privacy officer for Facebook, said that this upgrade “would give users better control over their personal information, by making it easier to identify posted photos in which they appear.” Egan explained: “Our goal is to facilitate tagging so that people know when there are photos of them on our service.” Facebook has stated that they retain information from their users that is syphoned from all across the web. This data is used to increase Facebook’s profits with the information being sold for marketing purposes. This is the impressive feature of Deepface; as previous FRS can only decipher faces in images that are frontal views of people. Shockingly, Deepface displays 97.25% accuracy in identifying faces in photos. That is quite a feat considering humans have a 97.53% accuracy rate. In order to ensure accuracy, Deepface “conducts its analysis based on more than 120 million different parameters.”
Paul Merrell

Page 2 - The Woman Behind the Microsoft Cloud - 0 views

www.eweek.com/...1

cloud computing container data center microsoft

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 08 - Cached
  • One Microsoft data center that is not getting a lot of attention is one the company is building in Chicago, which is the Microsoft's first container-based facility, Chrapaty said, showing a mock-up of a data center container on an 18-wheeler that could be unloaded and added to an existing facility to add capacity.
  • Moreover, Chrapaty said the Chicago data center is the first Microsoft data center to use shipping containers as a primary server packaging and deployment unit. When both phases of the data center are complete, it will total more than 707,000 square feet on a 16-acre site. It will hold hundreds of thousands of servers to deliver on the Microsoft software-plus-services initiative.  The company claims the Chicago facility will be one of the largest data centers in the world and the largest deployment of the use of containers to date.
Paul Merrell

Google Research Publication: BigTable - 0 views

labs.google.com/...bigtable.html

google bigtable database distributed storage

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Abstract Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable.
Matteo Spreafico

Google Redefines Disruption: The "Less Than Free" Business Model - 0 views

abovethecrowd.com/...n-free%E2%80%9D-business-model

google android map future Trends mobile

shared by Matteo Spreafico on 16 Nov 09 - Cached
  • In the summer of 2007, excitement regarding the criticality of map data (specifically turn-by-turn navigation data) reached a fever pitch.  On July 23, 2007, TomTom, the leading portable GPS device maker, agreed to buy Tele Atlas for US$2.7 billion. Shortly thereafter, on October 1, Nokia agreed to buy NavTeq for a cool US$8.1 billion. Meanwhile Google was still evolving its strategy and no longer wanted to be limited by the terms of its two contracts. As such, they informed Tele Atlas and NavTeq that they wanted to modify their license terms to allow more liberty with respect to syndication and proliferation. NavTeq balked, and in September of 2008 Google quietly dropped NavTeq, moving to just one partner for its core mapping data. Tele Atlas eventually agreed to the term modifications, but perhaps they should have sensed something bigger at play.
  • Rumors abound about just how many cars Google has on the roads building it own turn-by-turn mapping data as well as its unique “Google Streetview” database. Whatever it is, it must be huge. This October 13th, just over one year after dropping NavTeq, the other shoe dropped as well. Google disconnected from Tele Atlas and began to offer maps that were free and clear of either license. These maps are based on a combination of their own data as well as freely available data. Two weeks after this, Google announces free turn-by-turn directions for all Android phones. This couldn’t have been a great day for the deal teams that worked on the respective Tele Atlas and NavTeq acquisitions.
  • Google’s free navigation feature announcement dealt a crushing blow to the GPS stocks. Garmin fell 16%. TomTom fell 21%. Imagine trying to maintain high royalty rates against this strategic move by Google. Android is not only a phone OS, it’s a CE OS. If Ford or BMW want to build an in-dash Android GPS, guess what? Google will give it to them for free.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.”  (EDIT: One of the commenters below pointed out that all Android is open source, and the Google apps pack, including the GPS, is licensed on top.  Doesn’t change the argument, but wanted the correct data included here.)  Here was the big punch line – because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version!  That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model.
  • “Less than free” may not stop with the mobile phone. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has been quite outspoken about his support for the Google Chrome OS. And there is no reason to believe that the “less than free” business model will not be used here as well. If Sony or HP or Dell builds a netbook based on Chrome OS, they will make money on every search each user initiates. Google, eager to protect its search share and market volume, will gladly pay the ad splits. Microsoft, who was already forced to lower Windows netbook pricing to fend off Linux, will be dancing with a business model inversion of epic proportion – from “you pay me” to “I pay you.”  It’s really hard to build a compensation package for your sales team on those economics.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Big Data is Big Business for Commerce | Economics and Statistics Administration - 0 views

www.esa.doc.gov/...big-data-big-business-commerce

data business commerce economics statistics administration Big Data big

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 08 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 08 Dec 14
     
