Tag: Surveillance

Facebook Whistleblower

My fear is that without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning of what we saw in Myanmar and now in Ethiopia are the opening chapters of a story so terrifying that no one wants to read the end of it. Congress can change the rules that facebook plays by and stop the many harms it is now causing. We now know the truth about facebook’s instructive impact–destructive impact. I came forward at great personal risk because I believe we still have time to act, but we must act now. I am asking you to act.

Frances Haugen, October 5 2021 to Congress

Polling

This is where weather and electoral forecasts start to differ. For weather, we have fundamentals — advanced science on how atmospheric dynamics work — and years of detailed, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour data from a vast number of observation stations. For elections, we simply do not have anything near that kind of knowledge or data. While we have some theories on what influences voters, we have no fine-grained understanding of why people vote the way they do, and what polling data we have is relatively sparse.

Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times

Built in the Operating System

With their operating systems, Google and Apple build in surveillance for tracking spread of virus

Google and Apple add to geolocation tracking with more detailed tracking of person-person interaction. They will able to track proximity of individuals with Bluetooth. If an individual is COV-19 positive, then that individual and the others would be notified.

They say that the data will be anonymized and stay on the phones and will not collate into the rest of their data. Given the safeguards, this seems like a reasonable response.

Clearview of the Future

Clearview compiles and collates images of faces online with an associated name. With facial recognition software, Clearview identifies almost everyone with a photo online and trades that match for money.

Currently, Clearview’s target market is law enforcement. As this program is for Clearview’s sole benefit without any regulation or restriction, and the company must survive or die, they will inevitability expand to larger markets including individual consumers and corporations. This makes privacy in public not possible and enables more detailed surveillance.

Mozilla privacy not included product list

Mozilla logo typed moz://a

Products meet basic requirements

Mozilla provides a guide on products that are designed with minimum security standards (noted with a star with laurels). These include:

  • Encrypted communication
  • Security Updates
  • Strong Password requirement
  • System in place to manage vulnerabilities
  • Privacy Policy for the device

Degree of privacy

Products are also listed from “not creepy!” (Switch, Sonos, Kindle) to “super creepy” (Ring cams, Facebook Portal).

Athena, a grassroots alliance

“This is a David and Goliath story,” she said. “David took what he had and turned it into a winning strategy. We’re taking what we have — the voices of the members of our various organizations, our collective knowledge and experience and deep understanding of the economy around Big Tech, and the experience we’ve had with making this company [Amazon] shift its behavior — and trying to build a more humane economy.”

Lauren Jacobs from David Streitfeld’s NY Times article on Athena, an alliance for better practices at Amazon

From a profile of Roger McNamee

Much of this data [from Android] is collected even when a phone is off-line, then uploaded to Google’s servers and integrated into an archive that includes your search, Gmail, and Google Docs history. The Android platform finds information in your apps and your online activity, and often makes this information available to third parties, like advertisers. A user agreement also gives Google Assistant the right to record conversations that occur within earshot of the device’s microphone.

From Brian Barth’s New Yorker profile of Roger McNamee