Auditors
normally include recommendations to address any concerns. This
auditor did as well. Still not thinking of ALPRs as supplements to
the Mark One Eyeball. Readers in squad cars on on an officers belt
are more likely to match a plate to a ‘hot sheet’ but it is
clearly something the officer could do on his own. Fixed readers to
scan all traffic in targeted areas is something else. Should be
amusing to ask my students what they think is proper.
Dave
Maass and Hayley Tsukayama write:
California police and sheriffs are failing to protect the privacy of drivers on city streets, the California State Auditor’s office determined after a seven-month investigation into the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) by the Los Angeles Police Department and three other local law enforcement agencies. California State Senator Scott Wiener sponsored the State Auditor’s report.
The auditor raised a long list of concerns, including fundamental problems with police ALPR policies, failure to conduct audits, and the risk of ALPR data being abused to surveil political rallies or target immigrant populations. In addition to Los Angeles, the auditor investigated the Fresno Police Department, Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, and Marin County Sheriff’s Office. The auditor indicated that the problems are likely prevalent across 230 California law enforcement agencies using ALPRs.
Read
more on EFF.
Research.
WHEN
SPEAKERS ARE ALL EARS
… Anyone
who has used voice assistants knows that they accidentally wake up
and record when the “wake word” isn’t spoken—for example,
“Seriously” sounds like the wake word “Siri” and often causes
Apple’s Siri-enabled devices to start listening. There are many
other anecdotal
reports of
everyday words in normal conversation being mistaken for wake words.
For the past six months, our team
has
been conducting research to go beyond anecdotes through the use of
repeatable, controlled experiments that shed light on what causes
voice assistants to mistakenly wake up and record. Below, we provide
a brief summary of our approach, findings so far, and their
implications. This is ongoing research, and we will update this page
as we learn more.
… The
main goals of our research are to detect if, how, when, and why smart
speakers are unexpectedly recording audio from their environment (we
call this activation).
We are also interested in whether there are trends based on certain
non-wake words, type of conversation, location, and other factors.
Again,
a suggestion of a trend?
Entering
the ’20s – A New Era for Data Breach Class Actions?
Paul
Karlsgodt, David Carney, Casie Collignon, and Christopher Wiech of
BakerHostetler write, in part:
….There remains a dearth of case law surrounding the appropriateness of class certification in litigation arising out of a data breach. The reasons for the lack of authority on the class certification issue include that most data breach cases are either dismissed on the pleadings or settle before they reach a decision on a contested motion for class certification. In 2019, there were at least two class certification decisions. In Adkins v. Facebook, Inc., No. 3:18-cv-05982 (N.D. Cal., Nov. 26, 2019), the Northern District of California certified an injunctive relief class under Rule 23(b)(2) but declined to certify a damages class.
On the other end of the spectrum, a Georgia state court judge denied class certification based on lack of commonality under Rule 23(a)(2) in Buice v. Piedmont Athens Regional Hospital, which involved alleged widescale misuse of PHI by a former hospital employee. In particular, the trial judge determined that allegations that all putative class members’ HIPAA rights were violated did not establish common injuries among the class.
Read
more on Data
Privacy Monitor.
My AI says it knew that.
The real
test of an AI machine is when it can admit to not knowing something
On
Wednesday the European Commission launched a blizzard of proposals
and policy papers under the general umbrella of “shaping Europe’s
digital future”. The documents released included: a report on the
safety
and liability implications of artificial intelligence, the internet
of things and robotics;
a paper outlining the EU’s
strategy for data;
and a white paper on “excellence
and trust” in artificial intelligence.
In their general tenor, the documents evoke the blend of technocracy,
democratic piety and ambitiousness that is the hallmark of EU
communications. That said, it is also the case that in terms of
doing anything to get tech companies under some kind of control, the
European Commission is the only game in town.
… But
this is par for the course with AI at the moment: the discourse is
invariably three parts generalities, two parts virtue-signalling
leavened with a smattering of pious hopes. It’s got to the point
where one longs for some plain speaking and common sense.
And,
as luck would have it, along it comes in the shape of Sir
David Spiegelhalter,
an eminent Cambridge statistician and former president of the Royal
Statistical Society. He has spent his life trying to teach people
how to understand statistical reasoning, and last month published a
really helpful article
in
the Harvard
Data Science Review on
the question “Should we trust algorithms?”
Underpinning
Spiegelhalter’s approach is an insight from the philosopher Onora
O’Neill – that it’s trustworthiness
rather
than trust
we should be focusing on, because trust is such a nebulous, elusive
and unsatisfactory concept. (In that respect, it’s not unlike
privacy.) Seeking more trust, O’Neill observed in a famous
Ted Talk,
“is not an intelligent aim in this life – intelligently placed
and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim”.
For
my Security students.
Download
“Becoming The Hacker” For FREE (Worth $32)
If
you’d like to delve into web penetration testing, Becoming the
Hacker is a clear guide to approaching this lucrative and growing
industry.
This
free book takes you through commonly encountered vulnerabilities and
how to take advantage of them to achieve your goal. You’ll then go
on to put your “newly learned techniques into practice, going over
scenarios where the target may be a popular content management system
or a containerized application and its network”.
Note:
this free offer expires 3 Mar 2020.
This
could be a useful presentation tool. (Centennial Man, the movie?)
How
to Quickly Turn a Blog Post Into a Video
Last
week I published 5
Ways to Create Social Videos.
In that post I included a neat tool called Lumen5
that
can be used to turn blog posts or
any other written text
that you own into a video.
In
the video below you'll see that Lumen5
takes
the text of your article and breaks into small chunks to be displayed
on slides. Lumen5 then automatically detects keywords in those
chunks of text and adds corresponding images to the slides. Finally,
music is added to the video. You can override any of the automatic
selections that Lumen5 makes.
… Lumen5
might also be a neat tool for students to use to see a visualization
of the short stories or persuasive essays that they write.
Another
type of facial recognition?
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