“Look! We did something! All your worries are over!”
Key Senate
Panel Approves $250 Million for Election Security
A key Senate panel on Thursday approved $250
million to help states beef up their election systems, freeing up the
money after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell came under
criticism from Democrats for impeding separate election security
legislation.
… Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has been
outspoken about the need for improved election security, called the
proposal a “joke” and an effort by McConnell to “desperately”
get the issue to go away.
“This amendment doesn’t even require the
funding be spent on election security — it can go for anything
related to elections,” Wyden said in a statement. “Giving states
taxpayer money to buy hackable, paperless machines or systems with
poor cybersecurity is a waste.”
Good luck!
How to
erase your personal information from the internet (it’s not
impossible!)
Vox
– Your
shopping habits, your family members’ names, even your salary is
out there for anyone to see. But you can take back control.
“…Before you can get a handle on digital privacy, you first have
to understand what is out there. Start by Googling yourself with
your browser in private or “incognito” mode — which prevents
some tracking and autofilling from your own internet use — and look
for social media profiles and data brokers. (Google
and its popular Chrome browser hold a wealth of data, too.)
This will allow you to see what a stranger would find if they began
looking for your information online. For most of us, social media
profiles populate the first few search results on Google. Next, find
the data brokers. These companies scrape information from public
records and compile it into a database. Then, as the name might
suggest, they sell it. (This is technically legal, though shady.)
Oftentimes, they’ll have things like your birthday, phone number,
home address, salary, as well as names of neighbors and family
members. This information can be used to hack into other online
accounts by giving people hints on how you might answer security
questions. Popular brokers include Spokeo, Intelius, BeenVerified,
Whitepages, MyLife, and Radaris, but you can find many others on
privacy company and reputation management firm Abine’s
free
library.
This audit won’t be comprehensive. Rob Shavell, Abine’s chief
executive, says that when his company was founded in 2012, employees
removed about 1,000 pieces of information per customer over a
two-year period. Today, that number has reached 1,900. This amount
of information is too much for the average person to comprehend or
completely erase — but you can certainly make it harder for others
to find by getting it off common websites…”
When you can’t do one thing, do another thing.
It’s all techno-gibberish, so no one sees it.
Allegations
of Google’s Hidden Web Tracking Pages Raise New Privacy Concerns
… The details of Google’s hidden web
tracking system to serve personalized ads were outlined by Brave’s
Chief Policy Officer, Dr. Johnny Ryan, who has been campaigning very
publicly against Google for the past year. [So,
perhaps a bit of bias? Bob]
… when users opt out of allowing tracking
cookies, that’s when the task of serving up personalized ads
becomes much more difficult.
So, as might be expected, Google has come up with
a workaround for this problem. According to Brave, Google still
creates unique identifiers for each web user linked to their browsing
activity – but instead of sending this information directly to
advertisers as part of bid requests, it creates an elaborate network
of hidden web pages that advertisers can log into instead. Once they
are logged in, they can then grab this personally identifiable
information and match it with any information they already have about
the user in order to create very sophisticated advertising profiles
and decide how much to bid. But there’s just one problem with this
indirect form of web tracking – it’s not GDPR-compliant.
Like all laws, this one will have law breakers.
A facial
recognition ban is coming to the US, says an AI policy advisor
MIT
Technology Review:
“San
Francisco and
Oakland,
California, and Somerville,
Massachusetts,
have outlawed certain uses of facial recognition technology, with
Portland,
Oregon,
potentially soon to follow. That’s just the beginning, according
to Mutale
Nkonde,
a Harvard fellow and AI policy advisor. That trend will soon spread
to states, and there will eventually be a federal ban on some uses of
the technology, she said at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech
conference.
Which uses will face a ban, it’s not yet clear: while some cities
have banned use by police departments, Portland’s focus is
restricting use by the private sector. And the debate is not
confined to the US. In the UK, there is growing
concern over
the use of live facial recognition after it
emerged that
a property developer had been collecting images of people’s faces
in an area of London for two years without informing them. We still
don’t know how that data was used, Daragh
Murray,
a human rights lawyer at the University of Essex, said on stage.
“There
will be legal challenges, and there will eventually be regulation,”
he predicted…”
(Related)
This
article
discusses
new types of biometrics under development, including gait, scent,
heartbeat, microbiome, and butt shape (no, really).
Can
I use this information to avoid celebrity? A podcast!
Why
Being a Celebrity Is Big Business
… “When
the photograph became something anyone could buy, everyone who wanted
to be famous made sure they were photographed.”
...
“No one group controls the narrative. No one group controls the
outcome. That’s part of the reason we’re so engaged. We don’t
know how it’s going to turn out.”
Less control than Facebook, wider coverage than
dirt.
The
Internet of Things Is Still a Privacy Dumpster Fire, Study Finds
… The full
study, a joint collaboration between Northeastern University and
Imperial College London took a closer look at 81 popular smart TVs,
streaming dongles, smart speakers, and video doorbells made by
vendors including Google, Roku, and Amazon.
