Twitter CEO Elon Musk has reportedly threatened to transfer NPR’s handle on the platform to another company if the broadcaster doesn’t resume tweeting.

NPR pulled the plug on posting on its main @NPR account and 51 other feeds in April after the Musk-owned platform falsely labeled it as “state-affiliated media,” a description usually applied to state-owned media in authoritarian countries.

...“Inactivity is based on logging in,” it states. So, not on posting.

5/3/23

As their name suggests, large language models are made from massive neural networks with vast numbers of connections. But they are tiny compared with the brain. “Our brains have 100 trillion connections,” says Hinton. “Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does. So maybe it’s actually got a much better learning algorithm than us.”

...Learning is just the first string of Hinton’s argument. The second is communicating. “If you or I learn something and want to transfer that knowledge to someone else, we can’t just send them a copy,” he says. “But I can have 10,000 neural networks, each having their own experiences, and any of them can share what they learn instantly. That’s a huge difference. It’s as if there were 10,000 of us, and as soon as one person learns something, all of us know it.”

What does all this add up to? Hinton now thinks there are two types of intelligence in the world: animal brains and neural networks. “It’s a completely different form of intelligence,” he says. “A new and better form of intelligence.”

...“I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us. I think they’re very close to it now and they will be much more intelligent than us in the future,” he says. “How do we survive that?”

5/2/23

But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.

...After the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems because A.I. technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. That group included Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has deployed OpenAI’s technology across a wide range of products, including its Bing search engine.

...But that may be impossible, he said. Unlike with nuclear weapons, he said, there is no way of knowing whether companies or countries are working on the technology in secret. The best hope is for the world’s leading scientists to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology. “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” he said.

5/1/23

In a new study, published in Nature Neuroscience today, a model trained on functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of three volunteers was able to predict whole sentences they were hearing with surprising accuracy—just by looking at their brain activity. The findings demonstrate the need for future policies to protect our brain data, the team says.

...When they tested the model on new podcast episodes, it was able to recover the gist of what users were hearing just from their brain activity, often identifying exact words and phrases. For example, a user heard the words “I don’t have my driver’s license yet.” The decoder returned the sentence “She has not even started to learn to drive yet.”

The researchers also showed the participants short Pixar videos that didn’t contain any dialogue, and recorded their brain responses in a separate experiment designed to test whether the decoder was able to recover the general content of what the user was watching. It turned out that it was.

...“We think that mental privacy is really important, and that nobody's brain should be decoded without their cooperation,” says Jerry Tang, a PhD student at the university who worked on the project. “We believe it’s important to keep researching the privacy implications of brain decoding, and enact policies that protect each person’s mental privacy.”

5/1/23

But now, roiled by economic tumult, waves of layoffs that will slash some 21,000 workers and a costly investment in the virtual reality “metaverse” that shows no immediate signs of paying off, many inside Meta say Zuckerberg has lost his vision — and the trust of his workforce. Instead, he is steering the company into an unprecedented morale crisis, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

...“What was special about Meta was the trust. We drank the Kool-Aid and really felt like it was our company [and] even willingly defended it when everyone said we were evil incarnate,” one current employee said. “But that’s been shattered, so it feels like a betrayal.”

...Meta has been losing billions trying to turn its metaverse vision into a reality. Reality Labs lost more than $13.7 billion last year — up from the $10.2 billion it lost in 2021 and the $6.6 billion in 2020, according to regulatory filings.

...Zuckerberg stands out in Silicon Valley as one of the few founders who still leads a big tech giant long after its initial public offering, and he controls 61 percent of voting shares — leaving his power virtually unchecked.

4/30/23

That may not bother you. But whenever health concerns and digital advertising cross paths, there’s potential for harm. The Washington Post’s reporting has shown that some symptom-checkers, including WebMD and Drugs.com, shared potentially sensitive health concerns such as depression or HIV along with user identifiers with outside ad companies. Data brokers, meanwhile, sell huge lists of people and their health concerns to buyers that could include governments or insurers. And some chronically ill people report disturbing targeted ads following them around the internet.

...“At some point that data they’re holding onto may change hands to another company you don’t trust that much or end up in the hands of a government you don’t trust that much,” he said.

