Group items tagged

"Facebook is considering incorporating most of its 1 billion-plus members' profile photos into its growing facial recognition database, expanding the scope of the social network's controversial technology. The possible move, which Facebook revealed in an update to its data use policy on Thursday, is intended to improve the performance of its "tag suggest" feature. The feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labelling or "tagging" friends and acquaintances who appear in photos posted on the network"

Expelled for Facebook messages - do all schools need policies and standards?

Technology: iPhone Firms involved: Dutch Online Bank ING. SE issues: Privacy Policies & Standards Securities

"Insurance is just one area which could benefit from mining patient information in order to acquire the best business outcomes - although at the detriment of the person attempting to get insurance. After all, why would a company agree to hand out a policy to a person whose data suggests has a high risk of a heart attack?"

""Parties who wish to process device fingerprints which are generated through the gaining of access to, or the storing of, information on the user's terminal device must first obtain the valid consent of the user (unless an exemption applies)," the Article 29 Working Party wrote. It means that some websites, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, that have used alternative technical processes to try to bypass the need for a "cookie policy notice" will have to show a notification after all."

"O'Neill recounts an exercise to improve service to homeless families in New York City, in which data-analysis was used to identify risk-factors for long-term homelessness. The problem, O'Neill describes, was that many of the factors in the existing data on homelessness were entangled with things like race (and its proxies, like ZIP codes, which map extensively to race in heavily segregated cities like New York). Using data that reflects racism in the system to train a machine-learning algorithm whose conclusions can't be readily understood runs the risk of embedding that racism in a new set of policies, these ones scrubbed clean of the appearance of bias with the application of objective-seeming mathematics. "

"Tufekci describes how insurgent, democratic movements were early arrivals to the internet, and how clumsy authoritarians' attempts to fight them by shutting the net down only energized their movements. But canny authoritarians mastered the platforms, figuring out how to game their automated algorithms to upvote their messages, and how to game their moderation policies to banish their adversaries."

"This description is reminiscent of the controversy that erupted back in January 2018 when photojournalist A. M. Ahad shared a behind-the-scenes video of multiple photographers shooting photos of a young man who was leaning out of a train window and striking a prayerful pose." Seems you do not even need Photoshop - would policies have stopped this?

"Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan calls Zoom a "privacy disaster," filled with "creepy" features that send tracking data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account and tell meeting hosts if attendees aren't paying attention. Zoom's privacy policy allows it to use what it calls "customer content" for advertising purposes."

"The study by US-based thinktank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is the first that attempts to quantify the value of online privacy and data. It assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina."

"There's a technology that could be really useful in providing a real-time measure of the effectiveness (or otherwise) of public policy. But it's so intrusive that in "normal" times we would be very hesitant to adopt it. Present times are not normal, though, so we will probably adopt it - perhaps sensibly - "just for the duration of the crisis". And then?"

"If the eCNY is successful, it will give the central bank new powers, including novel types of monetary policy to help the economy grow. In one possibility that economists have discussed, a central bank could program its digital currency to slowly lose value so that consumers are encouraged to spend it immediately."

"In the last year, Facebook adjusted some of the most fundamental rules about what gets posted on its platform, halting algorithmic recommendations of political groups, banning lies about vaccines and removing a number of high-profile figures for spreading misinformation and hate - including Donald Trump. But researchers say the social media platform is not enforcing those policies as effectively when it comes to misinformation in Spanish - a blind spot that may prove deadly as health lies spread through the most vulnerable populations during the global vaccine effort."

"Take Yoti, for instance: the company provides a range of age verification services, partnering with CitizenCard to offer a digital version of its ID, and working with self-service supermarkets to experiment with automatic age recognition of individuals. John Abbott, Yoti's chief business officer, says the system is already as good as a person at telling someone's age from a video of them, and has been tested against a wide range of demographics - including age, race and gender - to ensure that it's not wildly miscategorising any particular group. The company's most recent report claims that a "Challenge 21" policy (blocking under-18s by asking for strong proof of age from people who look under 21) would catch 98% of 17-year-olds, and 99.15% of 16 year olds, for instance."

"Hundreds of Facebook employees have signed a letter to executive Mark Zuckerberg decrying his decision to allow politicians to post advertisements on the platform that include false claims."

"The paradox here is that Facebook is more accountable to US lawmakers and reporters than it is to any other country's. It is incumbent on American politicians and the American press to keep this in mind - and push Facebook to answer questions about how its policies will apply to the vast majority of its users."

"Prolific digital rights activism organization Fight for the Future has partnered with the group Students for Sensible Drug Policy to stop facial recognition technology from coming to college campuses. "

"But the policy explicitly covers only misinformation produced using AI, meaning "shallow fakes" - videos made using conventional editing tools - though frequently just as misleading, are still allowed on the platform."

"On Monday China's foreign ministry said it strongly opposed any US actions against Chinese software companies, and it hoped the US could stop its "discriminatory policies". Pompeo told Fox that countless Chinese software companies were "feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist party, their national security apparatus". "Could be their facial recognition patterns. It could be information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they're connected to. Those are the issues that President Trump has made clear we're going to take care of," he said."

"Conspiracy theories about Jewish people "controlling the world" are to be explicitly banned from Facebook and Instagram for the first time, after the company announced an update to its content policies on Tuesday. The ban on "certain kinds of implicit hate speech" would also include content depicting blackface, Facebook's vice-president of integrity, Guy Rosen, said."