Saturday, March 06, 2021

Am I missing something here? If the state sent it to the wrong (i.e. the hacker’s) bank account, they should have a record of it, right? Or their bank should. How can they not know what happened to the money?

https://www.databreaches.net/pa-delco-school-district-missing-millions-suggests-hackers-took-it/

PA: Delco School District Missing ‘Millions,’ Suggests Hackers Took It

NBC10 reports:

A law enforcement investigation is underway Friday after a school district reported it was missing an expected multimillion-dollar payment from the state, and a district official speculated it was due to hackers.
The receiver of the Chester Upland School District, Juan Baughn, told the Philadelphia Inquirer Thursday that “millions” were lost due to a “cyber issue.”

Read more on NBC10.





Shocking. First does this indicate that Facebook is actually thinking about Privacy (or at least GDPR based lawsuits) before they act? Second, will this introduce bias?

https://onezero.medium.com/facebook-scraped-1-billion-pictures-from-instagram-to-train-its-a-i-but-spared-european-users-621cc47a2a21

Facebook Scraped 1 Billion Pictures From Instagram to Train Its A.I. — But Spared European Users

Facebook researchers announced a breakthrough yesterday: They have trained a “self-supervised” algorithm using 1 billion Instagram images, proving that the algorithm doesn’t need human-labeled images to learn to accurately recognize objects.

But Facebook didn’t just select any billion Instagram images to train the algorithm. The team purposely excluded Instagram images from the European Union, noting in its paper that images were “random, public, and non-EU images.”





Privacy and more at risk?

https://udayton.edu/news/articles/2021/02/thaddeus_hoffmeister_book_internet_of_things_and_the_law.php

If you have devices connected to the Internet, this book about legal pitfalls of the Internet of Things is for you

With Wi-Fi seemingly around most every corner; devices in our hands, bodies, cars and homes connected to the Internet; and questions about the reliability and security of this connectivity, it's inevitable the "Internet of Things" will be the subject of legal battles. A new book by University of Dayton law professor Thaddeus Hoffmeister will help anyone with legal questions and issues about connected devices.

"The Internet of Things is defined as anything embedded with technology to allow it to interact in real time with the environment around it, people or other devices," Hoffmeister said. "At a minimum, anybody with a cell phone or devices hooked to Wi-Fi at home should be concerned about the law of the Internet of things. But if people take the time to drill down further into their everyday lives, this affects banking, medical records and ordering food most anywhere. In 2020, it's a rare occasion when somebody does something that isn't affected by some form of Internet connectivity.

In addition to defining "Internet of Things," the book, The Internet of Things and the Law, examines the current regulatory framework, privacy and security, and contracts and intellectual property related to the Internet of Things plus protections for consumers and how to prosecute offenders.





Parole is not what it used to be…

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/mar/04/they-track-every-move-how-us-parole-apps-created-digital-prisoners

They track every move’: how US parole apps created digital prisoners

Is smartphone tracking a less intrusive reward for good behaviour or just a way to enrich the incarceration industry?

In 2018, William Frederick Keck III pleaded guilty in a court in Manassas, Virginia, to possession with intent to distribute cannabis. He served three months in prison, then began a three-year probation. He was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor before his trial and then to report for random drug tests after his release. Eventually, the state reduced his level of monitoring to scheduled meetings with his parole officer. Finally, after continued good behaviour, Keck’s parole officer moved him to Virginia’s lowest level of monitoring: an app on his smartphone.

… “It’s saving countless hours on the officer’s part,” Jacobson says. He believes, from anecdotal evidence, that slightly fewer low-risk probationers are getting arrested since Virginia began using Shadowtrack instead of calling landlines at probationers’ curfew locations. As the pandemic wore on, the department started using the app’s video-conference function to conduct safe meetings with probationers deemed at higher risk of reoffending. “I can’t imagine it going away,” Jacobson says.





I don’t think any of these ideas will work. Isn’t it already too late?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/05/1020376/resist-big-tech-surveillance-data/

How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you

researchers at Northwestern University are suggesting new ways to redress this power imbalance by treating our collective data as a bargaining chip. Tech giants may have fancy algorithms at their disposal, but they are meaningless without enough of the right data to train on.

In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage:

  • Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it—leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance.

  • Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google’s ad-targeting algorithms.

  • Conscious data contribution, which involves giving meaningful data to the competitor of a platform you want to protest, such as by uploading your Facebook photos to Tumblr instead.



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