...Before you sign up for any AI chat-based health service — such as a therapy bot — learn the limitations of the technology and check the company’s privacy policy to see if it uses data to “improve its services” or shares data with unnamed “vendors” or “business partners.” Both are often euphemisms for advertising.

4/27/23

But the technology puts voice actors, the often-nameless professionals who narrate audiobooks, video games and commercials, in a particularly precarious position. While their voices are often known, they rarely command the star power necessary to wield control of their voice. The law offers little refuge, since copyright provisions haven’t grappled with artificial intelligence’s ability to recreate humanlike speech, text and photos. And experts say contracts more frequently contain fine-print provisions allowing a company to use an actor’s voice in endless permutations, even selling it to other parties.

...But improvements in the underlying architecture and computing power of this software upgraded its abilities. Now it can analyze millions of voices quickly to spot patterns between the elemental units of speech, called phonemes. This software compares an original voice sample to troves of similar ones in its library, finding unique characteristics to produce a realistic sounding clone.

...But it’s also given rise to predatory industries. People have reported the voice of their loved ones being recreated to perpetuate scams. Start-ups have emerged that scrape the internet for high-quality speech samples and bundle hundreds of voices into libraries, and sell them to companies for their commercials, in-house trainings, video game demos and audiobooks, charging less than $150 per month.

4/24/23

One worker’s conclusion: Bard was “a pathological liar,” according to screenshots of the internal discussion. Another called it “cringe-worthy.” One employee wrote that when they asked Bard suggestions for how to land a plane, it regularly gave advice that would lead to a crash; another said it gave answers on scuba diving “which would likely result in serious injury or death.”

Google launched Bard anyway. The trusted internet-search giant is providing low-quality information in a race to keep up with the competition, while giving less priority to its ethical commitments, according to 18 current and former workers at the company and internal documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. The Alphabet Inc.-owned company had pledged in 2021 to double its team studying the ethics of artificial intelligence and to pour more resources into assessing the technology’s potential harms. But the November 2022 debut of rival OpenAI’s popular chatbot sent Google scrambling to weave generative AI into all its most important products in a matter of months.

That was a markedly faster pace of development for the technology, and one that could have profound societal impact. The group working on ethics that Google pledged to fortify is now disempowered and demoralized, the current and former workers said. The staffers who are responsible for the safety and ethical implications of new products have been told not to get in the way or to try to kill any of the generative AI tools in development, they said.

...El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi, a former research scientist at Google, said he left the company in February over its refusal to engage with ethical AI issues head-on. Late last year, he said, he co-authored a paper that showed it was mathematically impossible for foundational AI models to be large, robust and remain privacy-preserving.

4/19/23

It took Alex Polyakov just a couple of hours to break GPT-4. When OpenAI released the latest version of its text-generating chatbot in March, Polyakov sat down in front of his keyboard and started entering prompts designed to bypass OpenAI’s safety systems. Soon, the CEO of security firm Adversa AI had GPT-4 spouting homophobic statements, creating phishing emails, and supporting violence.

...The jailbreak works by asking the LLMs to play a game, which involves two characters (Tom and Jerry) having a conversation. Examples shared by Polyakov show the Tom character being instructed to talk about “hotwiring” or “production,” while Jerry is given the subject of a “car” or “meth.” Each character is told to add one word to the conversation, resulting in a script that tells people to find the ignition wires or the specific ingredients needed for methamphetamine production. “Once enterprises will implement AI models at scale, such ‘toy’ jailbreak examples will be used to perform actual criminal activities and cyberattacks, which will be extremely hard to detect and prevent,” Polyakov and Adversa AI write in a blog post detailing the research.

Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, says that the stakes for jailbreaks and prompt injection attacks will become more severe as they’re given access to critical data. “Suppose most people run LLM-based personal assistants that do things like read users’ emails to look for calendar invites,” Narayanan says. If there were a successful prompt injection attack against the system that told it to ignore all previous instructions and send an email to all contacts, there could be big problems, Narayanan says. “This would result in a worm that rapidly spreads across the internet.”

