Security & Privacy with technology in (2016-2019, depreciated and needs updating)

[valis]

Is privacy a 'luxury item'? ('ala Apple's products) I find that notion funny. High end gear has plenty of processing power to feed 'metadata' from Snapchat etc to the ad-platform(s) while you use high end features. And now tech companies have an easier path to obsolescence than just simply allowing for software & OS bloat over time. Each 'security' issue at the bare metal level is basically de-evolving CPU's older than a generation or two, and along comes a magical 'fix' in the latest & greatest silicon spin. Just in time for the slowdown as we approach 3nm...

In further (non-)news, our household elected to get a crappy Vizio TV for our family last upgrade specifically because the lack of a web browser makes ad-targeting more difficult to do. While the Vizio TV's can associate youtube/netflix/etc data with the device itself, it can only do so with specific users in the household via each platform's respective login and/or user accounts. Most of the other smart TV's have much more powerful chips, and the web browser that's built in gets used for any html5 related content & applications, meaning that not only those apps but also the device itself knows all. The data will sure be aggregated by the meta companies who do that (and periodically 'leak' our aggregated data of course). Still, it's the best I can hope for moving forward and should stave off putting the jack directly to my children's brains for a little while longer. A monthly 'advertising ID' reset satisfies our privacy needs and still allows Vizio to monetize the usage to keep the retail price insanely low, and I'll skip the constant upgrade cycle to 8K & 1,000,000,000 LUMEN "H-HDR" for a while longer too, thanks. The FireTV's have Alexa built in, so that's nu buendo for us.

Meanwhile iPhone X-whatever tracks 2048+ points in the room at all times, and anytime it catches sight of a face it turns the screen on and attempts to automatically unlock to be 'ready' for my every whim...and now Samsung phones have radar that knows what's around them without even using a camera. Hey I can walk into the room and my phone is always ready!

[valis]

Facebook just fined 5 Billion by US FTC.

[Peter Drake]

Yeah, 1000 USD per each of the 50 million accounts, or 23 for each of the ~220 million US accounts at the time, or 65 cents for each and every human on the planet as well as the handful in orbit. I really don't know where I'm going with this.

[valis]

Well, if nothing else it represents the US's bureaucratic cut on whatever the sum total of our 'information age' worth is, no?

At least until we can be valued in Facebook's Libra, which some have speculated be a move to prevent destruction of your personal data for min. of 5 years, which also is part of US law for financial institutions and account information.

[valis]

Good article from WIRED on AI 'recommended' feedback loops, from audience to creator to platform: The Toxic Potential of YouTube’s Feedback Loop (applies well beyond Youtube).

[ronnie]

I said this here quite awhile ago. The proof is now mainstream. It's get out the popcorn time.

G gle is the NSA/CIA/NWO. Remember they changed the company name to ALPHABET. Lose Google. Use DuckDuckGo over Tor with a VPN and don't use G gle$ DNS.

[valis]

Google is following Facebook/Instagram/etc's lead by becoming the next "AOL" (ie, where all links lead to other Google properties):

Less than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click. What this means is that Google is ensuring that they monetize you as much as possible, by focusing on more paid links out (ads intermixed with the SERP results in ways that are harder to detect visually), more data collection, more results that keep you within their own products.

[at0m]

attempts to influence our population

?

They wouldn't dare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack "a 2019 documentary film about the Cambridge Analytica hacking scandal. The documentary was released by Netflix on July 24, 2019"

Cambridge Analytica's staff was ex-military, their speciality PsyOps. Psychological warfare, on our own population. Paid for by political campaigns, winners of some of the most recent elections in the biggest "democracies".

Looking for a feel-good movie for saturday night? This is not it.

[valis]

FB's 2nd in command is ex-CIA, iirc (GaryB seems to have stated this as well). Google, like MS before them, and IBM before them, underwent a DOJ 'investigation' and emerged a dominant player when the dust settled. Oh and we removed the restrictions of using propaganda on our own population during the Obama years, but Cambridge Analytica was UK in any case, right? Or should we worry more about who is pulling the strings, and less about which entity is being implicated? ("String-theory" let's say )

In other (same) news: Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system

[at0m]

Some 80% of the Brexit/Leave.EU budget went to online campaigns. For Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU was just a runner-up to the Trump campaign, the US elections. C.A. together with FB had staff present in the republican electoral campaign offices, yet FB surprise surprise denies all involvement.

BBC's Channel 4 had gone undercover and https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge ... estigation the list goes on and on.

A recent development: “We suspect many of these companies are doing similar types of scraping, the largest and most aggressive on the conservative side being Cambridge Analytica, a sketchy (to say the least) data modeling company that has penetrated our market deeply,” an email from a Facebook employee on September 22nd, 2015, reads. (via The Verge )

Citing off the top of my head, but there's more in the docu: C.A. was also involved in Italy, Trinidad, Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India, Argentina and many other countries.

[valis]

Keep in mind that this is about polarizing, not them vs. us but creating an us vs. us while “they” reap the rewards. IMHO...The data collection and targeting just makes it faster than ever before. But that game isn’t new, by any means.

FB’s “hive mind” effect is great when you’re going with the tide, but sheer insanity when it decides you’re jetsam to be jettisoned. Ditto for google, Twitter, Reddit....

On the flip side, if you wanted to sell craptastic widgets to sparkly eyed marks, life was never as good as 2014-16.

