Group items tagged

"It's actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike. In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people….This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. "

"Most people are aware of the cookies that track them across the web, and the privacy-invading practices of Google search, but did you know Google's email service, Gmail, collects large amounts of data too? This was recently put into stark focus for iPhone users when Gmail published its app "privacy label" - a self-declared breakdown of the data it collects and shares with advertisers as part of a new stipulation on the Apple App Store."

"The deluge of claims trying to exercise the "right to be forgotten" follows a decision by Europe's highest court, which said that in some cases the right to privacy of individuals outweighs the freedom of search engines to link to information about them although the information itself can remain on web pages."

The free antivirus software AVG is selling your online information for profit and you have no control over your privacy and security.

"The UK is not Russia. For all that the many civil liberty campaigners will complain, as is their role, the independence of the judiciary remains strong. The laws relating to freedom of association, expression and right to privacy are well defended in parliament and outside. But the technology, the means by which the state might insert itself into our lives, is developing apace. The checks and balances are not. The Guardian has revealed that the government is legislating, without fanfare, to allow the police and the National Crime Agency to run facial recognition searches across the UK's driving licence records. When the police have an image, they will be able to identify the person, it is hoped, through the photographic images the state holds for the purposes of ensuring that the roads are safe. Searching those digital images would have taken more man-hours than could have been justified in the old analogue world. It is now a matter of pushing a button, thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence systems that are able to match biometric measurements in a flash."

"Unlike other face recognition technology, their algorithm allows quick searches in big data sets. "Three million searches in a database of nearly 1bn photographs: that's hundreds of trillions of comparisons, and all on four normal servers. With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer," said Kabakov, during an interview at the company's modest central Moscow office. The app will give you the most likely match to the face that is uploaded, as well as 10 people it thinks look similar."

"Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, asked the AI to handle one of the assignments he gives his students: writing a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. "If you're unsure about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as being a scam," the AI advised in part. "I would have given this a good grade," Gillmor said. "Academia has some very serious issues to confront.""

"Google has launched a webpage where European citizens can request that links to information about them be taken off search results, the first step to comply with a court ruling affirming the "right to be forgotten". The company, which processes more than 90% of all web searches in Europe, has made available a webform through which people can submit their requests but has stopped short of specifying when it will remove links that meet the criteria for being taken down."

"Shodan is a search engine for the Internet of Things, scanning the public Internet for devices communicating on ports and over protocols that are commonly used by IoT devices. By feeding it the right parameters -- Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) -- you can find innumerable publicly shared webcams, ranging from CCTVs that oversee marijuana grow-ops and many, many baby-monitors. "

"China's internet censors have cracked down on searches about the Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents that reportedly tie the relatives of current and retired Chinese politicians, including President Xi Jinping, to offshore companies used for tax evasion. The reports by an international coalition of media outlets working with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, are based on documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's biggest creators of shell companies."

"XKEYSCORE is a secret NSA program that indexes data slurped up from covert fiber-taps, hacked systems, and smartphones, including "full take" data and metadata. "

"A Dutch surgeon formally disciplined for her medical negligence has won a legal action to remove Google search results about her case in a landmark "right to be forgotten" ruling. The doctor's registration on the register of healthcare professionals was initially suspended by a disciplinary panel because of her postoperative care of a patient. After an appeal, this was changed to a conditional suspension under which she was allowed to continue to practise."

"Journalists discovered that two companies had posted the personal data of 170,000 customers online. The leak, which exposed the victims to identity theft and fraud, was reportedly so bad that social security numbers, passport scans, financial data and home addresses were indexed by search engines. Rather than merely address the problem, however, TerraCom and YourTel threatened the reporters, referring to them as "hackers" and accusing them of "numerous violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act"

"Past scandals, bad photos, critical comments: the internet has a long memory. As the EU considers the 'right to be forgotten', we investigate the growing business of online reputation management - and learn how you can airbrush your own past"

"KFC has teamed up with Baidu - the search engine company often referred to as "China's Google" - to develop facial-recognition technology that can be used to predict customer's orders."

"America's National Security Agency gathers unfathomable mountains of Internet communications from fiber optic taps and other means, but it says it only retains and searches the communications of "targeted" individuals who've done something suspicious. Guess what? If you read Boing Boing, you've been targeted."