The stalkers already know what she looks like. Is turnabout fair
play?
Gabrielle Canon reports:
Taylor Swift secretly surveilling her fans using facial recognition technology might sound like science fiction – but Rolling Stone reported on Thursdaythat the pop star has been doing exactly that in an effort to root out stalkers.
Swift has stayed silent on the report, declining to comment to the Guardian and other news organizations. But the episode has raised ethical questions for civil rights groups concerned about privacy.
“Stalkers are a generally scary phenomenon and everyone understands why someone like Taylor Swift would want to be protected against them,” says Jay Stanley, the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) senior policy analyst. “But this does have larger implications. It is not about this one deployment, it is about where this is technology is headed.”
Read more on The
Guardian.
(Related) The technology is cheap and easily
available. Why wouldn’t they use it?
The Taliban
Are Watching US Troops With Drones '24/7' In Afghanistan
… During an October showcase
of counter-drone directed energy weapons at the White Sands Missile
Range in New Mexico, Air Force Research Laboratory official Tom
Lockhart revealed that the Taliban and various insurgent groups that
are battling for control of the country are aggressively utilizing
unmanned aircraft to keep an eye on Resolute Support personnel.
Porn has always been an early adopter, not
surprising that Big Data and Data Analytics are also being adopted.
Porn sites
collect more user data than Netflix or Hulu. This is what they do
with it.
The biggest and perhaps best source of data about
what people like to watch on the internet and what they would pay for
doesn’t come from streaming
giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Hulu. It comes from
porn.
While consuming porn is typically a private and
personal affair, porn sites still track your every move: What content
you choose, which moments you pause, which parts you repeat. By
mining this data to a deeper degree than other streaming services,
many porn sites are able to give internet users exactly what they
want—and they want a lot of it.
There are 125
million daily visits to the Pornhub Network of sites, including
YouPorn and Redtube, and 100 million of those are to Pornhub alone.
(It’s widely acknowledged that Pornhub is the
most popular porn site in the world although exact statistics on
the industry are few and far between.) To put into perspective how
much content that is: In
2017, Pornhub transmitted more than the entire contents of the
New York Public Library’s 50 million books combined.
... MindGeek
is the world’s
biggest porn company—more specifically, it’s a holding
company that owns numerous adult entertainment sites and production
companies, including the Pornhub Network.
… MindGeek, whose bandwidth use exceeds
that of Facebook or Amazon, began as a company named Mansef,
founded by Stephane Manos and Ouissam Youssef in 2004. It was bought
by tech entrepreneur Fabian Thylmann in 2010, re-named Manwin, then
MindGeek, and now runs a
near-monopoly of streaming porn sites.
What would it take for this to happen in Brazil,
Mexico, or the US?
In India, WhatsApp
is a major channel for false reporting and hate speech that sometimes
fuels mob violence and gruesome murders. Police say they can’t
track the encrypted messages to find culprits. And the government is
demanding change.
… The five male victims in Rainpada were part
of a string of killings that took place over the late spring and
summer linked to messages spread on WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned
encrypted messaging platform. Police and government officials
estimate that more than two dozen people have been killed by mobs,
though no official tally is being kept. IndiaSpend, a data
journalism outlet, pegs the figure at 33 killed in 69 incidents of
mob violence between January 2017 and July 2018.
… The Indian government has cast much of the
blame for these killings on WhatsApp. In August and again in late
October, the government asked the company for the ability to stop and
trace problematic messages, a demand that would short-circuit the
encrypted security that is central to the app’s popularity. At the
same time, critics of the government accuse it of using the platform
as a convenient scapegoat while failing to sufficiently address
underlying issues of intolerance, weak policing, caste divides, and
nationalist rhetoric that has fueled violence again and again.
For every ‘Oops!,’ a ‘Gotcha?’
Facebook
faces billion-euro fine as Irish data protection commissioner opens
fresh investigation into photo leak - Independent.ie
Facebook is potentially facing huge fines from
Ireland’s data protection commissioner, who has announced a fresh
investigation into the social media giant.
The move comes after Facebook admitted another
privacy error, possibly affecting 7m people. The bug may have
allowed up to 1,500 apps get access to private photos held by users
on the social site.
Facebook is already facing an official probe from
the Irish data watchdog for a previous privacy leak in September,
which the company said may have affected 30m people.
… The Irish data authority now has at least
two serious investigations underway into Facebook, with 14 more also
being undertaken against other tech multinationals. Because so many
big tech companies choose Ireland as their European or global
headquarters, the Irish data authority is responsible for
investigating when there is a problem.
An interesting perspective.
The Machine
Learning Race Is Really a Data Race
… Machine learning — or artificial
intelligence, if you prefer — is already becoming a commodity.
Companies racing to simultaneously define and implement machine
learning are finding, to their surprise, that implementing the
algorithms used to make machines intelligent about a data set or
problem is the easy part. There is a robust cohort of plug-and-play
solutions to painlessly accomplish the heavy programmatic lifting,
from the open-source machine learning framework of Google’s
TensorFlow to Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning and Amazon’s
SageMaker.
What’s not becoming commoditized, though, is
data. Instead, data is
emerging as the key differentiator in the machine learning race.
This is because good data is uncommon.
… today’s most valuable companies trade
in software and networks, not just physical goods and capital
assets. Over the past 40 years, the asset focus has completely
flipped, from the market being dominated by 83%
tangible assets in 1975 to 84% intangible assets in 2015.
Instead of manufacturing coffeepots and selling washing machines,
today’s corporate giants offer apps and connect people. This shift
has created a drastic mismatch between what we measure and what
actually drives value.
Worth reading.
Searching
Google: Lessons from Sundar Pichai’s Congressional Testimony
… “The big takeaway is that trust is the
currency of this generation of innovation,” notes Andrea
Matwyshyn, professor of law at Northeastern University and an
expert on information security and consumer privacy. She believes
that while data may have been the driver of the last decade of
building out new companies, “the challenge that exists now relates
to maintaining the engagement of companies, products and services
with the consumer base, and that is going to be driven by trust.”
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