Thursday, October 17, 2019


No need to test that. These aren’t the ‘droids we’re looking for.”
Samsung: Anyone's thumbprint can unlock Galaxy S10 phone
A flaw that means any fingerprint can unlock a Galaxy S10 phone has been acknowledged by Samsung.
It promised a software patch that would fix the problem.
The issue was spotted by a British woman whose husband was able to unlock her phone with his thumbprint just by adding a cheap screen protector.
When the S10 was launched, in March, Samsung described the fingerprint authentication system as "revolutionary".




Will this result in an increased volume of attacks? “You can pay, you’ve got insurance!”
Baltimore to Buy $20M in Cyber Insurance Months After Attack
The move comes after hackers in May demanded about $76,000 in ransom after freezing key computer systems. Online payments, billing systems and email were down, and property transactions came to a stop, exasperating home sellers and real estate professionals.
The city refused to pay the ransom, but recovery has been estimated at about $18 million.
The policies have a $1 million deductible.




Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Carl von Clausewitz Sounds like that applies to law too.
UK ‘porn block’: Government drops plan to stop children watching sex videos online
Controversial plans for a “porn blockto stop children viewing adult material online have been dropped, the government has announced.
The long-delayed measure – first promised in 2015 and first due to come into effect last year – “will not be commencing” after running into trouble and after repeated delays.
The government was also forced to exempt large social media sites from the ban over fears that it would result in the likes of Twitter and Reddit being blocked for adult content.




The evolution of personal.
California Amends Breach Notification Law
On October 11, 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 1130. which expands the types of personal information covered by California’s breach notification law to include, when compromised in combination with an individual’s name: (1) additional government identifiers, such as tax identification number, passport number, military identification number, or other unique identification number issued on a government document commonly used to verify the identity of a specific individual; and (2) biometric data generated from measurements or technical analysis of human body characteristics (e.g., fingerprint, retina, or iris image) used to authenticate a specific individual. Biometric data does not include a physical or digital photograph unless used or stored for facial recognition purposes.




A security perspective.
Jack Ma Reveals Alibaba Is the Target of 300 Million Cyber Attacks Each Day
During his 45-minute conversation with Forbes editor-in-chief Steve Forbes, the billionaire business magnate disclosed that his company suffers unrelenting hacking attempts — “but we deal [with] it,” Ma said. “We don’t have even one problem.”




The very definition of a hacker target. Everything you ever wanted to steal, all in one place.
Angelica Mari reports:
The Brazilian government will create a single citizen database that will contain a wide range of personal information about the country’s population of over 200 million people, to be fully shared across departments.
According to the decree signed by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, the objectives of the database include the improvement in public policy, as well as simplifying data sharing between government departments.
The information “will be shared as widely as possible,” according to the decree, taking into account any legal restrictions, requirements around information and communications security, as well as Brazil’s General Data Protection Act, which will be enforced in August 2020.
Read more on ZDNet.




Privacy lawyers are probably underpaid.
There were a slew of sessions on the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) at the Privacy+Security Forum in Washington, D.C. this week. I need to find time to read up more on the law and the regulations that have been introduced as CCPA is shaking things up big time. As one example, one law firm has identified almost two dozen significant impacts they see in the draft regulations. Daniel Felz of Alston & Bird writes that their advisory covers a number of topics, including
    • Why posting a CCPA privacy policy on your website may not be enough to satisfy your CCPA notice obligations – instead you may need additional “just in time” notices at every specific point where you collect data (or lose the right to collect it);
    • Why you may hear discussions about a potential return of Do Not Track in the online context, this time as a “Do Not Sell My Info” request;
    • Why brick-and-mortar interactions with consumers may require companies to faciliatate “offline” CCPA rights requests; and
    • Why companies that take a position as vendor or service provider may need to examine any aspect of their business that involves pooling customer data for regulatory risk.
Read their full advisory here.
Taking a somewhat lighter approach, Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild provides us with the Ten Commandments of CCPA Compliance:
    • Thou shalt make for yourself a person overseeing privacy compliance in thine corporation.
    • Thou shalt map thy data so thou knowest what it is, wherefrom it cometh and where it is shared.
    • Thou shalt keep thy service providers close and thy third parties closer and revise thine own agreements with them.
Read all the commandments on Privacy Compliance & Data Security.




A twist on state privacy legislation.
Karl Bode reports:
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has unveiled updated privacy legislation he says will finally bring accountability to corporations that play fast and loose with your private data.
Dubbed the Mind Your Own Business Act, the bill promises consumers the ability to opt out of data collection and sale with a single click. It also demands that corporations be transparent as to how consumer data is collected, used, and who it’s sold to, while imposing harsh fines and prison sentences upon corporations and executives that misuse consumer data and lie about it.
Read more on Vice. I haven’t found the full text of the bill yet, but will add a link to it when it’s available or I can find it.




