Cui bono? Who benefits? Why would a
company gather huge volumes of data if there was no profit to be
made?
Data
Collection Arms Race Feeds Privacy Fears
February 21, 2012 by Dissent
Revelations last
week that Google Inc, Twitter and other popular Internet companies
have been taking liberties with customer data have prompted criticism
from privacy advocates and lawmakers, along with apologies from the
companies.
They are the
latest in a long line of missteps by large Internet companies that
have faced little punishment for pushing privacy boundaries, which
are already more expansive than most consumers understand.
Despite all the
chatter about online privacy and the regular introductions of
proposed data protection laws in Congress, Silicon
Valley is in the midst of a veritable arms race of personal data
collection that is intensifying.
Read more of this Reuters report on
Wall
Street & Technology.
[From the article:
[What des technology
enable? Bob] Many innovative companies, most prominently
Facebook, base virtually all of their services on the ability to
personalize, which requires them to know their users well. Their
business models likewise depend to an increasing degree on the
ability to target a banner advertisement or other marketing pitch to
an individual. Millions of times each day, the right
to advertise to a specific user is auctioned off in a fraction of a
second by computers talking to one another.
For both the buyers and the sellers of
the advertising, the business advantage goes to the participant with
the most knowledge, and that race is driving companies like Google to
learn as much about its users as Facebook does.
Few U.S. laws prevent those companies
and others from collecting all manner of information - ranging from
credit cards numbers and real names and addresses to buying patterns
and Web surfing habits - then selling the data to advertisers and
other third parties.
… Companies generally face legal
threats or a user backlash only after violating their own published
privacy policies or being discovered subverting consumer wishes.
(Related) Government knows who has the
data they want...
Government
Pressures Twitter to Hand Over Keys to Occupy Wall Street Protester’s
Location Data Without a Warrant
February 22, 2012 by Dissent
Hanni Fakhoury of EFF writes about the
Twitter subpoena I previously
mentioned on this blog.
… The subpoena
is astonishing not only for its poor grammar, but also for the
breadth of information the government wants for a trivial crime that
hardly requires it. The government’s request that Twitter hand
over Tweets is unlikely to succeed because consistent with the Stored
Communications Act, Twitter releases “contents of communication”
(effectively Tweets and private messages between Twitter users) only
with a search warrant. In any event, Mr. Harris’ account is
“public”, meaning the government could obtain Tweets simply by
checking out Mr. Harris’ Twitter feed. Plus, requesting Tweets
only highlights the absurdity of the entire situation: why would the
government need Tweets from both before and after the October 1
protest to prove he was obstructing traffic on the bridge? In any
event, government fishing expeditions like this raise serious First
Amendment concerns. Mr. Harris was very outspoken about his support
of and involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement. With this
overbroad subpoena, the government would be able to learn about who
Mr. Harris was communicating with for an extensive period of time not
only through Tweets, but through direct messages. And with the
government’s request for all email addresses associated with
@destructuremal, they could subpoena Mr. Harris’ email provider to
get even more information about who he communicated with. The First
Amendment shouldn’t be trampled with only an expansive subpoena in
a case that barely registers as “criminal.”
Given that much of
Mr. Harris’ Twitter information (like Tweets and followers) is
already public, it’s very likely that the
government was really after something else: location data. By
attempting to subpoena these records, the government can get around
the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against warrantless searches by
requesting information that includes IP addresses.
Read more on EFF.
As EFF argues, and as I’ve often
maintained on this blog, Congress must update ECPA and it needs to
extend 4th Amendment protections to our online records. But as
importantly, and not really discussed in Hanni’s post, Twitter (and
other platforms) needs to stop logging IP data – or at least
significantly reduce the log retention so that the government cannot
go after these data.
(Related) Are Safari users covered by
Google's Privacy Policy? If not, what does protect them?
Google
Sued by Apple Safari-User Over Web-Browser Privacy
February 21, 2012 by Dissent
Phil Milford and Jef Feeley report:
Google Inc.
officials were sued for violating users’ privacy rights on Apple
Inc.’s Safari Web browser by bypassing computer settings designed
to block monitoring of consumers’ online activity.
Google, the
world’s biggest Internet-search company, has been dodging privacy
settings in Safari, which serves as the primary Web browser on
Apple’s iPhone and iPad products, lawyers for an Illinois man who
uses the Safari browser said in a lawsuit filed [last Friday] in
federal court in Delaware.
Read more on Bloomberg
Businessweek.
[From the article:
“Google’s willful and knowing
actions violated” federal wiretapping laws and other
computer-related statutes, attorneys for Matthew Soble said in the
complaint.
(Related) Just because everyone wants
to be like Facebook does not mean that is a very lofty goal...
Facebook
lawsuits sent to SF federal court
February 21, 2012 by Dissent
Ari Burack reports on the consolidation
of Facebook lawsuits:
A series of
class-action lawsuits contending that the popular social networking
site Facebook illegally tracked members’ Internet
activity on other websites has been moved to a federal
court in San Francisco.
At issue are
claims that Facebook users had their personal information tracked,
collected and stored by the website, including portions of their
Internet browsing history even when they were not
logged in to Facebook. The lawsuits claim violations of
the federal Wiretap Act and other laws, as well as of Facebook’s
own privacy policy.
Read more on The
San Francisco Examiner.
Someone believes in Global Warming!
February 21, 2012
New
Study: Americans Pay More for Weather Catastrophes as Insurers
Increasingly Shift Costs to Consumers and Taxpayers
"The Consumer Federation of
American (CFA) today released
a new study with insurance industry data that found that insurance
companies have significantly and methodically decreased their
financial responsibility for weather catastrophes like
hurricanes, tornados and floods in recent years, shifting much of the
risk and costs for these events to consumers and taxpayers. The
report is being released as insurers in eleven states have requested
large homeowners’ insurance rate increases of 18 percent or more.
“Insurance commissioners should block many of these pending rate
increases because they place an unwarranted financial burden on
homeowners, many of whom are coping with severe financial
difficulties in a bad economy,” said J. Robert Hunter, CFA’s
Director of Insurance and former federal insurance administrator and
state insurance commissioner. “In the last twenty years, insurers
have been so successful at shifting costs to consumers and taxpayers
that they are currently overcapitalized and cannot justify higher
homeowners’ rates.” Insurance executives frequently remind the
public and regulators of the frequency and severity of catastrophic
events. CFA’s study, The
Insurance Industry’s Incredible Disappearing Weather Catastrophe
Risk, found that some of the savings insurers
have achieved are legitimate, the result of the use of reinsurance
and wise risk diversification strategies." [Suggesting “we
don't want to cover that” is illegitimate? Bob]
Nifty little research tool with “find
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ReadCube is a PDF documents reader for
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… Based on your papers, you are
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- Similar tool: Proposalpad.
- Also read related article: 4
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