Thursday, April 19, 2018

If you have data, someone will collect and aggregate it.
Data firm leaks 48 million user profiles it scraped from Facebook, LinkedIn, others
A little-known data firm was able to build 48 million personal profiles, combining data from sites and social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow, among others -- without the users' knowledge or consent.
Localblox, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm, says it "automatically crawls, discovers, extracts, indexes, maps and augments data in a variety of formats from the web and from exchange networks." Since its founding in 2010, the company has focused its collection on publicly accessible data sources, like social networks Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and real estate site Zillow to name a few, to produce profiles.
But earlier this year, the company left a massive store of profile data on a public but unlisted Amazon S3 storage bucket without a password, allowing anyone to download its contents.
The bucket, labeled "lbdumps," contained a file that unpacked to a single file over 1.2 terabytes in size. The file listed 48 million individual records, scraped from public profiles, consolidated, then stitched together.
The data was subsequently found by Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at security firm UpGuard. Vickery, a well-known ethical data breach hunter, disclosed the leak to Localblox's chief technology officer Ashfaq Rahman in late February. The bucket was secured hours later.


(Related) A long look at a company operating on the fringe? Making a business of Big Brotherly surveillance. If nothing else, the background image is worth viewing.
Palantir Knows Everything About You




Useful! I will share this with my Computer Security students. (PDF)
Chart on Admissibility of Electronic Evidence
Craig Ball posted a well documented chart, Admissibility of Electronic Evidence, authored by U.S. District Judge Paul Grimm and attorney Kevin Brady.




The other side of the “All AI Algorithms are Biased” argument.
Upping Your Diversity Game: Tech That Enables a More Diverse Talent Pool
Diversity is a common topic of discussion for HR teams and internal recruiters, and with good reason. Few people question that a diverse team makes a company stronger. But finding the right pool of candidates can be a challenge.
It's surprising where some of those challenges come from. Many people think subconscious bias during resume review could be the cause, and that's one of the issues. But even the way you write your job descriptions can impact the kinds of candidates that apply.
… Corporations have tried to combat unconscious bias through training, but critics and even some studies say that traditional diversity training is the least effective means of removing bias from hiring.
… Several applications exist that allow companies to find candidates solely based on skills. Software like Hundred5 allows applicants to take a skills-based test, and those that score the lowest are weeded out of the pack of potential hires before anyone can make assumptions about gender or race.
… Similarly, platforms Pymetrics and Gapjumpers use online surveys and quizzes without demographic information attached. Applicants answer questions on Gapjumpers, what they call "blind auditions", and employers review the answers to decide if the applicant is worth pursuing. According to their website, Gapjumpers sees women making up 60 percent of the top performers in blind auditions.
Pymetrics combines neuroscience games and AI to match people with jobs. After roughly 20 minutes playing behavior-based games, the AI matches the results with the profile of a position. If there is a match, the applicant moves on to the next round.




Perspective.
Jeff Bezos reveals Amazon has 100 million Prime members in letter to shareholders




A supplement for my students.
Linkedin – The Skills Companies Need Most in 2018 – And The Courses to Get Them
Linkedin Learning Blog: “Whenever there is change, there is opportunity. With report after report showing the world of work changing faster than ever today, it’s fair to assume there’s more opportunity than ever. The challenge? It isn’t easy to know where that opportunity exists. If only some organization with the resources necessary to answer that question could release a roadmap… Well, consider this is your roadmap. Using a combination of LinkedIn data and survey results, we determined both the soft and the hard skills companies need most. And then we provided LinkedIn Learning courses that teach those skills, which we’ve made free for all of January 2018…”
[As I read their course descriptions, it looks like they actually offer First Month Free. Bob]


(Related)




For all my students.
You can think of Grasshopper as an app that teaches you how to code in Javascript similar to how apps like Duolingo teach you how to learn a foreign language. After signing in with your Google account, you will be walked through the basics of programming and given several quizzes. As you continue on, you will be given more subject matter to learn and exercises to help you retain the knowledge.
… My one real hope is that as Grasshopper grows, the Google developers working on the app will add new programming languages for users to learn.
If you’re interested in checking out Grasshopper for yourself, you can download it for free from the Play Store. Additionally, if you’re running iOS, you can download it from Apple’s App Store.


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