Privacy, Surveillance, and the Human Implications of New Technology
Most Internet service providers charge a flat fee and price their packages based on the speed of the service. Cable providers have been considering charging based on usage, similar to the way utilities charge for electricity.
"Usage-based pricing would help drive efficiency in the networks," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said on Tuesday, speaking at the cable industry's annual NCTA Show.
Facebook Camera is set up very similarly to Instagram and includes most of the same features, but Dirk Stoop,Facebook's product manager for photos, told The New York Times that the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company was working on this application long before the Instagram acquisition.
In the next few months, the provider will be trying out two approaches in select markets: a 300GB monthly cap for basic service and higher caps for more advanced levels of service, plus $10 for an additional 50GB; or 300GB for all tiers of service and $10 for 50GB more. Comcast said it has not yet determined what the data limits would be for the higher tiers with the first option.
The signatures are potentially a milestone moment in a campaign that began about a year ago, when the activist group filed 22 complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (Facebook’s international HQ is in Ireland). Those complaints in part led to the DPC issuing a report in December with some suggested changes to its privacy policy — largely aimed at making it more transparent and for users to be able to more clearly access all their data and delete it if they choose — but the activists believe that the changes in fact “worsened many issues and did not comply with the Irish conditions.” The Irish DPC and its German counterpart, the German Data Protection Agency, have put in more suggestions for changes since then.
"How many people are in the living room? Are they taking any action based on the advertising they just saw?" Watts said. "Can we watch the customers' reaction, and if we can, do we have the capability of showing a different ad, or the same ad, depending on what the reaction was?"
Watts, who focuses on this topic for Microsoft, says Kinect developers need to pay attention to privacy from the beginning. "Make sure you do full disclosure," he suggested. "Make sure on the back end you know what you're going to do with your data."
The U.K. government is haemorrhaging data — private and confidential citizen data — from medical records to social security details, and even criminal records, according to figures obtained through Freedom of Information requests.
Just shy of 1,000 civil servants working at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), were disciplined for accessing personal social security records. The Department for Health (DoH), which operates the U.K.’s National Health Service and more importantly all U.K. medical records, saw more than 150 breaches occur over a 13-month period.And the UK is looking to expand collection of, and access to web surfing data.
In addition to the window which will help users find the right “thing,” Google will also surface summaries for things, which, again, will try to be somewhat comprehensive by tapping into the various databases of knowledge. A search for Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, will return a brief summary, photos of Wright, images of his famous projects and perhaps, most interestingly, related “things.” People who search for Wright are also looking for other notable architects. It’s a feature that may remind users of Amazon’s penchant for delivering “people who liked this book also bought or searched for this one” results.
Gomes said that the search results are tailored to deliver information that best relates to the initial search result. So the details delivered about a female astronaut will likely outline her space travel record, because that’s what people who search for her are, according to Google, most interested in.
Last year, San Franciscans were pretty freaked out when they learned that some of their favorite watering holes had installed cameras and were live-streaming footage of them taking one too many shots of Patrón. To add to an already sinister Friday night, local bars have decided to go ahead keep tabs on you via facial recognition technology.
SceneTap, the Austin-based nightlife startup, is officially launching its facial detection software at 25 bars in San Francisco on Friday, including Mr. Smith's and Pete's Tavern. Using a free iPhone or Android App, you can get a snapshot of the San Francisco bar scene, including male-to-female ratio, average age, and crowd size -- all in real time. In short, you can find out if there are enough women to hit on before you bother getting decked out for the night.
These tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies — including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube — do when they’re integrated into websites. By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.
As always, we are committed to providing you with simple and meaningful choices about the information we collect to improve your Twitter experience. For those who don’t want to tailor Twitter, we offer ways to turn off this collection. As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned earlier today, we support Do Not Track (DNT), which is reflected in our privacy policy as one of the ways you can indicate your preference. If you have DNT enabled in your browser settings, we will not collect the information that enables this feature, so you won’t see any tailored suggestions. We hope that our support of DNT highlights its importance as a privacy tool for consumers and creates even more interest and wider adoption across the web.