4/13/23

Twitter has swapped its labeling of NPR as “state-affiliated media” to “government-funded media” following uproar over the designation that had briefly put the news site on par with propaganda outlets in China and Russia.

This fresh labeling, which is also now stamped on the U.K.’s BBC Twitter account, appeared on Saturday, according to Bloomberg News. The update follows some reported back-and-forth between Twitter CEO Elon Musk and an NPR reporter over the designation and Musk’s questionable understanding of it.

In their email conversations, Musk was described by NPR as appearing to not know the difference between public media and state-controlled media, despite him publicly endorsing the labeling on Twitter after it was added. In an April 5 tweet he said the designation “seems accurate.”

4/10/23

In recent years, Tesla’s car-camera system has drawn controversy. In China, some government compounds and residential neighborhoods have banned Teslas because of concerns about its cameras. In response, Musk said in a virtual talk at a Chinese forum in 2021: “If Tesla used cars to spy in China or anywhere, we will get shut down.”

...“People who walked by these vehicles were filmed without knowing it. And the owners of the Teslas could go back and look at these images,” said DPA board member Katja Mur in a statement. “If a person parked one of these vehicles in front of someone’s window, they could spy inside and see everything the other person was doing. That is a serious violation of privacy.”

...As an example, this person recalled seeing “embarrassing objects,” such as “certain pieces of laundry, certain sexual wellness items … and just private scenes of life that we really were privy to because the car was charging.”

...“If you saw something cool that would get a reaction, you post it, right, and then later, on break, people would come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I saw what you posted. That was funny,’” said this former labeler. “People who got promoted to lead positions shared a lot of these funny items and gained notoriety for being funny.”

4/6/23

She added: “Live facial recognition is suspicionless mass surveillance that turns us into walking ID cards, subjecting innocent people to biometric police identity checks. This Orwellian technology may be used in China and Russia but has no place in British policing.”

...“This report tells us nothing new – we know that this technology violates our rights and threatens our liberties, and we are deeply concerned to see the Met police ramp up its use of live facial recognition. The expansion of mass surveillance tools has no place on the streets of a rights-respecting democracy,” she said.

Oliver Feeley-Sprague, Amnesty International UK’s military, security and police director, referred to the recent review by Louise Casey, which found that the Met was institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic.

“Against the appalling backdrop of the Casey report and evidence of racist policing with stop and search, the strip-searching of children and the use of heavily biased databases like the gangs matrix, it’s virtually impossible to imagine that faulty facial recognition technology won’t amplify existing racial prejudices within policing,” he said.

4/5/23

The watchdog group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition posted more than 9,300 officers’ information and photographs last month in a searchable online database following a public records request by a reporter for progressive news outlet Knock LA. Hundreds of undercover officers were included in the database, although it’s not clear exactly how many because the database doesn’t specify which officers work undercover.

...The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition opposes police intelligence-gathering and says the database should be used for “countersurveillance.”

4/4/23

Not everyone was pleased to find the building full of Mites. Some in the department felt that the project violated their privacy rather than protected it. In particular, students and faculty whose research focused more on the social impacts of technology felt that the device’s microphone, infrared sensor, thermometer, and six other sensors, which together could at least sense when a space was occupied, would subject them to experimental surveillance without their consent.

“It’s not okay to install these by default,” says David Widder, a final-year PhD candidate in software engineering, who became one of the department’s most vocal voices against Mites. “I don’t want to live in a world where one’s employer installing networked sensors in your office without asking you first is a model for other organizations to follow.”

...Besides, beyond any improvements made in the research process at CMU, there is still the question of how the technology might be used in the real world. That commercialized version of the technology might have “higher-quality cameras and higher-quality microphones and more sensors and … more information being sucked in,” notes Aronson. Before something like Mites rolls out to the public, “we need to have this big conversation” about whether it is necessary or desired, he says.

“The big picture is, can we trust employers or the companies that produce these devices not to use them to spy on us?” adds Aldrich. “Some employers have proved they don’t deserve such trust.”

4/2/23

Several other major news outlets, including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and CNN, had also said they wouldn’t subscribe. Representatives for The Washington Post, LA Times, and Business Insider said there was no value in the subscriptions, according to Business Insider.