    "That hundreds of American companies are using Commerce data every day to innovate and deliver important goods and services to their customers."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 08 Dec 14
     
    "That hundreds of American companies are using Commerce data every day to innovate and deliver important goods and services to their customers." # ! ... or else...
Gary Edwards

Meteor: The NeXT Web - 0 views

www.meteor.com/people

html

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Sep 14
     
    "Writing software is too hard and it takes too long. It's time for a new way to write software - especially application software, the user-facing software we use every day to talk to people and keep track of things. This new way should be radically simple. It should make it possible to build a prototype in a day or two, and a real production app in a few weeks. It should make everyday things easy, even when those everyday things involve hundreds of servers, millions of users, and integration with dozens of other systems. It should be built on collaboration, specialization, and division of labor, and it should be accessible to the maximum number of people. Today, there's a chance to create this new way - to build a new platform for cloud applications that will become as ubiquitous as previous platforms such as Unix, HTTP, and the relational database. It is not a small project. There are many big problems to tackle, such as: How do we transition the web from a "dumb terminal" model that is based on serving HTML, to a client/server model that is based on exchanging data? How do we design software to run in a radically distributed environment, where even everyday database apps are spread over multiple data centers and hundreds of intelligent client devices, and must integrate with other software at dozens of other organizations? How do we prepare for a world where most web APIs will be push-based (realtime), rather than polling-driven? In the face of escalating complexity, how can we simplify software engineering so that more people can do it? How will software developers collaborate and share components in this new world? Meteor is our audacious attempt to solve all of these big problems, at least for a certain large class of everyday applications. We think that success will come from hard work, respect for history and "classically beautiful" engineering patterns, and a philosophy of generally open and collaborative development. " .............. "It is not a
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Sep 14
     
    "How do we transition the web from a "dumb terminal" model that is based on serving HTML, to a client/server model that is based on exchanging data?" From a litigation aspect, the best bet I know of is antitrust litigation against the W3C and the WHATWG Working Group for implementing a non-interoperable specification. See e.g., Commission v. Microsoft, No. T-167/08, European Community Court of First Instance (Grand Chamber Judgment of 17 September, 2007), para. 230, 374, 421, http://preview.tinyurl.com/chsdb4w (rejecting Microsoft's argument that "interoperability" has a 1-way rather than 2-way meaning; information technology specifications must be disclosed with sufficient specificity to place competitors on an "equal footing" in regard to interoperability; "the 12th recital to Directive 91/250 defines interoperability as 'the ability to exchange information and mutually to use the information which has been exchanged'"). Note that the Microsoft case was prosecuted on the E.U.'s "abuse of market power" law that corresponds to the U.S. Sherman Act § 2 (monopolies). But undoubtedly the E.U. courts would apply the same standard to "agreements among undertakings" in restraint of trade, counterpart to the Sherman Act's § 1 (conspiracies in restraint of trade), the branch that applies to development of voluntary standards by competitors. But better to innovate and obsolete HTML, I think. DG Competition and the DoJ won't prosecute such cases soon. For example, Obama ran for office promising to "reinvigorate antitrust enforcement" but his DoJ has yet to file its first antitrust case against a big company. Nb., virtually the same definition of interoperability announced by the Court of First Instance is provided by ISO/IEC JTC-1 Directives, annex I ("eye"), which is applicable to all international standards in the IT sector: "... interoperability is understood to be the ability of two or more IT systems to exchange information at one or more standardised interfaces
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Big data is an antitrust issue too, says European Commissioner | ITworld - 1 views

www.itworld.com/...ays-european-commissioner.html

Margrethe Vestager EC European Commission Big Data antitrust issue data companies manipulation market competency and else

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 20 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 20 Jan 16
     
    "Margrethe Vestager is on the lookout for antitrust issues arising from companies' use of big data -- but says it doesn't require special regulation"
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 20 Jan 16
     