Facebook Messenger is the best alternative for three massive reasons: most of your friends already have it (or they at least have Facebook – remember the service has over 901 million monthly active users), it’s cross-platform (again, not just mobile), and it is regularly getting significant upgrades (video calling is coming this summer).
Texting isn’t going away anytime soon, especially given that carriers make so much revenue from it. Nevertheless, texting is so limited that alternatives have been quickly embraced. As a BlackBerry user and former RIM employee, I love BlackBerry Messenger and all the features it offers. When Facebook Messenger 1.7 came out, however, I called it a BBM killer.
Police will not specify what roles drones would have in the force, but it is believed they could be used in surveillance and during car chases.
In a written statement, Victoria Police described the technology as rapidly evolving and said anything that could provide more effective and safer policing is worth assessing.
Law enforcement agencies in the US are set to begin using drones from tomorrow and Victoria's Police Airwing recently hosted a conference to examine their potential.
Unless we make a change for legal or administrative reasons, or to correct an inaccurate statement, we will give you seven (7) days to provide us with comments on the change. If we receive more than 7000 comments concerning a particular change, we will put the change up for a vote. The vote will be binding on us if more than 30% of all active registered users as of the date of the notice vote.Read Write Web has an article that describes this and other aspects of the newly released policy changes, like the privacy hub. Voting - or at least sneaking up on the idea of voting - is a fascinating step in the direction of democratic governance.
The Air Force, like the rest of the military and the CIA, isn’t supposed to conduct “nonconsensual surveillance” on Americans domestically, according to an Apr. 23 instruction from the flying service. But should the drones taking off over American soil accidentally keep their cameras rolling and their sensors engaged, well … that’s a different story.
“Collected imagery may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent,” reads the instruction (.pdf), unearthed by the secrecy scholar Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. That kind of “incidental” spying won’t be immediately purged, however. The Air Force has “a period not to exceed 90 days” to get rid of it — while it determines “whether that information may be collected under the provisions” of a Pentagon directive that authorizes limited domestic spying.
According to comments Tong left in an online forum, hackers penetrated a webserver hosted byRackspace after they managed to reset a password, most likely through an automated e-mail. Other participants in the discussion castigated Tong for not relying on two-factor authentication to manage the account. They also criticized Bitcoinica for storing such large amounts of liquid currency online, rather than keeping it offline and in an encrypted format. Tong didn't address the authentication issue, but he defended the decision to store such a large amount of currency online.
Facebook will soon launch it's own app store. From the Mashable article:The company announced on Wednesday that it is building its own app center. It will also enable paid Facebook apps for the first time.
Users currently search for apps on Facebook using the same search bar they use to find people, groups and events. In the coming weeks, they’ll be able to search from a dashboard that looks much like Apple’s App Store or Google Play — complete with details and ratings for each app.Now all we need is a Facebook phone, operating system, and ISP!
SALT L AKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - A Colorado teen is upset with screeners at Salt Lake City International Airport. The type one diabetic says TSA agents were abrupt, rude and were responsible for breaking her $10,000 insulin pump. A pump she has to have to survive...
"I went up to the lady and I said, I am a type one diabetic. I wear an insulin pump. I showed her the pump. I said, what do you want me to do? I usually do a pat down - what would you recommend?"
Savannah then showed agents a doctor's note explaining that the sensitive insulin pump should not go through the body scanner. She says she was told to go through it anyway. "When someone in a position of authority tells you it is - you think that its right. So, I said, Are you sure I can go through with the pump? It's not going to hurt the pump? And she said no, no you're fine."Rand Paul will add this to his list of reasons TSA should be scrapped.
In its motion, Twitter offers three arguments against turning over that data: First, that the data belongs to Harris under Twitter’s terms of service, and handing it over would violate both those terms of service and the SCA. Second, it argues that handing over Harris’s data would violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against searches without a warrant, which it argues applies even when the government is seeking information about allegedly public activities like a user’s tweets. And third, it points out that Twitter is in California, and argues that the New York prosecutors need to make their case to a California court to obtain Twitter’s data.Most of the account information is public, but the GPS information and accounts linked to this account can help identify pseudonyms, the exact location of the subscriber when Tweets were sent, and other followers of the subscriber.
In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned.
The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.This might seem surprising to some, but this is legislation would be consistent with previous wiretap requirements, like the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which required telecom providers to create a tappable infrastructure.
