"But the bigger problem with things like public tweets is that no-one knows what information can be derived from them, either now or in the future. I write as a data analyst who's done a fair bit of work with this kind of material. What follows are a few techniques that aren't at all obvious to the average Twitter user. They go far beyond reading the surface text (or metadata) of an individual tweet. And these are just some of the techniques currently used to mine this data, ethically or unethically, legally or illegally."
"While 77% of shoppers in a recent study by Opinion Lab said in-store tracking is unacceptable, 61% also responded that they expect to be compensated with cost-saving discounts if they're tracked.
How stores sell in-store tracking to shoppers and highlight its benefits is where one of the next major battles of retail will be fought, Kilcourse says. "
"She recounts the moment when her 13-year-old son Jacob - now 16 - was sent to isolation for refusing to register his fingerprint to use the school canteen.
"I went to school and said that I didn't give my consent. As a parent I want to be clear that the decisions I make that affect my children are in their best interests."
"But researchers at New York University's AI Now Institute have issued a strong warning against not only ubiquitous facial recognition, but its more sinister cousin: so-called affect recognition, technology that claims it can find hidden meaning in the shape of your nose, the contours of your mouth, and the way you smile. If that sounds like something dredged up from the 19th century, that's because it sort of is."
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Singhealth, a Singaporean public health service, suffered the worst breach in Singaporean history, losing control of 1.5 million peoples' data; included in the breach was prescription data on 160,000 people, including Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong."
"When Vancouver tech retailer NCIX went bankrupt, it stopped paying its bills, including the bills for the storage where its servers were being kept; that led to the servers being auctioned off without being wiped first, containing sensitive data -- addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, etc -- for thousands of customers. Also on the servers: tax and payroll information for the company's employees."
"Following backlash, the company said it removed the alarm function from the smartwatch, but reports maintain the employees are still being required to wear the device so their location can be tracked."
""Before anyone meets a new person these days they Google them," Tomlinson said. He added that many people engaged in misdeeds when they were young and if the misdeeds were constantly brought to the attention of others then they would permanently have a negative effect."
"This RFID-enabled device allowed its proud new owners to do things such as log into their computer, open doors and purchase food in the office cafeteria with a flick of the wrist. Nearly half of the company's 85 workers had the device implanted when the firm held a "chip party".
YIKES!
"The new feature, part of a wider set of tools covering "off-Facebook activity", will not delete anything from Facebook's servers, instead simply "disconnecting" data from an individual user's account."
"The ethics of Facebook's micro-targeted advertising was thrust into the spotlight this week by a report out of Australia. The article, based on a leaked presentation, said that Facebook was able to identify teenagers at their most vulnerable, including when they feel "insecure", "worthless", "defeated" and "stressed"."
"The Chinese government is planning on implementing a system that connects citizens' financial, social, political, and legal credit ratings into one big social trustability score. The idea would be that if someone breaks trust in one area, they'd be adversely affected everywhere."
"A whistleblower who works in Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the US to Google, has expressed anger to the Guardian that patients are being kept in the dark about the massive deal."
""The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It's the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques," she said."
"The case was finally cracked when new legislation in January 2019 allowed police to search for matches to suspects' DNA on commercial genealogy websites, which are popular among Swedes seeking long-lost relatives."
"Earlier this year, the consultancy PwC came under fire for developing a facial recognition tool that logs when employees are away from their computer screens while working from home."