    "Margrethe Vestager is on the lookout for antitrust issues arising from companies' use of big data -- but says it doesn't require special regulation"
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Brexit could put UK-EU data-sharing in jeopardy | Ars Technica UK - 0 views

arstechnica.co.uk/...brexit-eu-uk-data-sharing

Brexit UK-EU UK EU data-sharn jeopardy

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 12 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 12 Mar 16
     
    "... Privacy Shield covers the obligations of non-EU commercial organisations and governments when handling data of EU citizens. The Investigatory Powers Bill will regulate the role of security services and police in the UK for UK citizens' data. Should Britain vote to leave the EU in the forthcoming referendum, the interplay between these two could be devastating for UK digital industries. ..."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Three ways to easily encrypt your data on Linux | howtoforge.com | [# ! Note] - 0 views

www.howtoforge.com/...ily-encrypt-your-data-on-linux

encrypt data linux GNU_Linux encryption security networks storage

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 10 Dec 15
     
    "Data encryption is one very solid security measure/precaution that everyone who owns data with significant personal or objective value should perform."
Paul Merrell

California Passes Sweeping Law to Protect Online Privacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fornia-online-privacy-law.html

digital-privacy California legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • California has passed a digital privacy law granting consumers more control over and insight into the spread of their personal information online, creating one of the most significant regulations overseeing the data-collection practices of technology companies in the United States.The bill raced through the State Legislature without opposition on Thursday and was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, just hours before a deadline to pull from the November ballot an initiative seeking even tougher oversight over technology companies.The new law grants consumers the right to know what information companies are collecting about them, why they are collecting that data and with whom they are sharing it. It gives consumers the right to tell companies to delete their information as well as to not sell or share their data. Businesses must still give consumers who opt out the same quality of service.It also makes it more difficult to share or sell data on children younger than 16.The legislation, which goes into effect in January 2020, makes it easier for consumers to sue companies after a data breach. And it gives the state’s attorney general more authority to fine companies that don’t adhere to the new regulations.
  • The California law is not as expansive as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., a new set of laws restricting how tech companies collect, store and use personal data.But Aleecia M. McDonald, an incoming assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in privacy policy, said California’s privacy measure was one of the most comprehensive in the United States, since most existing laws — and there are not many — do little to limit what companies can do with consumer information.
Paul Merrell

Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - 0 views

theintercept.com/...he-u-s-and-israeli-governments

OpenWeb censorship Facebook Instagram Israel U.S.

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In September of last year, we noted that Facebook representatives were meeting with the Israeli government to determine which Facebook accounts of Palestinians should be deleted on the ground that they constituted “incitement.” The meetings — called for and presided over by one of the most extremist and authoritarian Israeli officials, pro-settlement Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked — came after Israel threatened Facebook that its failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country. The predictable results of those meetings are now clear and well-documented. Ever since, Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials. Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders
  • Facebook now seems to be explicitly admitting that it also intends to follow the censorship orders of the U.S. government.
  • What this means is obvious: that the U.S. government — meaning, at the moment, the Trump administration — has the unilateral and unchecked power to force the removal of anyone it wants from Facebook and Instagram by simply including them on a sanctions list. Does anyone think this is a good outcome? Does anyone trust the Trump administration — or any other government — to compel social media platforms to delete and block anyone it wants to be silenced? As the ACLU’s Jennifer Granick told the Times: It’s not a law that appears to be written or designed to deal with the special situations where it’s lawful or appropriate to repress speech. … This sanctions law is being used to suppress speech with little consideration of the free expression values and the special risks of blocking speech, as opposed to blocking commerce or funds as the sanctions was designed to do. That’s really problematic.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • As is always true of censorship, there is one, and only one, principle driving all of this: power. Facebook will submit to and obey the censorship demands of governments and officials who actually wield power over it, while ignoring those who do not. That’s why declared enemies of the U.S. and Israeli governments are vulnerable to censorship measures by Facebook, whereas U.S and Israeli officials (and their most tyrannical and repressive allies) are not
  • All of this illustrates that the same severe dangers from state censorship are raised at least as much by the pleas for Silicon Valley giants to more actively censor “bad speech.” Calls for state censorship may often be well-intentioned — a desire to protect marginalized groups from damaging “hate speech” — yet, predictably, they are far more often used against marginalized groups: to censor them rather than protect them. One need merely look at how hate speech laws are used in Europe, or on U.S. college campuses, to see that the censorship victims are often critics of European wars, or activists against Israeli occupation, or advocates for minority rights.
  • It’s hard to believe that anyone’s ideal view of the internet entails vesting power in the U.S. government, the Israeli government, and other world powers to decide who may be heard on it and who must be suppressed. But increasingly, in the name of pleading with internet companies to protect us, that’s exactly what is happening.
Paul Merrell

