Washington Post Geoffrey A. Fowler August 27, 2020
I couldn’t pick just one crazy thing to say about the Halo, Amazon’s new wearable health gadget. So here are three:
Mirror, mirror on the wall, Amazon thinks you’re fat.
The artificial intelligence would like you to stop sounding overwhelmed now.
That nagging voice inside your head is now on your wrist.
The Halo is a $100 wrist-worn device that, among other functions, listens to your conversations so you can understand how you sound to others. And it comes with a companion app that scans your body three-dimensionally to track your progress gaining your “quarantine 15.”
Amazon is upfront about these invasive functions, which users of the Halo have to opt into using. What’s revealing is that one of tech’s biggest companies thinks consumers in 2020 might want them.
Clear Channel Outdoor, one of the world’s largest billboard companies, will in coming days roll out technology across Europe capable of letting advertisers know where people go and what they do after seeing a particular billboard.
Sounds creepy, no?
Well, brace yourself. Clear Channel has been quietly using this technology in the United States for the last four years, including in Los Angeles.
“They’re spying on you in your own neighborhood,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.
“You don’t know it’s happening,” he told me. “You don’t know who they’re sharing the information with.”
Cade Metz, Erin Griffith and Kate Conger New York Times August 26, 2020
“Offering software — and, crucially, teams of engineers that customize the software — Palantir helps organizations make sense of vast amounts of data. It helps gather information from various sources like internet traffic and cellphone records and analyzes that information. It puts those disparate pieces together into something that makes sense to its users, like a visual display.”
Brooke Auxier Pew Research Center January 27, 2020
Americans prefer to keep certain information about themselves outside the purview of online searches, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June 2019. Given the option, 74% of U.S. adults say it is more important to be able to “keep things about themselves from being searchable online,” while 23% say it is more important to be able to “discover potentially useful information about others.”
The Department of Homeland Security has announced a plan to transfer detailed personal data collected from immigrants to the Census Bureau—an apparent violation of the Privacy Act. In a privacy impact assessment, published over the holiday break, the DHS revealed that it would provide names, addresses, social security numbers, and other highly sensitive data to the Census Bureau. Yet the DHS admitted that individuals weren’t aware their personal data would be obtained by the Census Bureau, that the data may be inaccurate, or used for purposes unrelated to the census survey. The proposed data transfer follows a July executive order by President Trump, who vowed that the government “will leave no stone unturned” when seeking citizenship information from every person in the United States. EPIC previously warned Congress that the executive order could undermine Privacy Act safeguards. In EPIC v. Commerce, EPIC challenged the failure of the Census Bureau to conduct privacy impact assessments before adding the (later withdrawn) citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
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Categories : DHS, FIP 3: One use, Privacy, Surveillance
THE PING of a smartphone usually means a text from a friend or a news story from a favorite publication. Soon enough, it could instead signal that it’s time to stay inside for 14 days. Technologists are coding furiously to create a plan for digital contact tracing that, paired with traditional manual methods and widespread testing capability, could ease the country out of lockdowns. But before the United States bets on Silicon Valley to solve its problems, leaders ought to ask themselves two questions: How well does it work, and how high is the cost?
On April 23, I started work at 8:49 a.m., reading and responding to emails, browsing the news and scrolling Twitter. At 9:14 a.m., I made changes to an upcoming story and read through interview notes. By 10:09 a.m., work momentum lost, I read about the Irish village where Matt Damon was living out the quarantine.
All of these details — from the websites I visited to my GPS coordinates — were available for my boss to review.
Here’s why: With millions of us working from home in the coronavirus pandemic, companies are hunting for ways to ensure that we are doing what we are supposed to. Demand has surged for software that can monitor employees, with programs tracking the words we type, snapping pictures with our computer cameras and giving our managers rankings of who is spending too much time on Facebook and not enough on Excel.
The technology raises thorny privacy questions about where employers draw the line between maintaining productivity from a homebound work force and creepy surveillance. To try to answer them, I turned the spylike software on myself.
Illinois Facebook users could soon learn if they’re eligible for up to $300 as part of a class-action settlement alleging the social media giant violated state privacy law with its facial tagging feature.
Attorneys representing users filed court documents last week showing class members are estimated to receive between $150 and $300 as part of a massive $550 million settlement reached in January. There is no timeline set on notification or payout, and a federal judge in San Francisco must approve the details.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has announced an agreement with Zoom Video Communications following an investigation into Zoom’s consumer safeguards. Zoom agreed to enhance encryption protocols, perform yearly penetration testing, and add privacy-enhancing features to its platform. The agreement also provides enhanced privacy controls for education accounts. Last month, EPIC urged the FTC to issue best practices for online conferencing.
The Senate voted today to pass an amended version of the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act of 2020, which was passed by the House in March. The bill would end the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata program and make further reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Senate agreed this week to further amendments by Senators Lee and Leahy that expand FISA protections, but rejected amendments proposed by Senators Wyden and Daines that would have protected Americans’ internet browsing and search histories. The adopted Leahy/Lee amendment strengthens the role of “amici curiae,” who are independent, expert advisors to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, by increasing their access to information, their power to raise issues with the Court, and the number of cases they are appointed in. Since amendments were adopted, the bill now returns to the House of Representatives for consideration. Members of both parties have expressed support for reform of the controversial NSA surveillance program. EPIC closely tracks the use of FISA authority. EPIC has advocated for significant FISA reforms, and recently advised Congress to limit Section 702 surveillance and to allow Section 215 to expire.
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