Is
gathering data always ‘stealing’ data?
US
Warns Chinese Drones May Steal Data: Report
The
Department of Homeland Security sent out an alert on Monday flagging
drones built in China as a "potential risk to an organization's
information", CNN reported.
The
US government has "strong concerns about any technology product
that takes American data into the territory of an authoritarian state
that permits its intelligence services to have unfettered access to
that data or otherwise abuses that access," wrote CNN, quoting
the DHS alert.
… The
DHS report did not name any specific Chinese manufacturers, but the
southern China-based DJI produces about 70 percent of the world's
commercial drones.
… "For
government and critical infrastructure customers that require
additional assurances, we provide drones that do not transfer data to
DJI or via the internet," the company added.
(Related)
Opinion
| Your Car Knows When You Gain Weight
Vehicles
collect a lot of unusual data. But who owns it?
This
comes from failure to RTFM.
DHS
Highlights Common Security Oversights by Office 365 Customers
As
organizations migrate to Microsoft Office 365 and other cloud
services, many fail to use proper configurations that ensure good
security practices, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS)
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns.
… According
to CISA, customers who used third-parties to migrate email services
to Office 365 did not have multi-factor authentication enabled by
default for administrator accounts, had mailbox auditing disabled and
password sync enabled, and allowed for the use of legacy protocols
that did not support authentication.
Although
Azure Active Directory (AD) Global Administrators have the highest
level of administrator privileges at the tenant level in an Office
365 environment, multi-factor authentication (MFA) is not
enabled by default
for these accounts, CISA points
out.
Spy
gooder! Clear security implications.
The
Spycraft Revolution
Changes
in technology, politics, and business are all transforming espionage.
Intelligence agencies must adapt—or risk irrelevance.
How
honest should you be? What have you been telling your customers?
Isn’t
this what I’ve been saying for more than a decade now?
Now
there’s a study that agrees with me. Laurel Thomas-Michigan
reports on a study called, “You `Might’ Be Affected: An Empirical
Analysis of Readability and Usability Issues in Data Breach
Notifications” by Yixin Zou, Shawn Danino, Kaiwen Sun, Florian
Schau. She reports:
Building on their previous research that showed consumers often take little action when facing security breaches, researchers analyzed the data breach notifications companies sent to consumers to see if the communications might be responsible for some of the inaction.
They found that 97 percent of the 161 sampled notifications were difficult or fairly difficult to read based on readability metrics, and that the language used in them may have contributed to confusion about whether the recipient of the communication was at risk and should take action.
(Related)
Dilbert is on point, again.
Are
you being paid enough for your data?
Return
on Data
Consumers
routinely supply personal data to technology companies in exchange
for services. Yet, the relationship between the utility (U)
consumers gain and the data (D) they supply — “return on data”
(ROD) — remains largely unexplored. Expressed as a ratio, ROD = U
/ D. While lawmakers strongly advocate protecting consumer privacy,
they tend to overlook ROD. Are the benefits of the services enjoyed
by consumers, such as social networking and predictive search,
commensurate with the value of the data extracted from them?
Sure
they do…
Microsoft
wants a US privacy law that puts the burden on tech companies
Microsoft's
idea of a US privacy law would make it easier for people to protect
their data.
The
company's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, Julie
Brill, wrote Monday that people have a right
to privacy,
as they become increasingly alarmed by how
much data tech giants have gathered on
them.
… Tech
giants like Facebook, Google and Apple have also called for a data
privacy law, though the specific details vary. In Microsoft's vision
for privacy regulation, it calls for shifting the burden of
protecting your data from the person to the tech companies.
… Microsoft
has the numbers to back up how often people actually take that extra
step to protect their own privacy. In the year since GDPR came into
effect and Microsoft released
its Privacy Dashboard,
Brill said more than 18 million people have used those tools.
Considering
that there are about 1.5
billion Windows devices,
that would mean only 1 percent of Microsoft users have actually
changed their privacy settings. Similarly, there were about 2.5
billion visits last year to Google's Accounts page,
but only about 20 million people viewed their ads settings.
Architecting
the LoC.
Digital
Strategy for the Library of Congress
“The
Library of Congress’s mission is to engage, inspire, and inform the
Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source
of knowledge and creativity. To accomplish that mission, the Library
is adopting a digital-forward strategy that harnesses technology to
bridge geographical divides, expand our reach, and enhance our
services. This document describes how we will secure the Library’s
position in an increasingly digital world as we realize our vision
that all
Americans are connected to the Library of Congress.