On Wednesday, the European Commissionpublished a strategy document aimed at setting up systems to protect children online. In the document (PDF) — but not in the accompanyingpress release nor the citizens' summary — the Commission mentioned that it will soon propose a "pan-European framework for electronic authentication".
A spokesman for digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said the Commission "will have full e-ID proposals on 30 May".image: http://www.delfji.ec.europa.eu/
The activist’s computer was infected during a Skype chat with who she thought was a fellow freedom fighter. “We received the hard drive from a source we cannot name. The user got suspicious when she realised that the person who she was chatting with couldn’t be available, as he was arrested before the conversation took place. Then she remembered she had received a file and became very worried,” Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, told TechWeekEurope.
The impersonator sent an application called MACAddressChanger.exe that was supposed to help avoid government surveillance. Instead, it spawned a file called silvia.exe, which, upon closer examination, turned out to be the “Xtreme RAT” backdoor.image: www.operationworld.org
Federal authorities who seized a popular hip-hop music site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four “pre-release” music tracks gave it back more than a year later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to court records obtained by Wired.
The Los Angeles federal court records, which were unsealed Wednesday at the joint request of Wired, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Coalition, highlight a secret government process in which a judge granted the government repeated time extensions to build a civil or criminal case against Dajaz1.com, one of about 750 domains the government has seized in the last two years in a program known as Operation in Our Sites.
PITTSBURGH—The millions of "check-ins" generated by foursquare, the location-based social networking site, can be used to create a dynamic view of a city's workings and character, Carnegie Mellon University researchers say. In contrast to static neighborhood boundaries and dated census figures, these "Livehoods" reflect the ever-changing patterns of city life.
Researchers from the School of Computer Science (SCS) have developed an algorithm that takes the check-ins generated when foursquare members visit participating businesses or venues, and clusters them based on a combination of the location of the venues and the groups of people who most often visit them. This information is then mapped to reveal a city's Livehoods, a term coined by the SCS researchers.
Disrupting mobile phone service is a legitimate tool for law enforcement authorities working against terrorism or other dangerous situations, a mass transit agency has said in defending its own mobile shutdown last August.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District, serving the San Francisco area, has an obligation to protect its riders, wrote Grace Crunican, BART's general manager, in a Monday filing to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The FCC has been investigating BART's three-hour shutdown of mobile-phone base stations in some of its San Francisco stations last August in an attempt to disrupt a planned protest.
On Tuesday, the White House released a fabricated itinerary - consisting of all-day meetings in the Oval Office to cover up the fact that Obama was secretly flying to Afghanistan. Whilst only a few US journalists were aware of this event, by mid-morning, a lot more people were suddenly in on the revelation courtesy of Twitter.
The first tweet to let the virtual cat out of the bag was Afghanistan news site TOLOnews which reported: "United States President Barack Obama has arrived in Kabul to meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai."
Last Friday the UK High Court ruled that several of country’s leading ISPs must censor The Pirate Bay website having ruled in February that the site and its users breach copyright on a grand scale.
The blocks – to be implemented by Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media (BT are still considering their position) – are designed to cut off all but the most determined file-sharers from the world’s most popular torrent site.
“The assumption that the person who pays for Internet access at a given location is the same individual who allegedly downloaded a single sexually explicit film is tenuous, and one that has grown more so over time,” writes Brown. “An IP address provides only the location at which one of any number of computer devices may be deployed, much like a telephone number can be used for any number of telephones."This ruling makes sense, but we'll see if it stands up on appeal.
Weather Channel VP of Web Products Mike Finnerty calls this social media implementation “phase one.” The channel is working with Facebook on “phase two,” which involves incorporating weather warnings into Facebook’s open graph.
In the future, Finnerty says, you’ll be able to see weather warnings that affect family members or friends in your Facebook network while you’re on the site. You’ll be able to post those warnings directly to their individual Facebook walls.
“It takes that annoying tone you get on radio or TV and makes it really, really personal,” Finnerty says.image: www.ehow.com
The fastest county in the world based on the average connection speed, was South Korea coming in at 17.5 Mbps, in contrast the US ranked 13 at 5.8 Mbps. In terms of the fastest cities in the world, Taegu, South Korea ranked first at 21.8 Mbps. In general, Akamai found that cities in the Asia Pacific region held 69 of the top 100 spots on the list of fastest cities in the world. Japan tops the list with 61, while there are 22 from the US.