Could this translate to facial recognition?
A Fourth Amendment Framework for Voiceprint Database Searches
From prisons to banks, the mass recording and collection of voices has become increasingly common. This practice can be useful—voiceprint technology (also known as voice recognition technology) helps banks and prisons verify the identity of a caller and prevent fraud. But, used for other purposes, this technology can reveal a considerable amount of personal information about the speaker and those they associate with. To address these privacy concerns, voiceprint technology should be subject to a new Fourth Amendment framework that treats each query of a voice database to verify an individual’s identity – a voiceprint verification – as a unique “search.” Drawing on the Supreme Court’s recent technology-related decisions and the insights of Fourth Amendment experts, we articulate the rationale for and specifics of this framework below.




If the AI suggests I have “reallyrare-itis” what happens if the doctors ignore that diagnosis and I later die from it? Can my heirs sue the AI?
Explainable AI In Health Care: Gaining Context Behind A Diagnosis
Most of the available health care diagnostics that use artificial intelligence (AI) function as black boxes—meaning that results do not include any explanation of why the machine thinks a patient has a certain disease or disorder. While AI technologies are extraordinarily powerful, adoption of these algorithms in health care has been slow because doctors and regulators cannot verify their results. However, a new type of algorithm called “explainable AI” (XAI) can be easily understood by humans. As a result, all signs point to XAI being rapidly adopted across health care, making it likely that providers will actually use the associated diagnostics.
for fields such as health care, where mistakes can have catastrophic effects, the black box aspect of AI makes it difficult for doctors and regulators to trust it—perhaps with good reason. Doctors are trained primarily to identify the outliers, or the strange cases that don’t require standard treatments. If an AI algorithm isn’t trained properly with the appropriate data, and we can’t understand how it makes its choices, we can’t be sure it will identify those outliers or otherwise properly diagnose patients, for instance.
For example, in its latest draft guidance released on Sept. 28, the FDA continues to require doctors to be able to independently verify the basis for the software’s recommendations in order to avoid triggering higher scrutiny as a medical “device.” Thus, software is lightly regulated where doctors can validate the algorithms’ answers. Consider the case of a medical image, where doctors can double-check suspicious masses highlighted by the algorithm. With algorithms such as deep learning, however, the challenge for physicians is that they have no context for why a diagnosis was chosen.


(Related) What if the legal AI misses relevant data? Can a legal ‘black box’ be allowed? (Cute image.)
Artificial Intelligence Is on the Case in the Legal Profession
My brain conjures up an image of C-3PO in a three-piece suit…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is, in fact, becoming a mainstay component of the legal profession. In some circumstances, this analytics-crunching technology is using algorithms and machine learning to do work that was previously done by entry-level lawyers. (What does that say about entry-level lawyers?)
… “AI’s present capability meets a sizable need in the legal space by automating a number of high-volume, recurring tasks that otherwise take lawyers’ focus away from more meaningful work,” Lillquist said. “Beyond this, the role of the lawyer is still vital to conducting quality legal work.”
Over the next five years, Lillquist predicts the role of AI in the legal space will continue to be accomplishing narrow and specific tasks, such as finding terms in a set of documents or filling out certain forms.
Meet the Robot Lawyer Fighting Fines, Fees, and Red Tape https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbXM-aNRNlY
… “Deep legal expertise is required to create technology that successfully operates in the legal space, and that knowledge resides in humans,” he added.


(Related) I note that this article was not written by an AI.
Artificial Intelligence, Legal Change, and Separation of Powers
Michaels, Andrew C., Artificial Intelligence, Legal Change, and Separation of Powers (September 24, 2019). 88 University of Cincinnati Law Review _ (2020, Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3459069
A number of prominent contemporary legal scholars have recently argued in favor of replacing human legal decision-making with Artificial Intelligence, assuming that AI technology improves to a level they deem appropriate. I disagree, particularly as regards Article III judges, for four main reasons. First, human judges must strike a delicate balance between respect for precedent (the past), and adapting the law to unforeseen circumstances (the present/future), thus playing an important role in shaping the law that those arguing for robot judges do not adequately account for. Second, arguments for AI judges often seem inherently formalist in stating that robot judges would make fewer errors, overlooking the teachings of legal realism that not all cases have a clear right answer. Third, the loss of human judges would lead to a loss or diminishment of the human legal community, such that fewer people would be paying attention to the law, leaving the law more susceptible to being co-opted. Fourth, Article III judges play an important role as a check on the other two branches, a role which AI seems ill-equipped to replace and those arguing for AI judges do not account for. In short, proposals to automate the judiciary both under-appreciate and undervalue the human aspects of law, and the degree to which a human legal system contributes to the sense that we as a society govern ourselves. The potential benefits of an automated judiciary are better achieved in other ways, and do not justify the risks.”




Useful?
Artificial intelligence: Cheat sheet



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