Tuesday, May 21, 2019


Is gathering data always ‘stealing’ data?
US Warns Chinese Drones May Steal Data: Report
The Department of Homeland Security sent out an alert on Monday flagging drones built in China as a "potential risk to an organization's information", CNN reported.
The US government has "strong concerns about any technology product that takes American data into the territory of an authoritarian state that permits its intelligence services to have unfettered access to that data or otherwise abuses that access," wrote CNN, quoting the DHS alert.
The DHS report did not name any specific Chinese manufacturers, but the southern China-based DJI produces about 70 percent of the world's commercial drones.
"For government and critical infrastructure customers that require additional assurances, we provide drones that do not transfer data to DJI or via the internet," the company added.


(Related)
Opinion | Your Car Knows When You Gain Weight
Vehicles collect a lot of unusual data. But who owns it?




This comes from failure to RTFM.
DHS Highlights Common Security Oversights by Office 365 Customers
As organizations migrate to Microsoft Office 365 and other cloud services, many fail to use proper configurations that ensure good security practices, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns.
According to CISA, customers who used third-parties to migrate email services to Office 365 did not have multi-factor authentication enabled by default for administrator accounts, had mailbox auditing disabled and password sync enabled, and allowed for the use of legacy protocols that did not support authentication.
Although Azure Active Directory (AD) Global Administrators have the highest level of administrator privileges at the tenant level in an Office 365 environment, multi-factor authentication (MFA) is not enabled by default for these accounts, CISA points out.




Spy gooder! Clear security implications.
The Spycraft Revolution
Changes in technology, politics, and business are all transforming espionage. Intelligence agencies must adapt—or risk irrelevance.




How honest should you be? What have you been telling your customers?
Isn’t this what I’ve been saying for more than a decade now?
Now there’s a study that agrees with me. Laurel Thomas-Michigan reports on a study called, “You `Might’ Be Affected: An Empirical Analysis of Readability and Usability Issues in Data Breach Notifications” by Yixin Zou, Shawn Danino, Kaiwen Sun, Florian Schau. She reports:
Building on their previous research that showed consumers often take little action when facing security breaches, researchers analyzed the data breach notifications companies sent to consumers to see if the communications might be responsible for some of the inaction.
They found that 97 percent of the 161 sampled notifications were difficult or fairly difficult to read based on readability metrics, and that the language used in them may have contributed to confusion about whether the recipient of the communication was at risk and should take action.
Read more on Futurity.
You can access the full report in html or pdf from here.


(Related) Dilbert is on point, again.




Are you being paid enough for your data?
Return on Data
Consumers routinely supply personal data to technology companies in exchange for services. Yet, the relationship between the utility (U) consumers gain and the data (D) they supply — “return on data” (ROD) — remains largely unexplored. Expressed as a ratio, ROD = U / D. While lawmakers strongly advocate protecting consumer privacy, they tend to overlook ROD. Are the benefits of the services enjoyed by consumers, such as social networking and predictive search, commensurate with the value of the data extracted from them?




Sure they do…
Microsoft wants a US privacy law that puts the burden on tech companies
Microsoft's idea of a US privacy law would make it easier for people to protect their data.
The company's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, Julie Brill, wrote Monday that people have a right to privacy, as they become increasingly alarmed by how much data tech giants have gathered on them.
Tech giants like Facebook, Google and Apple have also called for a data privacy law, though the specific details vary. In Microsoft's vision for privacy regulation, it calls for shifting the burden of protecting your data from the person to the tech companies.
Microsoft has the numbers to back up how often people actually take that extra step to protect their own privacy. In the year since GDPR came into effect and Microsoft released its Privacy Dashboard, Brill said more than 18 million people have used those tools.
Considering that there are about 1.5 billion Windows devices, that would mean only 1 percent of Microsoft users have actually changed their privacy settings. Similarly, there were about 2.5 billion visits last year to Google's Accounts page, but only about 20 million people viewed their ads settings.




