Group items tagged

"When a rogue researcher last week released 70,000 OkCupid profiles, complete with usernames and sexual preferences, people were pissed. When Facebook researchers manipulated stories appearing in Newsfeeds for a mood contagion study in 2014, people were really pissed. OkCupid filed a copyright claim to take down the dataset; the journal that published Facebook's study issued an "expression of concern." Outrage has a way of shaping ethical boundaries. We learn from mistakes."

"As the Web Monetization ecosystem grows, an increasing number of researchers are studying, exploring, and writing about Web Monetization. Read and discover their findings on this shelf within the Web Monetization Resource Library."

Wearable sensor technology has the potential to transform health care and our understanding of our own bodies and habits. The investigation and testing of these sensors in the commercial sector offer an unprecedented opportunity to leverage biometric data, both to improve individual health through the development of better products and to advance the public good through research. However, research with wearable sensor data must be done in a manner that is respectful of ethical considerations and consumer privacy

Open Humans is a platform that allows you to upload, connect, and privately store your personal data - such as genetic, activity, or social media data. Once you've added data, you can to donate it: you might choose to share some publicly , and you can join and contribute to diverse research projects. Thus, we turn the traditional research pipeline on its head: you are at the center and in control of when you share your data. We want to empower you to explore your data

"Secret messages for Alexa and Co. Researchers can hide secret commands for voice assistants in spoken sentences, birds' twittering, or music. They are not audible to the human ear. The machine recognises them precisely."

"EPSRC-funded research project, we use the concept of the 'Digital Lifespan' to investigate how digital identities are created and managed across the human lifespan by UK citizens"

"It's time you put your data to work for you, not them. Mozilla Rally gives you the power to donate your data to research studies that are designed to build new resources, tools, and potentially even policies that empower people just like you to build a better internet and fight back against exploitative tech."

"webxray is a tool for analyzing third-party content on webpages and identifying the companies which collect user data. A command line user interface makes webxray easy to use for non-programmers, and those with advanced needs may analyze millions of pages with proper configuration. webxray is a professional tool designed for academic research, and may be used by privacy compliance officers, regulators, and those who are generally curious about hidden data flows on the web."

"Neuroscientists have found that they can identify individuals based on a coarse map of which brain regions "pair up" in scans of brain activity. The map is stable enough that the researchers could pick one person's pattern from a set of 126, by matching it to a scan taken on another day. "

"Researchers have encountered a denial-of-service botnet that's made up of more than 25,000 Internet-connected closed circuit TV devices."

"FACEBOOK. Instagram. Google. Twitter. All services we rely on - and all services we believe we don't have to pay for. Not with cash, anyway. But ad-financed Internet platforms aren't free, and the price they extract in terms of privacy and control is getting only costlier. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that 93 percent of the public believes that "being in control of who can get information about them is important," and yet the amount of information we generate online has exploded and we seldom know where it all goes."

A mediagenic press-release from Proofpoint, a security firm, announced that its researchers had discovered a 100,000-device-strong botnet made up of hacked "Internet of Things" appliances, such as refrigerators

" Documenting design patterns for personal data sharing, example uses and research. Work in progress. "

A security researcher accessed personal information stored by Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi-enabled talking Barbie doll.

Lancaster University researchers say their 'Living Room of the Future' is not just a peek at what could await us as the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution gathers pace.

"Through the design, development and implementation of the Living Room of the Future (LRoTF), we build upon existing work to progress two strands of research. The first explores how media broadcasters may utilise Object-Based Media (OBM) to provide more immersive experiences. Created in conjunction with the BBC R&D the LRofTF utilizes OBM to dynamically customise television content according to audiences' personal, contextual and derived data. OBM works by breaking media into smaller parts or 'objects', describing how they relate to each other semantically, and then reassembling them into personalized programmes. In addition to this media-delivery aspect, the LRoTF explores data protection issues that arise from OBM's use of data by integrating with the privacy-enhancing Databox system. "

Kromtech Security Researchers have discovered another publically accessible Amazon S3 repository. This time it contained medical data in 316,363 PDF reports in the form of weekly blood test results. Many of these were multiple reports on individual patients. It appears that each patient had weekly test results totaling around 20 files each. That would still be an estimated 150,000+ people affected by the leak.

Researchers say Google's ad-targeting system sometimes makes troubling decisions based on data about gender and other personal characteristics.

Twitter archives are a rich source of data for doing research into numerous things: Learning about social media and interaction networks, gaining insights into movement patterns based on geolocations and even doing sentiment analysis based on the tweets. And the best part of it: Unless you have a protected Twitter account this data is already public. So why not share it? The TwArχiv takes in your Twitter archive and generates interesting visualizations from your own tweets, including tweet volume over time and your interaction/movement patterns.

"Data Sense is a research experiment at Intel Labs. We wanted to see if it is possible to make data more accessible to those of us without stats degrees. To test out some ideas, we built this tool. "