Monday, June 24, 2019


Home Security is a real issue.
Walmart and Amazon want to see inside your house. Should you let them?
… Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc., the two largest retailers in the U.S., are now offering to send delivery people inside your house to safely deposit your packages indoors and your groceries inside your fridge.
To calm fears that delivery people might get up to no good, both companies are promising to let you watch the deliveries happen live on video. There’s one catch: Amazon and Walmart get to hang on to that video too.
… risks include having sensitive home data — including voice and video recordings and codes for the front door’s smart lock — hacked and released online, or having the same private data subject to search by law enforcement.
More prosaically, with the advent of computer vision analytics, which offer the ability to extract consumer insights from millions of hours of video, the companies behind these smart-home services could use imagery from your living room to improve their ad targeting or as raw material to train their computer vision algorithms.




For my Security Compliance class.
New York Privacy Act Would Be Considerably Tougher Than California’s Bill
… A patchwork system of state-by-state privacy legislation would require companies to be much more careful and cautious in order to avoid running afoul of any state laws. Law experts are now calling New York State “the next battleground in the fight for state privacy laws.”
there are several notable exceptions between the New York Privacy Act and the CCPA. For example, the New York Privacy Act gives New Yorkers the right to sue companies directly, without waiting for the State Attorney General to take action on their behalf.
… the New York privacy legislation does not impose any minimum sizes on which companies would be covered by the new sweeping legislation. California, by way of contrast, says that companies must have at least $25 million in gross annual revenue in order to fall within the purview of the CCPA. In New York State, a small social media startup with just a few employees and zero revenue would also be expected to follow the full scope and spirit of the New York Privacy Act.
… Under the current interpretation of the New York Privacy Act, businesses must act as “data fiduciaries” when interacting with state residents. In such a way, they would be expected to act much more like attorneys or doctors, which must adhere to very stringent guidelines when it comes to protecting the privacy of citizens.
… The big question is whether large tech companies like Facebook and Google – which have constructed very profitable business models around the idea of trading in personal data – would ever be able to transform into data fiduciaries.




Worth a read.
What Does an AI Ethicist Do?
many organizations are increasingly paying attention to ethical issues around AI. In a 2018 Deloitte survey, 32% of AI-aware executives ranked the ethical risks of AI as one of their top three AI-related concerns. Microsoft and O’Brien are essentially bellwethers on this issue — the figurative sheep at the head of the flock — in creating a role focused on, as O’Brien puts it, AI ethics “advocacy and evangelism.”
I talked with O’Brien to find out how his role came about, what he does in it, and what kinds of policies might emerge at Microsoft because of his work. I also asked him how the AI ethicist role might relate to similar positions at other companies.
... He began to realize, he said, that leaving all of businesses’ ethical and policy issues to the lawyers was not sufficient. O’Brien was seeing that, as data and processing move to the cloud, technology, policy, and geography issues all were starting to collide.




Perspective. What happens when you remove “barriers to entry.”
The number of American taxi drivers has tripled in a decade
The CPS data likely underestimates the true number of Americans who work as part- or full-time taxi drivers and chauffeurs. That’s because the CPS counts US adults who give this occupation as their primary job, while many people who drive for a service like Uber do it as a secondary gig. For context, a 2016 study by Uber and labor economist Alan Krueger found that more than half of drivers worked full time at another job, and 14% worked part time at another job. Lots of those people aren’t being captured by the CPS estimate.




Could be amusing…
New tool by Harvard Law lets people explore language usage in caselaw abajournal.com
ABAJournal: “Parsing 6.7 million federal and state cases and 12 billion words, a new tool allows the public to explore the use of language over 360 years of caselaw. Released [June 19, 2019], “Historical Trends ” was built by the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab and is free to use. “I think it’s a good example of a research tool that we can offer that the commercial providers have never been inclined to explore,” says Adam Ziegler, director of the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab.
The tool allows a user to explore the use of language in caselaw dating back to the colonial period. A user can track the historical utilization of a word like “privacy,” which was fairly dormant during the 19th and early 20th centuries before receiving much more attention in the 1950s and 1960s. Or, a comparison can be made to see which is more commonly referred to in litigation, such as Harvard or Yale. (Turns out, it’s Yale by a mile.) The tool can also visualize the use of a word across various states, as explained in a blog post by Kelly Fitzpatrick, a research associate at the Library Innovation Lab. For example, Nevada is currently leading the country in cases mentioning the Fifth Amendment, while Iowa has seen a recent uptick in Ninth Amendment mentions, for some reason. The tool is plugged into the repository of cases released last fall as the Caselaw Access Project. Outside of the Library of Congress, it is the most comprehensive database of its kind—totaling 200 terabytes of information…”




Perspective. Watching what could be a multi-day match in five minute chunks?
Cricket World Cup highlights just how big video streaming is in India
More than 100 million users tuned in to Hotstar, an on-demand streaming service owned by Disney, on June 16, the day India and Pakistan played a league match against each other. That’s the highest engagement the four-year-old service has clocked on its platform to date, it said in a statement today.
Hotstar said about 66% of its viewers came from outside of big metro cities
To be sure, these 100 million users are not paying subscribers. Hotstar offers five-minute streaming of live events to users at no cost.




Coming soon to a classroom near me!
The Best Machine Learning Resources
Medium – The Best Machine Learning Resources – “A compendium of resources for crafting a curriculum on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning



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