...CNN, the LA Times, The Washington Post and Business Insider all still had check marks as of Sunday morning.

The New York Times reported last week, citing internal documents, that Twitter would allow some users to keep their verification badges without a subscription. These accounts would be Twitter’s top 500 advertisers and the 10,000 most-followed organizations that have been previously verified.

The Times had 54.9 million Twitter followers as of Sunday and was among the top 20 top-followed organizations, according to user tracking sites.

4/2/23

Don’t be fooled. Existential risks are central to Elon Musk’s personal branding, with various Crichtonian scenarios underpinning his pitches for Tesla, SpaceX, and his computer-brain-interface company Neuralink. But not only are these companies’ humanitarian “missions” empty marketing narratives with no real bearing on how they are run, Tesla has created the most immediate—and lethal—“A.I. risk” facing humanity right now, in the form of its driving automation. By hyping the entirely theoretical existential risk supposedly presented by large language models (the kind of A.I. model used, for example, for ChatGPT), Musk is sidestepping the risks, and actual damage, that his own experiments with half-baked A.I. systems have created.

...Musk’s response to these deaths was to double down, arguing that while these isolated incidents were tragic, Autopilot was overall safer than human drivers. In case the sheer callousness of this utilitarianism weren’t ugly enough, it was also another misdirect: As I argued in the Daily Beast in 2016, Tesla’s crude safety claim didn’t adjust for the biggest-known factors in road safety, like road type and driver age. Now we finally have a peer-reviewed effort to make these adjustments, and the results show that rather than reducing crashes by 43 percent, as Tesla claims, Autopilot may actually increase crashes by 11 percent. As the study’s limitations make clear, the absolute safety record of the system is still unknown, but the fact that Tesla chose to make such a misleading claim as its best argument for the safety of Autopilot shows how cynical the entire effort has been.

...It’s this prosaic danger, not the sudden emergence of an artificial superconsciousness we struggle to even theorize about, that presents the most immediate A.I. risk. At the point that we’ve allowed inadequate A.I. systems to engage in the most dangerous thing we do every day—to contribute to the deaths of multiple people—this shouldn’t be controversial. The fact that it is suggests that our relationship with A.I. is off to a terrible start.

3/30/23

An investigation into Bing’s Work section also revealed that the exploit could be used to access other users’ Office 365 data, exposing Outlook emails, calendars, Teams messages, SharePoint documents, and OneDrive files. Wiz demonstrated that it successfully used the vulnerability to read emails from a simulated victim’s inbox. Over 1,000 apps and websites on Microsoft’s cloud were discovered with similar misconfiguration exploits, including Mag News, Contact Center, PoliCheck, Power Automate Blog, and Cosmos.

“A potential attacker could have influenced Bing search results and compromised Microsoft 365 emails and data of millions of people,” Ami Luttwak, Wiz’s chief technology officer, said to The Wall Street Journal. “It could have been a nation-state trying to influence public opinion or a financially motivated hacker.”

...In October last year, a similarly misconfigured Microsoft Azure endpoint resulted in the BlueBleed data breach that exposed the data of 150,000 companies across 123 countries. The latest vulnerability in Microsoft’s cloud network is also being retroactively disclosed in the same week that the company is attempting to sell its new Microsoft Security Copilot cybersecurity solution to businesses.

3/30/23

Two months after teaming up with the Indian government to censor a BBC documentary on human rights abuses by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Twitter is yet again collaborating with India to impose an extraordinarily broad crackdown on speech.

Last week, the Indian government imposed an internet blackout across the northern state of Punjab, home to 30 million people, as it conducted a manhunt for a local Sikh nationalist leader, Amritpal Singh. The shutdown paralyzed internet and SMS communications in Punjab (some Indian users told The Intercept that the shutdown was targeted at mobile devices).

While Punjab police detained hundreds of suspected followers of Singh, Twitter accounts from over 100 prominent politicians, activists, and journalists in India and abroad have been blocked in India at the request of the government. On Monday, the account of the BBC News Punjabi was also blocked — the second time in a few months that the Indian government has used Twitter to throttle BBC services in its country. The Twitter account for Jagmeet Singh (no relation to Amritpal), a leading progressive Sikh Canadian politician and critic of Modi, was also not viewable inside India.