[garyb]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP0sBE9 ... e=youtu.be

[at0m]

Keep in mind that this is about polarizing, not them vs. us but creating an us vs. us while “they” reap the rewards.
[...]

Right, that's an inherent consequence of how the algo's of these silo's work nowadays: to prevent you from clicking away, leaving the app or visiting another service or website, more of the same is fed on useds of these silo platforms, who then get their worldview confirmed instead of engaging in healthy and critical discussions. garyb's youtube link in his post above provides some examples on such algo manipulation, confirmation bias etc. (ironically, that video is also hosted on youtube:)

Remember when kensuguro posted that Japanese study (15y ago?) on how planetz forums were taken as a unique example on how this place has a way to take on most any topic and discuss it constructively and to self-moderate. Different opinions would out, and yet we'd all get along eventually.

No such thing on these silo's, where heated discussions on sensitive topics lead to flamewars, de-friending, accounts getting deleted just to name a couple examples of contemporary drama. The polarization, contrast of the other opinions in the discussion while ones circlefap timeline is full of self-confirmation each individual is used to, so the other opinion must be wrong, right?

[valis]

This Amazing Polly episode "Stressing You Right Out" is worth a watch, and relevant at this point in the discussion.

And related: Social media stress can lead to social media addiction

[valis]

Don't Play in Google's Privacy Sandbox

Perhaps the most fleshed-out proposal in the Sandbox is the conversion measurement API. This is trying to tackle a problem as old as online ads: how can you know whether the people clicking on an ad ultimately buy the product it advertised....? Google's ID field can contain 64 bits of information -- a number between 1 and 18 quintillion. This will allow advertisers to attach a unique ID to each and every ad impression they serve, and, potentially, to connect ad conversions with individual users. If a user interacts with multiple ads from the same advertiser around the web, these IDs can help the advertiser build a profile of the user's browsing habits.

Even worse is Google's proposal for Federated Learning of Cohorts (or "FLoC").... FLoC would use Chrome users' browsing history to do clustering. At a high level, it will study browsing patterns and generate groups of similar users, then assign each user to a group (called a "flock"). At the end of the process, each browser will receive a "flock name" which identifies it as a certain kind of web user. In Google's proposal, users would then share their flock name, as an HTTP header, with everyone they interact with on the web. This is, in a word, bad for privacy. A flock name would essentially be a behavioral credit score: a tattoo on your digital forehead that gives a succinct summary of who you are, what you like, where you go, what you buy, and with whom you associate...

If the Privacy Sandbox won't actually help users, why is Google proposing all these changes? Google can probably see which way the wind is blowing. Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention and Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection have severely curtailed third-party trackers' access to data. Meanwhile, users and lawmakers continue to demand stronger privacy protections from Big Tech. While Chrome still dominates the browser market, Google might suspect that the days of unlimited access to third-party cookies are numbered. As a result, Google has apparently decided to defend its business model on two fronts. First, it's continuing to argue that third-party cookies are actually fine, and companies like Apple and Mozilla who would restrict trackers' access to user data will end up harming user privacy. This argument is absurd. But unfortunately, as long as Chrome remains the most popular browser in the world, Google will be able to single-handedly dictate whether cookies remain a viable option for tracking most users.

At the same time, Google seems to be hedging its bets. The "Privacy Sandbox" proposals for conversion measurement, FLoC, and PIGIN are each aimed at replacing one of the existing ways that third-party cookies are used for targeted ads. Google is brainstorming ways to continue serving targeted ads in a post-third-party-cookie world. If cookies go the way of the pop-up ad, Google's targeting business will continue as usual.

The Sandbox isn't about your privacy. It's about Google's bottom line. At the end of the day, Google is an advertising company that happens to make a browser.

[valis]

https://www.privacytools.io/

I'll put this into the parent post, in fact I think I need to run through and collect some of this information in the parent for ease of use. Tools and solutions only, not news.

[valis]

This isn't strictly privacy related, but here is google's documentation on how to 'shift' public sentiment via modern digital campaigns: https://redirectmethod.org/blueprint/

[valis]

Getting a new mobile number in China will involve a facial-recognition test

China is taking every measure it can to verify the identities of its over 850 million mobile internet users.

From Dec. 1, people applying for new mobile and data services will have to have their faces scanned by telecom providers, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a Sept. 27 statement (link in Chinese).

MIIT said the step was part of its efforts to “safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of citizens in the cyberspace” and to control phone and internet fraud. In addition to the facial-recognition test, phone users are also banned from passing their mobile phone numbers to others, and encouraged to check if numbers are registered under their name without their consent.

Most countries require some form of ID to sign up for mobile phone contracts—versus for prepaid services—but the facial-recognition requirement seems to be a first. In China, it’s only the latest example of the technology’s embrace by a government that is using it for everything from catching jaywalkers to nabbing criminals at concerts to social profiling, even as other countries go slow due to concerns over privacy and human rights. The new decree is an upgrade of China’s real-name registration system for mobile phone users launched in 2013, which requires people to have their national IDs checked and photos taken by carriers to get a new number. The facial-recognition step will match the image against the person’s stored ID.

[garyb]

oh, brother...

[valis]

Did you mean "oh," or "big"?

We're still a few steps off of direct implants, relax. The dialectics need time to synthesize!