Is China doing it better?
Analyzing China’s PIPL and How It Compares to the EU’s GDPR
… To better understand the new challenges posed by the PIPL, we compare the PIPL with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, and then explain the roles of key enforcement agencies in China and recent enforcement trends and priorities.
The goal here is to explain not just the text of the new law, but also how it is likely to be implemented going forward, so companies can form a risk-based approach towards privacy compliance in China.
Is the US missing a bet? Or perhaps our criminals are technological amateurs?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/technology/china-hackers.html
Spies for Hire: China’s New Breed of Hackers Blends Espionage and Entrepreneurship
The state security ministry is recruiting from a vast pool of private-sector hackers who often have their own agendas and sometimes use their access for commercial cybercrime, experts say.
More Big Brother like every day. Under public rules you qualify for citizenship. Under ‘double secret probation’ rules, you don’t.
https://theintercept.com/2021/08/25/atlas-citizenship-denaturalization-homeland-security/
LITTLE-KNOWN FEDERAL SOFTWARE CAN TRIGGER REVOCATION OF CITIZENSHIP
SOFTWARE USED BY the Department of Homeland Security to scan the records of millions of immigrants can automatically flag naturalized Americans to potentially have their citizenship revoked based on secret criteria, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept.
… ATLAS helps DHS investigate immigrants’ personal relationships and backgrounds, examining biometric information like fingerprints and, in certain circumstances, considering an immigrant’s race, ethnicity, and national origin. It draws information from a variety of unknown sources, plus two that have been criticized as being poorly managed: the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, also known as the terrorist watchlist, and the National Crime Information Center.
Why go backward? By now, British organizations should be GDPR compliant.
UK to overhaul privacy rules in post-Brexit departure from GDPR
Britain will attempt to move away from European data protection regulations as it overhauls its privacy rules after Brexit, the government has announced.
The freedom to chart its own course could lead to an end to irritating cookie popups and consent requests online, said the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, as he called for rules based on “common sense, not box-ticking”.
But any changes will be constrained by the need to offer a new regime that the EU deems adequate, otherwise data transfers between the UK and EU could be frozen.
Because we can?
Facial Recognition Technology: Current and Planned Uses by Federal Agencies
Facial Recognition Technology: Current and Planned Uses by Federal Agencies GAO-21-526 Published: Aug 24, 2021. “Recent advancements in facial recognition technology have increased its accuracy and its usage. Our earlier work has included examinations of its use by federal law enforcement, at ports of entry, and in commercial settings. For this report, we surveyed 24 federal agencies about their use of this technology.
16 reported using it for digital access or cybersecurity, such as allowing employees to unlock agency smartphones with it
6 reported using it to generate leads in criminal investigations
5 reported using it for physical security, such as controlling access to a building or facility
10 said they planned to expand its use…”
Another potentially useful technology found to be useless.
Chicago Inspector General: Police Use ShotSpotter to Justify Illegal Stop-and-Frisks
Matthew Guariglia andAdam Schwartz write:
Λ€The Chicago Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has released a highly critical report on the Chicago Police Department’s use of ShotSpotter, a surveillance technology that relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human “acoustic experts” to purportedly identify and locate gunshots based on a network of high-powered microphones located on some of the city’s streets. The OIG report finds that “police responses to ShotSpotter alerts rarely produce evidence of a gun-related crime, rarely give rise to investigatory stops, and even less frequently lead to the recovery of gun crime-related evidence during an investigatory stop.” This indicates that the technology is ineffective at fighting gun crime and inaccurate. This finding is based on the OIG’s quantitative analysis of more than 50,000 records over a 17-month period from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the city’s 911 dispatch center.
Read more on EFF.
Certainly curious. Perhaps a guide for others facing HIPAA investigations?
Internal emails raise questions about government’s investigation into Walgreens privacy breach
I am so glad to see a follow-up on this case because I had the same questions about how and why Walgreens did not suffer the same federal penalties as CVS and Rite Aid for the same infringement of HIPAA. My original coverage of this breach is no longer online as the former version of pogowasright.org wasn’t imported into the newer database. CVS and Walgreens both settled with the Indiana Attorney General’s Office in 2009, but whereas Rite Aid and CVS both came under federal enforcement from both the FTC and HHS, Walgreens… didn’t.
Bob Segall reports:
The nation’s three largest pharmacy chains were all caught red-handed.
A 13News investigation revealed the drugstores had been disposing of their customers’ protected health information in unsecured dumpsters — a clear violation of the nation’s health care privacy law known as HIPAA.
Following that 2006 WTHR investigation, CVS and Rite Aid reached settlement agreements with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, and they paid a combined $3.25 million in fines for jeopardizing their customers’ privacy. At the time, they were the largest settlements the government had ever reached for violations of HIPAA.
But the government’s Walgreens investigation was very different. Unlike the CVS and Rite Aid cases — which were both resolved within a few years — OCR’s Walgreens investigation dragged on for nearly a decade. And it resulted in no settlement. No fine. No penalty at all.
Read more on Fox61.
[From the article:
New documents obtained by 13News show senior officials at OCR did not know their own case against Walgreens was still open 10 years after the violations took place. The internal emails suggest the government may have forgotten it was investigating Walgreens at all, raising questions about what happens — and what does not happen — when big companies trash your privacy.
Plus and minus.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/open-source-ai
Open Source Is Throwing AI Policymakers For A Loop
Depending on whom you ask, artificial intelligence may someday rank with fire and the printing press as technology that shaped human history. The jobs AI does today—carrying out our spoken commands, curing disease, approving loans, recommending who gets a long prison sentence, and so on—are nothing compared to what it might do in the future.
But who is drawing the roadmap? Who's making sure AI technologies are used ethically and for the greater good? Big tech companies? Governments? Academic researchers? Young upstart developers? Governing AI has gotten more and more complicated, in part, because hidden in the AI revolution is a second one. It's the rise of open-source AI software —code that any computer programmer with fairly basic knowledge can freely access, use, share and change without restriction. With more programmers in the mix, the open-source revolution has sped AI development substantially. According to one study, in fact, 50 to 70 percent of academic papers on machine learning rely on open source.
And according to that study, from The Brookings Institution, policymakers have barely noticed.
… "The software is out there, it's been copied, it's in multiple places, and there's no mechanism to stop using something that's known to be biased," she says. "You can't put the genie back in the bottle."
Rude headline, good advice.
https://thenextweb.com/news/dos-donts-of-machine-learning-research-syndication
The dos and don’ts of machine learning research — read it, nerds
Machine learning is becoming an important tool in many industries and fields of science. But ML research and product development present several challenges that, if not addressed, can steer your project in the wrong direction.
In a paper recently published on the arXiv preprint server, Michael Lones, Associate Professor in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, provides a list of dos and don’ts for machine learning research.
Yes, I understand it. No, I don’t get it.
So you bought an NFT? Doesn’t mean you also own it
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