I
don’t own a smartphone. That may not be possible in the (near?)
future. Too much valuable information for governments to ignore.
Singapore
to require smartphone check-ins at all businesses and will log
visitors' national identity numbers
Singapore
will from May 12th require all businesses to adopt a system that
checks visitors into and out of their premises using their
smartphones, and has already made using the system compulsory before
entering some venues.
Called
“SafeEntry”, the system is designed to enhance Singapore's
coronavirus contact-tracing capabilities and requires visitors to
either scan a QR code or allow their phones to be scanned to record a
barcode in the national e-services app. That scans are taken when
visitors enter and exit a premises.
Singapore’s
Ministry of Health says
the
service logs names, national identity numbers (or the equivalent for
long-term residents) and mobile phone numbers, plus the time a user
entered and exited a venue.
The
resulting data is uploaded to a cloud service where, the Ministry
says, it will only be used “by authorised personnel for contact
tracing purposes, and stringent measures are in place to safeguard
the data in accordance with the Government’s data security
standards.”
Lying
for fun and profit?
The
business of disinformation
Eurozine:
“Disinformation is not always ideologically motivated. On the
contrary, most fake news websites serve primarily
to make money.
The disinformation economy relies heavily on Facebook and Google
Ads, a report on five eastern European countries shows…”
Should
companies have done this years ago? (Hint: Hell yes!)
Worried
About CCPA? Devalue Your Company’s Payments Data
… The
California law, which went into effect January 1, imposes tough
penalties on companies that fail to implement “reasonable security
measures and practices” to protect “nonencrypted and nonredacted”
PII. It also gives affected customers a right to civil action against
those companies.
Unfortunately,
the law isn’t very specific about defining those “reasonable
security measures and practices.” But there’s one thing all
companies can do that will enormously reduce their risk of
CCPA-related penalties and litigation: They can devalue their data by
using techniques that make it incredibly difficult for hackers to
exploit.
… There
are two main strategies for devaluing data, and the data use case
usually determines which strategy a company should deploy.
Any
sudden change in strategy requires more planning (thought) than we
seem to be giving it.
Paranoia
about cheating is making online education terrible for everyone
When
student Marium Raza learned
that
her online biochemistry exam at the University of Washington would
have a digital proctor, she wanted to do her research. The system,
provided by a service called Proctorio, would rely on artificial
intelligence and a webcam to monitor her while she worked. In other
words, as tests must happen remotely in the Covid-19
crisis,
Raza’s school is one of many using a mixture of robots and video
feeds to make sure students don’t cheat.
“We
don’t have any transparency about how our recorded video is going
to be used or who is going to see it,” Raza told Recode. “The
status quo should not be visualizing each student as someone who is
trying to cheat in any way possible.”
Interesting,
but doable?
Don't
Regulate Artificial Intelligence: Starve It
… We
already know certain threatening attributes of AI. For one thing, the
progress of this technology has been, and will continue to be,
shockingly quick. Many people were likely stunned to read recently
the announcement by Microsoft that AI was proving to be better at
reading X-rays than trained radiologists. Most newspaper readers
don’t realize how much of their daily paper is now written by AI.
That wasn’t supposed to happen; robots were supposed to supplant
manual labor jobs, not professional brainwork. Yet here we are: AI
is quickly gobbling up entire professions—and those jobs will never
come back.
… Europeans
now have the “right to explanation,” which requires a humanly
readable justification for all decisions rendered by AI systems.
Certainly, that transparency is desirable, but it is not clear how
much good it will do. After all, AI systems are in constant flux.
So, any actions taken based on the discovery of an injustice will be
like shaping water. AI will just adopt a different shape.
We
think a better approach is to make AI less powerful. That
is, not to control artificial intelligence, but to put it on an
extreme diet. And what does AI consume? Our personal information.
Perspective.
One side of the coin.
The
inevitable has happened.
Disruptions,
downturns, and recessions make the weak weaker and the strong
stronger. It was true centuries ago, and it is true today.
(Related)
How
the virus could boomerang on Facebook, Google and Amazon
The
pandemic “has unmasked how big and powerful these companies are,”
one antitrust advocate says. And that could make them an even bigger
target in Washington.
Sit back.
Relax.
Best
free music services in 2020
ZDNet
– Drowning
out the pandemic with streaming tunes –
“With
many of us stuck in our home offices during the pandemic,
the silence gets pretty boring. You may require tunes to work — or
maybe you need to drown out the distractions. Either way, while
there are numerous music streaming services well worth paying for,
there’s also plenty of stuff that you can access for free…”
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