The results aren’t comforting: the majority of
the devices collected and shared information including your IP
address, device specs (like MAC address), usage habits, and location
data. That data is then shared with a laundry list of third parties,
regardless of whether the user actually has a relationship with those
companies.
“Nearly all TV devices in our testbeds contacts
Netflix even though we never configured any TV with a Netflix
account,” the researchers said.
(Related)
California's
IoT Security Law Causing Confusion
The law, which goes
into effect January 1, requires manufacturers to equip devices with
'reasonable security feature(s).' What that entails is still an open
question.
Gambling on lawsuits. Is this the best possible
use for AI in the legal field?
This young
litigation finance startup just secured $100 million to chase cases
it thinks will win
… What is litigation finance? In a nutshell,
the idea is to fund plaintiffs and law firms in cases where it looks
like there will be a winning ruling. When everything goes the right
way, the capital that helps fund the lawsuits is returned — and
then some — in return for the risk taken. Litigation finance firms
— and there’s a growing number of them — basically want to
estimate as accurately as possible the risk involved so they can bet
on the right horses.
Interestingly, one of the newest entrants onto the
scene wasn’t founded by career attorneys or spun out of a hedge
fund or private equity group. Instead it’s a young, 11-person
company called Legalist
that’s run by a 23-year-old Harvard dropout named Eva Shang, who
co-founded the company with her college classmate Christian Haigh,
who also dropped out.
Mis-learning?
New White
Paper Explores Privacy and Security Risk to Machine Learning Systems
The
Future of Privacy Forum (FPF)
released a white paper, WARNING
SIGNS: The Future of Privacy and Security in an Age of Machine
Learning,
exploring how machine learning systems can be exposed to new privacy
and security risks, and explaining approaches to data protection.
A podcast.
Doctor Bot:
How artificial intelligence is already changing healthcare, and
what’s coming next
Artificial intelligence is at the center of many
emerging technologies today, and perhaps nowhere are the implications
more meaningful than in healthcare.
So where is AI making an impact in healthcare
today? What will the future bring, and how should healthcare
providers and technologists get ready?
On the Season 4 premiere of GeekWire’s Health
Tech Podcast, we address all of those questions with three guests:
Linda Hand, CEO of Cardinal
Analytx Solutions, a venture-backed company that uses predictive
technology to identify people at high risk of declining health, and
match them with interventions; Colt Courtright, who leads Corporate
Data & Analytics at Premera Blue Cross; and Dr.
David Rhew, Microsoft’s new chief medical officer and vice
president of healthcare.
… Implications for data and privacy
Hand: I think we have a really
inconvenient relationship with privacy. Everybody wants to keep
their stuff private, but everybody wants the benefit of having the
insights from using everybody else’s data. There’s just a huge
disconnect there.
Rhew: It’s very important to be
proactive on this because once the information moves outside of the
medical record into the individual’s phone, it’s no longer under
the context or umbrella of HIPAA.
They can do what they want with that. Now we’re talking about the
Wild West in terms of how data can be used and moved around. We have
to really start thinking proactively about how do we put those
safeguards in without being too restrictive at the same point.
Courtright: I think we are in an
inflection point where we are being forced to grapple with these
kinds of considerations. The Privacy and Security Standards that
have governed what I would call the traditional actors in healthcare
— the health plans and the providers — will remain the same. The
shift is really to say the member owns their medical record. The
member should be able to control that, and use it, place it where
they would like it.
Teasing an interesting series?
The
Artificial Intelligence Apocalypse (Part 1)
Is It Time to Be
Scared Yet?
Perspective.
50 Trillion
Calculations per Second in the Palm of Your Hand—Data Sheet
The number of transistors packed onto a modern
chip inside your phone or PC runs into the billions but it’s still
sometimes amazing to comprehend the computing power you can easily
hold in the palm of your hand. When I met Intel
vice presidents Gadi Singer and Carey Kloss on Wednesday, they showed
me a new circuit board the company has created for speeding up
artificial intelligence apps.
The board is the size of an SSD drive, made to
plug into a standard PC or server. The Nervana chip at its heart is
no bigger than a quarter. But it can perform some 50 trillion
operations per second and greatly speed up the job of an A.I. program
that has already been trained as it makes inferences such as
identifyng objects in photos.
For me and my geeks.
Microsoft:
We want you to learn Python programming language for free
Microsoft has launched a new 44-part series called
Python
for Beginners on YouTube, consisting of three- to four-minute
lessons from two self-described geeks at Microsoft who love
programming and teaching.
The course
isn't quite for total beginners as it assumes people have done a
little programming in JavaScript or played around with the
MIT-developed
Scratch visual programming language aimed at kids.
But it could help beginners kick-start ambitions
to build machine-learning apps, web applications, or automate
processes on a desktop.
Microsoft has published a page
on GitHub containing additional resources, including slides and
code samples to help students become better at Python.
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