""Ultimately, we need a global movement for the web like we now have for the environment, so that governments and companies are far more responsive to citizens than they are today. The contract lays the foundations for that movement.""
"Fighting the creep of government use of face surveillance and the related risks can seem overwhelming. Police agencies, and the spy tech vendors that profit from the growth of a surveillance state, have much to gain by deploying this invasive spying technology. "
"These ranged from the mundane (Facebook may change its terms of service at any time) to a reminder that Facebook may store and process your data anywhere in the world, meaning it might be subject to different data protection laws. When scanning license agreements from Google, Do Not Sign told me the company reserves the right to stop providing its services at any time and that its services are used at the users' sole risk."
"The greatest propaganda machine in history.
Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others - they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged - stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It's why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It's why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it's no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history - the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, "Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.""
"The internet-freedom group Access Now recorded 75 internet outages in 2016, which more than doubled to 196 last year. "The tactic has been around for a while, but the rate at which it is being applied now is extremely alarming," says Berhan Taye, of the UK-based organisation."
"It's a useful and insightful perspective, particularly for a time when Facebook is cowering under the pressure of conservative conspiracy theorists, while Twitter took the approach and ended up empowering oil companies by throttling climate activists."
"Now, researchers warn that these "direct to consumer" services could be vulnerable to a sort of genetic hacking. By uploading selected DNA sequences, they say, it may be possible, for example, to pull out the genomes of most people in a database or to identify people with genetic variants associated with specific traits such as Alzheimer's disease."
"But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google's internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents. BERT is one of a number of A.I. systems that learn from lots and lots of digitized information, as varied as old books, Wikipedia entries and news articles."
"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."
"As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I'd ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I'd opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time."
"It has led to a proliferation of fake news and clickbait. It has fuelled surveillance capitalism and normalised pervasive tracking and data-mining. If we want to do something about the proliferation of misinformation and erosion of trust in traditional institutions, it is not enough to regulate or factcheck political adverts. We need to crack down on the use of personal information for all targeted advertising. Otherwise democracy will continue to erode, one highly optimised click at a time."
"Oliver also pointed to a Finnish man who once found "one of the most severe security flaws ever discovered in a voting system" in US machines and alerted their manufacturers, who released a patch to fix the problem in 2006. The state of Georgia, however, never installed it, and the Senate report noted their machines hadn't been updated since at least 2005. "They'd essentially been hitting the 'remind me tomorrow' button on a critical security update for over a decade," Oliver explained, "meaning Georgia's election systems operate on the same level of technical proficiency as Every Dad"."
"If true, this would be a big deal. But, said OpenAI, "due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with, as well as a technical paper.""
"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."
"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."
"Jim Baker served as the FBI's general counsel from 2014 until 2017, and he presided over the the FBI's attempt to force Apple to undermine its cryptography under the rubric of investigating the San Bernadino shooters; he has long been a prominent advocate for mass surveillance, but he has had a change of heart: in a long, detailed essay on Lawfare, Baker explains why he believes that governments should not seek to introduce defects into cryptographic systems."
"A widely used algorithm that predicts which patients will benefit from extra medical care dramatically underestimates the health needs of the sickest black patients, amplifying long-standing racial disparities in medicine, researchers have found."
"Now, there's a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google. The threat isn't just theoretical. Whitehat hackers at Germany's Security Research Labs developed eight apps-four Alexa "skills" and four Google Home "actions"-that all passed Amazon or Google security-vetting processes. The skills or actions posed as simple apps for checking horoscopes, with the exception of one, which masqueraded as a random-number generator. Behind the scenes, these "smart spies," as the researchers call them, surreptitiously eavesdropped on users and phished for their passwords."
YES IAN YOU SHOULD BE READING THIS! "The authors raise three arguments: first, that "notice and choice" has been a failure ("to opt out simply stay indoors!"); second, that facial recognition fears are technophobic overreactions, and finally, that facial recognition is uniquely powerful and dangerous and needs a regulatory framework separate from other privacy rules ("to opt out, just don't have a face")."
