Monday, May 04, 2020


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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