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""I don't really care about data privacy because I think it's all an illusion anyway." It's interesting to see how this encounter also reflects the general behavior of a majority of people when it comes to privacy. Although user data has long been a gold mine for companies, would it be more acceptable if they started paying their users in exchange for it?"

""Anonymised" data lies at the core of everything from modern medical research to personalised recommendations and modern AI techniques. Unfortunately, according to a paper, successfully anonymising data is practically impossible for any complex dataset."

"Many services retain the data they harvest indefinitely, and some have been caught storing (and losing) the data without encryption: for example, in 2017 the Greater Manchester Police were found to have lost data from victims of violent and sexual crimes, which had been stored unencrypted on DVDs and sent through the post."

"no dearth of posts related to vaccines, the top 50 Facebook pages ranked by the number of public posts they made about vaccines generated nearly half (46 percent) of the top 10,000 posts for or against vaccinations, as well as 38 percent of the total likes on those posts, from January 2016 to February of this year."

"As Zuckerberg surely knows, providing a greater sense of control over their personal data won't make Facebook users more cautious. It will instead encourage them to share more. This, of course, will produce more data for Facebook to mine to its own financial advantage."

"If that data is collected, does the child have a right to get it back? If that data is collected from very early childhood and does not belong to the child, does it make the child extra vulnerable because his or her choices and patterns of behaviour could be known to anyone who purchases the data, for example, companies or political campaigns. Depending on the privacy laws of the state in which the toys are being used, if the data is collected and kept, it breaches Article 16 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child - the right to privacy. (Though, of course, arguably this is something parents routinely do by posting pictures of their children on Facebook). "

"Researchers are becoming so adept at mining information from genealogical, medical and police genetic databases that it is becoming difficult to protect anyone's privacy-even those who have never submitted their DNA for analysis."

"In the fawning media coverage of the Obama campaign's technological prowess, it did not occur to observers at the time to call this a startling invasion of privacy. And it wasn't, or at a very minimum, the privacy risks were arguably outweighed by the benefits. A tool like this could be the future of politics: door-to-door canvassing for the digital age, and a welcome antidote to impersonal broadcast TV ads or a welcome upgrade from getting a phone call from a stranger telling you to vote."

"That's interesting work suggesting that Russian troll activity was significantly more ambitious on an international scale than previously thought. It also suggests a way of spotting this kind of meddling as it is happening by looking for the kind of forensic fingerprint the team identified. Of course, finding trolls is a cat-and-mouse game. For the organizations responsible for Russian troll activity, it ought to be a straightforward matter to change the pattern of activity in a way that does not create the same signature."

"The judges considered three aspects of digital surveillance: bulk interception of communications, intelligence sharing and obtaining of communications data from communications service providers. By a majority of five to two votes, the Strasbourg judges found that GCHQ's bulk interception regime violated article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which guarantees privacy, because there were said to be insufficient safeguards, and rules governing the selection of "related communications data" were deemed to be inadequate."

"The bitcoin blockchain was created, in part, to address this historical weakness. After the 21 millionth bitcoin is mined, in around 2140, the system will produce no more."

"Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric is just one example of the large-scale application of brain surveillance devices to monitor people's emotions and other mental activities in the workplace, according to scientists and companies involved in the government-backed projects. Concealed in regular safety helmets or uniform hats, these lightweight, wireless sensors constantly monitor the wearer's brainwaves and stream the data to computers that use artificial intelligence algorithms to detect emotional spikes such as depression, anxiety or rage."

"Cambridge Analytica sought to influence the Nigerian presidential election in 2015 by using graphically violent imagery to portray a candidate as a supporter of sharia law who would brutally suppress dissenters and negotiate with militant Islamists, a video passed to British MPs reveals."

"The store will also utilise data and video analytics to analyse purchasing behaviour and customise its inventory. An auto-ordering system eliminates the need to manually track and order stocks."

"The mapping information could ostensibly tell third-parties when the owners are most often home, the shape of rooms, the size of houses, and even the frequency of cleanings. Gizmodo imagines that a room's shape could be valuable to Amazon as information on the acoustics of a room containing an Alexa device, informing both volume and directional settings so that its broadcasting and microphone can work properly. "

"This tool predicts your psycho-demographic profile from digital footprints of your behaviour. It reveals how you might be perceived by others online and provides detailed insights on your personality, intelligence, life satisfaction and more." YIKES

"My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with "did the holocaust happen". And an entire page of results that claimed it didn't."

"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?"