Tuesday, March 03, 2020


Is “fight back” a targeted concept in this surveillance?
EFF LAUNCHES SURVEILLANCE SELF-DEFENSE GUIDE FOR STUDENTS
San Francisco – Schools across the country are increasingly using technology to spy on students at home, at school, and on social media.
Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched a new Surveillance Self-Defense guide for students [1] and their parents, so they can learn more about how schools are watching them, and how they can fight back.
The surveillance technology currently in use includes software to scan students’ social media posts [2], cameras with facial recognition and other scanning capabilities [3], and microphones to “detect aggression [4].” Schools can even track you on devices that they don’t control: if you have to download a certain kind of security certificate to use the school Internet [5], they may be monitoring your browser history and messages you send.
Some administrators argue that they need to use this technology to keep schools safe, yet there is little evidence that it works,” said EFF
In the new guide, EFF shows students and concerned parents what kind of technologies to watch for, how they can track you, and what it means for privacy. For example, some schools are tracking students’ locations, ostensibly to automate attendance or track school bus ridership. This monitoring can be conducted through tools ranging from students’ cell phones to ID cards with tracking chips, and it can easily continue when you are off campus. Location information is extraordinarily sensitive–it can reveal who your friends are and what you do when you see them, as well as what kind of medical appointments you might have or what sort of meetings or groups you attend regularly. In some cases, student data is reported to school resource officers or the police, and it can be kept over time, creating a granular history of a student’s actions.
For Privacy for Students: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/privacy-students [1]




Clearly, “It’s for your own good!”
Katie Jickling reports:
On March 1, thousands of Vermonters’ medical records became available to doctors, even for patients who have not given consent for their records to be shared.
The new sharing policy went into place Sunday for records on the statewide health information exchange, a database run by Vermont Information Technology Leaders.
Previously, Vermonters had to give consent for doctors to access their lab tests or medical history on the exchange, which stores the health records of all patients in the state.
Read more on VTDigger.




Jobs for my students?
The New Pace of Privacy: More Changes Ahead Require Adaptable CPOs
2020 is shaping up to be another eventful and demanding year for CPOs. In fact, the job of the CPO will continue to grow in significance and evolve in complexity as more privacy laws are enacted, organizations focus on compliance with new requirements and media attention on privacy issues continues to increase public awareness.
Looking back, it seems like GDPR, effective as of 2018, was the starting gun for a race in the evolving privacy landscape. In 2019, CCPA kept privacy professionals working at a rapid pace, interpreting new privacy requirements along with how to apply rules from various jurisdictions to business operations. Now, with several recently announced federal privacy bills, numerous state legislatures debating various forms of privacy laws, and a collection of new privacy laws taking shape around the world, the responsibilities of CPOs will continue to expand in the years ahead. This may be a privacy marathon.
California and Nevada passed privacy laws in 2019, but numerous other states are introducing a variety of legislative proposals this year. For example, Virginia introduced the Virginia Privacy Act in January, which would require a broader use of privacy risk assessments than current laws. Illinois also introduced the Data Transparency and Privacy Act, which includes opt-out rights for consumers. In addition, Washington recently reintroduced privacy legislation from 2019, the Washington Privacy Act, with the strong backing of Microsoft, which now includes standards for the use of facial recognition tools.




I think I understand this – treat AI like an employee.
Algorithms and Contract Law
Scholz, Lauren, Algorithms and Contract Law (August 1, 2019). Cambridge Handbook of the Law of Algorithms, 2019. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3525503 – “Generalist confusion about the technology behind complex algorithms has led to inconsistent case law for algorithmic contracts. Case law explicitly grounded in the principle that algorithms are constructive agents for the companies they serve would provide a clear basis for enforceability of algorithmic contracts that is both principled from a technological perspective and is readily intelligible and able to be applied by generalists.”


(Related) Should all algorithms be open source?
ICE’S NEW YORK OFFICE USES A RIGGED ALGORITHM TO KEEP VIRTUALLY ALL ARRESTEES IN DETENTION. THE ACLU SAYS IT’S UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
IN 2013, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly began using a software tool to recommend whether people arrested over immigration violations should be let go after 48 hours or detained. The software’s algorithm supposedly pored over a variety of risk factors before outputting a decision.
A new lawsuit, however, filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defenders, alleges that the algorithm doesn’t really make a decision, at least not one that can result in a detainee being released. Instead, the groups said, it’s an unconstitutional cudgel that’s been rigged to detain virtually everyone ICE’s New York Field Office brings in, even when the government itself believes they present a minimal threat to public safety.




Leave it to the lawyers to invent a new sin.
Retrievable Images on Social Media Platforms: A Call for a New Privacy Tort
The recognition of a right of privacy in Warren and Brandeis’s famous article has long been celebrated and lamented. It is celebrated because privacy is a central feature of individual well-being that deserves legal protection. It is lamented because the protection they contemplated, and that is actually provided by the law, is quite modest. Modern technology, especially social media platforms, has only raised the stakes. Anytime one goes out in public, one risks having one’s image captured and shared worldwide, leaving us with little or no control over how we are perceived by others.
This Article argues for the recognition of a new privacy tort: the tort of unwanted broadcasting. It would allow a person whose image is, without permission, shared widely on one or more social media platforms that has an enduring retrievable character, to recover damages from a person who posts it. While in some respects novel and far-reaching, the unwanted broadcasting tort has a solid grounding in privacy theory and doctrinal roots in English case law. This Article also shows that this tort can be fashioned in a manner that renders it consistent with First Amendment principles.




What the industry thinks?
Key Takeaways From The Gartner Magic Quadrant For AI Developer Services
Within weeks of publishing the Magic Quadrant (MQ) report on Data Science and Machine Learning, Gartner has come out with another MQ report related to ML and AI.
According to Gartner, machine learning is a subset of data science while artificial intelligence is the business outcome of machine learning.
It’s not a surprise to see AWS, Google, IBM, and Microsoft securing the slots in the leadership quadrant.
AWS, which was excluded in the DSML MQ report is ranked as the top AI developer services vendor. With its unique advantage of addressing both the enterprise and consumer market needs through AWS and Alexa respectively, Amazon has a vantage point into the use cases and scenarios.
Google is one of the first to offer AI and AutoML services to developers and businesses. Like AWS, Google also has access to large datasets from the enterprise and consumer markets which is helping the company in building innovative AI services.
IBM has also found place in the leadership quadrant. Thanks to the investments in Watson and Augmented AI, IBM enjoys top-of-mind brand recall in the AI market. The efforts around positioning cognitive computing and AutoAI through Watson have started to pay off.




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