Architecting the LoC.
Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress’s mission is to engage, inspire, and inform the Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity. To accomplish that mission, the Library is adopting a digital-forward strategy that harnesses technology to bridge geographical divides, expand our reach, and enhance our services. This document describes how we will secure the Library’s position in an increasingly digital world as we realize our vision that all Americans are connected to the Library of Congress.
The Digital Strategy complements the Library’s 2019-2023 strategic plan, Enriching the User Experience, which enumerates four high-level goals: expand access, enhance services, optimize resources, and measure results.
The Digital Strategy describes how we will use each interaction as an opportunity to move users along a path from awareness, to discovery, to use, and finally to a connection with the Library through three main goals: throwing open the treasure chest, connecting, and investing in our future.”




What is that thingie?
Understanding Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
The opening session of FPF’s Digital Data Flows Masterclass provided an educational overview of  Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – featuring Dr. Swati Gupta, Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech; and Dr. Oliver Grau, Chair of ACM’s Europe Technology Policy Committee, Intel Automated Driving Group, and University of Surrey. To learn more about the Basics of AI/ML and how Bias and Fairness impact these systems, watch the class video here,
In conjunction with this class, FPF released The Privacy Expert’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning. Covering much of the course content, this guide explains the technological basics of AI and ML systems at a level of understanding useful for non-programmers, and addresses certain privacy challenges associated with the implementation of new and existing ML-based products and services.




Lip service or a basis for legal actions?
US to back international guidelines for AI ethics
Only some countries will support the principles, though.
American companies have fostered ethical uses of AI before. Now, however, the government itself is posed to weigh in. Politico understands that the US, fellow members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and a "handful" of other countries will adopt a set of non-binding guidelines for creating and using AI. The principles would require that AI respects human rights, democratic values and the law. It should also be safe, open and obvious to users, while those who make and use AI should be held responsible for their actions and offer transparency.
… The guidelines should be released on May 22nd


(Related)
The Ethics of Smart Devices That Analyze How We Speak
Speech lies at the heart of our social interactions, and we unwittingly reveal much about ourselves when we talk. When someone hears a voice, they immediately start picking up on accent and intonation and make assumptions about the speaker’s age, education, personality, etc. Humans do this so we can make a good guess at how best to respond to the person speaking.
But what happens when machines start analyzing how we talk? The big tech firms are coy about exactly what they are planning to detect in our voices and why, but Amazon has a patent that lists a range of traits they might collect, including identity (gender, age, ethnic origin, etc.”), health(“sore throat, sickness, etc.”), and feelings, (“happy, sad, tired, sleepy, excited, etc.”).




Code faster and cleaner. Maybe.
Microsoft wants to apply AI ‘to the entire application developer lifecycle’
At its Build 2018 developer conference a year ago, Microsoft previewed Visual Studio IntelliCode, which uses AI to offer intelligent suggestions that improve code quality and productivity. In April, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac. At that point, IntelliCode was still an optional extension that Microsoft was openly offering as a preview. But at Build 2019 earlier this month, Microsoft shared that IntelliCode’s capabilities are now generally available for C# and XAML in Visual Studio 2019 and for Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python in Visual Studio Code. Microsoft also now includes IntelliCode by default in Visual Studio 2019.




Perspective. A podcast on a hot topic.
Is Amazon Getting Too Big?
In an era when legacy retailers such as Sears and Macy’s are scaling back or going bust, online behemoth Amazon continues to boom. The company is the second-largest retailer in the United States behind Walmart, and last year it became the second company in the world to reach $1 trillion in market capitalization. Perhaps more significantly, it’s also one of the world’s largest tech companies, with reams of data collected from an enormous customer base. Amazon has sold 100 million units of its voice assistant, Alexa, and an equal number of Prime subscriptions. But is Amazon too big?
… “Typically, when you think about antitrust, you think about whether the consumer is worse off. And Amazon has been so far pretty clean on that,” Kahn said, adding that Amazon hasn’t lowered product quality or raised prices. The company also appears to be transparent with its customers.




A possible follow on to our spreadsheet class?
Nine Tutorials for Making Your Own Mobile App
Glide is a service that anyone can use to create a mobile app without doing any coding. Glide lets you take one of your Google Sheets and have the information become a mobile app. It's easy to use and you can get started in minutes.
Glide recently published their own official tutorial videos. Glide offers these eight tutorials that will walk you through each step of using Glide from sign-up through publication of your app.



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