privacy
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has set off a flurry of speculation after he said the state's consumers should get a piece of the billions of dollars that technology companies make by capitalizing on personal data they collect. The new governor has asked aides to develop a proposal for a "data dividend" for California residents but provided no hints about whether he might be suggesting a tax on tech companies, an individual refund to their customers or something else.
A massive database for 2,565,724 people -- with names, ID card number, expiration date, home address, date of birth, nationality, gender, photograph, employer and GPS coordinates of locations -- was left online without authentication, according to a report from ZDNet. Security researcher Victor Gevers, who found the database, told ZDNet that over a 24-hour period, a steady stream of nearly 6.7 million GPS coordinates was recorded, which means the database was actively tracking Uyghur Muslims as they moved around Xinjiang province in China.
“Surveillance capitalism has taken human experience, specifically private human experience, and unilaterally claimed it as something to be bought and sold in the marketplace,” Dr. Zuboff told me during a visit to The Times’s office. “This new kind of marketplace trades in behavioral futures. It’s like a form of derivative. But it’s about us.”
It’s a foregone conclusion that app makers will get at least some data on how you use their product. How much data do you really expect, though? Maybe which buttons you tap or the length of sessions? According to TechCrunch and analytics company App Analyst, some popular iPhone apps are getting much more. They basically see everything you do in real time, even sensitive information like passwords and credit card numbers.
A computer scientist who is known as a pioneer in artificial intelligence is sounding the alarm about its potential for misuse by China -- joining privacy advocates and technologists who have expressed similar concerns. Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist and co-founder of Montreal-based AI software company Element AI, said he was fearful about the technology being deployed to surveil and control people.
When a bug in FaceTime allows strangers to hear and watch us, we get that, in the same visceral way we can imagine a man snooping outside our window. But your data -- the abstract portrait of who you are, and, more importantly, of who you are compared to other people -- is your real vulnerability when it comes to the companies that make money offering ostensibly free services to millions of people.
A disturbing trend is emerging in modern media and our online communications. Both government and private organizations are collecting personal user data for their own purposes, often without disclosing that fact. Now, social media platforms are banning views that contradict their mainstream views and political opinions.
As Facebook deals with the fallout from yet another privacy scandal, it’s worth unpacking how its Research app worked—especially because it serves as a good reminder for other apps you might already be using, particularly virtual private networks. It wasn’t just Facebook: Google also disabled a similar app on iOS devices on Wednesday. Both apps are still available on Android.
Apple said Wednesday that it has banned Facebook from using tools that let businesses control iPhones used by employees, following a news report that the social media giant has been monitoring the browsing habits of teenagers. Reuters reported that Apple took the punitive step a day after TechCrunch published an article saying Facebook has been paying teenagers as young as 13 to install an app called Facebook Research that is used it to monitor their internet browsing habits.
Analysts estimate that smart TVs now make up about 70 percent of all new TV sales. The television is no longer a mere display, but a full-fledged computer, for good and for ill. And what is a computer now? On the one hand, it’s something companies sell to consumers for money. But after you’ve purchased an internet-connected device of any kind, it begins to generate information that the company can use itself or sell to third parties.