The
Digital
Strategy complements
the Library’s 2019-2023 strategic plan, Enriching
the User Experience,
which enumerates four high-level goals: expand
access, enhance services, optimize resources, and measure results.
…
The
Digital Strategy describes how we will use each interaction as an
opportunity to move users along a path from awareness, to discovery,
to use, and finally to a connection with the Library through three
main goals: throwing
open the treasure chest,
connecting,
and investing
in our future.”
What is that
thingie?
Understanding
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
The
opening
session of
FPF’s Digital
Data Flows Masterclass provided
an educational overview of Artificial Intelligence and Machine
Learning – featuring Dr. Swati Gupta, Assistant Professor in the H.
Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at
Georgia Tech; and Dr. Oliver Grau, Chair of ACM’s Europe Technology
Policy Committee, Intel Automated Driving Group, and University of
Surrey. To learn more about the Basics of AI/ML and how Bias and
Fairness impact these systems, watch
the class video here,
… In
conjunction with this class, FPF released The
Privacy Expert’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning.
Covering much of the course content, this guide explains the
technological basics of AI and ML systems at a level of understanding
useful for non-programmers, and addresses certain privacy challenges
associated with the implementation of new and existing ML-based
products and services.
Lip
service or a basis for legal actions?
US
to back international guidelines for AI ethics
Only
some countries will support the principles, though.
American
companies have fostered
ethical uses of AI before. Now, however, the government itself
is posed to weigh in. Politico understands
that the US, fellow members of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development and a "handful" of other
countries will adopt a set of non-binding guidelines for creating and
using AI. The principles would require that AI respects human
rights, democratic values and the law. It should also be safe, open
and obvious to users, while those who make and use AI should be held
responsible for their actions and offer transparency.
… The guidelines should be released on May
22nd
(Related)
The Ethics
of Smart Devices That Analyze How We Speak
… Speech
lies at the heart of our social interactions, and we unwittingly
reveal much about ourselves when we talk. When someone hears a
voice, they immediately start picking up on accent and intonation and
make assumptions about the speaker’s age, education, personality,
etc. Humans do this so we can make a good guess at how best to
respond to the person speaking.
But
what happens when machines start analyzing how we talk? The big tech
firms are coy about exactly what they are planning to detect in our
voices and why, but Amazon
has a patent that
lists a range of traits they might collect, including identity
(“gender,
age, ethnic origin, etc.”), health(“sore
throat, sickness, etc.”), and
feelings, (“happy,
sad, tired, sleepy, excited, etc.”).
Code
faster and cleaner. Maybe.
Microsoft
wants to apply AI ‘to the entire application developer lifecycle’
At
its Build 2018 developer conference a year ago, Microsoft previewed
Visual
Studio IntelliCode,
which uses AI to offer intelligent suggestions that improve code
quality and productivity. In April, Microsoft
launched Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac.
At that point, IntelliCode was still an optional extension that
Microsoft was openly offering as a preview. But at Build 2019
earlier this month, Microsoft shared that IntelliCode’s
capabilities are now generally available for C# and XAML in Visual
Studio 2019 and for Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python in
Visual Studio Code. Microsoft
also now includes IntelliCode by default in Visual Studio 2019.
Perspective.
A podcast on a hot topic.
Is
Amazon Getting Too Big?
In
an era when legacy
retailers such as Sears and
Macy’s are scaling back or going bust, online behemoth Amazon
continues to boom. The company is the second-largest retailer in the
United States behind Walmart, and last year it became the second
company in the world to reach $1
trillion in market capitalization.
Perhaps more significantly, it’s also one of the world’s largest
tech companies, with reams of data collected from an enormous
customer base. Amazon has sold 100
million units
of its voice assistant, Alexa, and an equal number of Prime
subscriptions.
But is Amazon too big?
… “Typically,
when you think about antitrust, you think about whether the consumer
is worse off. And Amazon has been so far pretty clean on that,”
Kahn said, adding that Amazon hasn’t lowered product quality or
raised prices. The company also appears to be transparent with its
customers.
A possible
follow on to our spreadsheet class?
Nine
Tutorials for Making Your Own Mobile App
Glide
is
a service that anyone can use to create a mobile app without doing
any coding. Glide lets you take one of your Google Sheets and have
the information become a mobile app. It's easy to use and you can
get started in minutes.
… Glide
recently
published their own official tutorial videos. Glide offers these
eight tutorials that
will walk you through each step of using Glide from sign-up through
publication of your app.
No comments:
Post a Comment