The fastest city in the US is Boston at 8.4 Mbps; fractionally ahead of North Bergen, NJ for average connection speed. Jersey City, NJ came in third at 8.3 Mbps, Monterey Park, CA fourth at 8.2 Mbps and Clifton, NJ fifth at 8.0 Mbps21 Mbps in Taegu vs 8.4 in Boston! Imagine how much faster they can waste time.
In a nutshell, individuals sign up to the Social Loot website and are assigned companies to promote to their circle of online friends. They are then paid on a sliding scale based on the amount of traffic their posts generate, and the quality of referrals and number of resulting sales. This is tracked by a code embedded in the links promoted by Social Loot’s spruikers.image: bundance.blogspot.com
The inclusion of Canada on the priority watch list is so lacking in objective analysis as to completely undermine the credibility of the report. The Canadian "analysis" amounts to 173 words that hits on the usual dubious complaints (and given criticism of countries such as Chile for their notice-and-notice system, Israel for their statutory damages rules, and many countries on border enforcement, the Canadian criticism will clearly not end with the enactment of Bill C-11). By comparison, China is treated as equivalent to Canada on the priority watch list, yet garners over 4,600 words.I find it interesting as a view into the attempts by the U.S. to promote an international copyright standard.
On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards...
Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence -- more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group's most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.Explains why Osama had porn in his hideout.
In February, Mr. Strachman duplicated and shipped 1,100 movies. (“A slow month,” he said.) He has not kept an official count but estimates that he topped 80,000 discs a year during his heyday in 2007 and 2008, making his total more than 300,000 since he began in 2004. Postage of about $11 a box, and the blank discs themselves, would suggest a personal outlay of over $30,000.He hasn't been bothered by the copyright police yet - “If I were younger,” he added, “maybe I’d be spending time in the hoosegow.” Let's hope he is right.
The report points the finger at a rogue engineer who, it says, intentionally wrote software code that captured payload data information -- communication over the Internet including emails, passwords and search history -- from unprotected wireless networks, going beyond what Google says it intended. The engineer invoked his 5th Amendment right and declined to speak to the FCC.So, will Google have to contact each individual it inadvertently collected information from and prove that the information had been destroyed? This may sound ridiculous, but if a company inadvertently towed cars from people's driveways, it would have to return the cars.
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Gak!
The court’s conclusion on qualified immunity may or may not be defensible, but the court veered off course in concluding that a Facebook like is not speech. Maybe the court slept through Arab Spring and the many other instances of online activism in the past five years. Maybe the court is unaware of the robust body of First Amendment precedent which says that protection for expression is not limited to just actual words. Hello,Tinker (black arm bands) and Texas v. Johnson (flag burning)! More likely, as Eric notes in his comments below, the practical implications of a "like" threw the court for a loop.
The vote came despite strong opposition from many broadcasters, who have argued that making sensitive advertising rate information so publically available will undermine stations' competitiveness and give advertisers unfair leverage over how much they are willing to pay. A coalition of broadcasters put forth a compromise plan that would have required TV stations to put public files online while shielding information about political spending.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski rejected the compromise, noting stations already make available paper records of what they charge political advertisers. He said there was no reason such information should be "stuck in a filing cabinet" in an online world.
"We must draw the line somewhere and define what is private," Engel said in a statement. "No one would feel comfortable going to a public place and giving out their username and passwords to total strangers. They should not be required to do so at work, at school, or while trying to obtain work or an education. This is a matter of personal privacy and makes sense in our digital world.”Of course, asking you to login and show your private information would not be illegal.
The report comes from the Brazilian tech site, Tech Guru (Google Translation). At a Foxconn plant in Jundiaí, Brazil, over 2,500 Foxconn employees have complained about conditions at the factory. Workers met with company officials last Monday to raise their concerns, and have given the company 10 days to address them.
The complaints range from overcrowded buses to poor food and lack of water. If the issues are not resolved by May 3, the employees have threatened to strike.