Facebook to pay $5bn fine as regulator settles Cambridge Analytica complaint | Technolo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-cambridge-analytica-complaint

Facebook FTC regulation penalty Cambridge-Analytics

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Facebook will pay a record $5bn (£4bn) penalty in the US for “deceiving” users about their ability to keep personal information private, after a year-long investigation into the Cambridge Analytica data breach. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the US consumer regulator, also announced a lawsuit against Cambridge Analytica and proposed settlements with the data analysis firm’s former chief executive Alexander Nix and its app developer Aleksandr Kogan. The $5bn fine for Facebook dwarfs the previous record for the largest fine handed down by the FTC for violation of consumers’ privacy, which was a $275m penalty for consumer credit agency Equifax.
Paul Merrell

Is This The End Of Facebook And WhatsApp​ Encrypted Messaging? - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...kdoors2-billion-users-impacted

encryption backdoors Facebook

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • A week ago, we saw a procession of nervous headlines after the Times and then Bloomberg reported that Facebook, its messaging platform WhatsApp and others would now be forced to disclose encrypted messages to law enforcement agencies under a new treaty between the U.S. and the U.K. As I commented at the time, these reports were misleading, mixing up agreements to share data that already exists with changes in the law to break encryption. But now the U.S. and U.K., as well as Australia, are set to write to Facebook to request that the company pauses its plans for cross-platform messaging encryption until backdoors can be added, citing public safety and serious crime as its reasons.EFF described the letter as an “all-out attack on encryption... a staggering attempt to undermine the security and privacy of communications tools used by billions of people,” and urged Facebook not to comply. The organization warned that the move would endanger activists and journalists, and could be used by “authoritarian regimes... to spy on dissidents in the name of combatting terrorism or civil unrest.”
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 19
     
    A more in-depth look at the issue. Unstated: this is only the latest round of the Deep State fight against digital privacy that has periodically recurred since the World Wide Web first appeared on the scene. The good news: all previous attempts have failed since Pretty Good Privacy broke the U.S. encryption export barrier beginning in 1991. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#History
Paul Merrell

Judge "Disturbed" To Learn Google Tracks 'Incognito' Users, Demands Answers | ZeroHedge - 1 views

www.zerohedge.com/...ncognito-users-demands-answers

surveillance state Google incognito mode privacy-litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • A US District Judge in San Jose, California says she was "disturbed" over Google's data collection practices, after learning that the company still collects and uses data from users in its Chrome browser's so-called 'incognito' mode - and has demanded an explanation "about what exactly Google does," according to Bloomberg.
  • In a class-action lawsuit that describes the company's private browsing claims as a "ruse" - and "seeks $5,000 in damages for each of the millions of people whose privacy has been compromised since June of 2016," US District Judge Lucy Koh said she finds it "unusual" that the company would make the "extra effort" to gather user data if it doesn't actually use the information for targeted advertising or to build user profiles.Koh has a long history with the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary, previously forcing the Mountain View, California-based company to disclose its scanning of emails for the purposes of targeted advertising and profile building.In this case, Google is accused of relying on pieces of its code within websites that use its analytics and advertising services to scrape users’ supposedly private browsing history and send copies of it to Google’s servers. Google makes it seem like private browsing mode gives users more control of their data, Amanda Bonn, a lawyer representing users, told Koh. In reality, “Google is saying there’s basically very little you can do to prevent us from collecting your data, and that’s what you should assume we’re doing,” Bonn said.Andrew Schapiro, a lawyer for Google, argued the company’s privacy policy “expressly discloses” its practices. “The data collection at issue is disclosed,” he said.Another lawyer for Google, Stephen Broome, said website owners who contract with the company to use its analytics or other services are well aware of the data collection described in the suit. -Bloomberg
  • Koh isn't buying it - arguing that the company is effectively tricking users under the impression that their information is not being transmitted to the company."I want a declaration from Google on what information they’re collecting on users to the court’s website, and what that’s used for," Koh demanded.The case is Brown v. Google, 20-cv-03664, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose), via Bloomberg.
« First ‹ Previous 101 - 120 of 596 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page