Wednesday, March 11, 2020


Not all computer systems are managed by IT. Shouldn’t they be?
Most Medical Imaging Devices Run Outdated Operating Systems
You'd think that mammography machines, radiology systems, and ultrasounds would maintain the strictest possible security hygiene. But new research shows that a whopping 83 percent of medical imaging devices run on operating systems that are so old they no longer receive any software updates at all.
That issue is endemic to internet of things devices generally, many of which aren't designed to receive software improvements or offer only a complicated path to doing so. But medical devices are an especially troubling category for the issue to show up in, especially when the number of devices with outdated operating systems is up 56 percent since 2018. You can attribute most of that increase to Microsoft ending support for Windows 7 in January. As new vulnerabilities are found in the operating system, any device still running it won't get patches for them.




Not all IT decisions are based on experience. Some just sound good.
New Data Rules Could Empower Patients but Undermine Their Privacy
In a move intended to give Americans greater control over their medical information, the Trump administration announced broad new rules on Monday that will allow people for the first time to use apps of their choice to retrieve data like their blood test results directly from their health providers.
The Department of Health and Human Services said the new system was intended to make it as easy for people to manage their health care on smartphones as it is for them to use apps to manage their finances.
Prominent organizations like the American Medical Association have warned that, without accompanying federal safeguards, the new rules could expose people who share their diagnoses and other intimate medical details with consumer apps to serious data abuses.




Try to make sense of this… The report should be available later today.
Giant Report Lays Anvil on US Cyber Policy
Released today, the bipartisan Cyberspace Solarium Commission makes more than 75 recommendations that range from common-sense to befuddling.
Today, the US Cyberspace Solarium Commission published its final report. The 182-page document is the culmination of a year-long, bipartisan process to develop a new cyber strategy for the United States




How does DNA differ from fingerprints?
Alexia Rodriguez of ACLU writes:
Every two minutes, we shed enough skin cells to cover nearly an entire football field. With a single sneeze, we can spew 3,000 cell-containing droplets into the world. And, on average, we leave behind between 40 and 100 hairs per day. As long as we live in the world and leave our homes each day, we can’t avoid leaving a trail of our DNA in our wake.
Every strand of DNA holds a treasure trove of deeply personal information, from our propensity for medical conditions to our ancestry to our biological family relationships. And increasingly, police are accessing and testing the DNA contained in our unavoidably shed genetic material without judicial oversight. That’s why we’re asking a court to require police to get a warrant before collecting the DNA we unavoidably leave behind.
Read more on ACLU.




For the Privacy team. Start learning AI.
AI Predicted to Take Over Privacy Tech
More than 40% of privacy tech solutions aimed at ensuring legal compliance are predicted to rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the course of the next three years, analysts from the business research and advisory firm Gartner Inc have found.
The company—which is set to present these findings among others at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™ 2020 in Toronto, Canada in May—has found that reliance on privacy tech to ensure compliance with various privacy laws is expected to increase by at least 700% between 2020 and 2023.
This marks an increase from the 5% of privacy tech solutions that are AI driven today to the more than 40% that are predicted to become available within the next 36 months.




The first of many, I’m sure. Each possible/potential use of public information requires a specific consent?
Vermont sues secretive facial recognition company Clearview AI
The state of Vermont has sued the company behind a facial recognition tool that has built a vast database from photos of private individuals it has gathered across the internet and social media platforms without consent.
Attorney General TJ Donovan announced Tuesday his office has filed a lawsuit in Vermont Superior Court in Chittenden County against Clearview AI, alleging the secretive business has violated the state’s consumer protection law by illegally collecting images of Vermont residents, including children, and selling this information to private businesses, individuals and law enforcement.
In January, around the time when the New York Times published its report on Clearview, the company registered as a data broker in Vermont — an entity that collects information about individuals from public and private sources for profit.
Data brokers that sell Vermonters’ data must register annually with the state’s data broker registry and provide certain information about business practices. In the registry, Clearview reported that it knowingly “possesses the brokered personal information of minors,” according to the attorney general’s lawsuit.
The state’s lawsuit also makes the case that when an individual uploads a photograph to Facebook for “public” viewing, they consent to others looking at the photograph but are not consenting to the “mass collection of those photographs by an automated process that will then put those photographs into a facial recognition database.”




For all my students.
Co-Designing Checklists to Understand Organizational Challenges and Opportunities around Fairness in AI
Many organizations have published principles intended to guide the ethical development and deployment of AI systems; however, their abstract nature makes them difficult to operationalize. Some organizations have therefore produced AI ethics checklists, as well as checklists for more specific concepts, such as fairness, as applied to AI systems. But unless checklists are grounded in practitioners’ needs, they may be misused. To understand the role of checklists in AI ethics, we conducted an iterative co-design process with 48 practitioners, focusing on fairness. We co-designed an AI fairness checklist and identified desiderata and concerns for AI fairness checklists in general. We found that AI fairness checklists could provide organizational infrastructure for formalizing ad-hoc processes and empowering individual advocates. We discuss aspects of organizational culture that may impact the efficacy of such checklists, and highlight future research directions.




Recreational privacy.



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