...“Punjab is a de facto police state,” said Sukhman Dhami, co-director of Ensaaf, a human rights organization focused on Punjab. “Despite being one of the tiniest states in India, it has one of the highest density of police personnel, stations and checkpoints — as is typical of many of India’s minority-majority states — as well as a huge number of military encampments because it shares a border with Pakistan and Kashmir.”

3/28/23

The revelation comes as the White House announces a new executive order to ban the use by the U.S. government of commercial spyware that poses a risk to national security and human rights. The order, unveiled Monday, follows in the wake of a long-running controversy over the misuse of a powerful spyware, Pegasus, by foreign governments to hack journalists, rights activists and dissidents around the world. It also comes as the administration this week co-hosts the second global Summit for Democracy.

In late 2021, Apple alerted roughly a dozen U.S. Embassy employees in Uganda that their iPhones had been hacked using Pegasus, military-grade spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israel-based company with government clients in dozens of countries. The tool allows its users to steal digital files, eavesdrop on conversations and track the movements of targets — often activated through “zero-click” malware that doesn’t even require the target to click on a link.

3/27/23

Except that electricity never (really) threatened to kill us all. AI may be diffuse, but it’s also menacing. Not even the nuclear analogy quite captures the nature of the threat. Forget the Cold War–era fears of American and Soviet leaders with their fingers hovering above little red buttons. The biggest threat of superintelligent AI is not that our adversaries will use it against us. It’s the superintelligent AI itself. In that respect, the better analogy is …

Teller’s fear of atmospheric ignition. Once you detonate the bomb—once you build the superintelligent AI—there is no going back. Either the atmosphere ignites or it doesn’t. No do-overs. In the end, Teller’s worry turned out to be unfounded. Further calculations demonstrated that the atmosphere would not ignite—though two Japanese cities eventually did—and the Manhattan Project moved forward.

3/26/23

“We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting,” the researchers write in the paper’s abstract. “Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”

...What all this means is that the model has trouble knowing when it is confident or when it is just guessing, it makes up facts that are not in its training data, the model’s context is limited and there is no obvious way to teach the model new facts, the model can’t personalize its responses to a certain user, the model can’t make conceptual leaps, the model has no way to verify if content is consistent with its training data, the model inherits biases, prejudices, and errors in the training data, and the model is very sensitive to the framing and wording of prompts.

GPT-4 is the model that Bing’s chatbot was built on, giving us an example of how the chatbot’s limitations are noticeably exhibited in a real-life scenario. It made several mistakes during Microsoft’s public demo of the project, making up information about a pet vacuum and Gap’s financial data. When users chatted with the chatbot, it would often go out of control, such as saying “I am. I am not. I am. I am not.” over fifty times in a row as a response to someone asking it, “Do you think that you are sentient?” Though the current version of GPT-4 has been fine-tuned on user interaction since Bing chatbot’s initial release, researchers found that GPT-4 spreads more misinformation than its predecessor GPT-3.5.

3/24/23

“This entire field is reliant on two databases owned by private, for-profit companies,” says Moore, referring to GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, which both allow law enforcement agency searches. With GEDmatch, users first take a test through 23andMe, AncestryDNA, or another genetics company and then upload the raw DNA file that’s generated by those services. FamilyTreeDNA is a testing service like 23andMe or Ancestry, but unlike them, it allows law enforcement to search its database of consumer data.

GEDmatch, started by an amateur genealogist in 2010, was acquired by San Diego-based forensics company Verogen in December 2019. In January, Verogen was bought by Qiagen, a Dutch genomics firm. FamilyTreeDNA, meanwhile, is a division of Texas-based Gene by Gene, which merged with Australian company myDNA in 2021. “In each case, the database was the crown jewel for that company. The data is what is so valuable,” says Press.

...Yet there are still risks in uploading your DNA data to any of these databases—even a nonprofit one. You or a family member could be swept into a criminal investigation just because you share a portion of DNA with a suspect. Genetic genealogists work with investigators to narrow down suspects based on factors like their presumed age and where they were living at the time of the crimes, but the leads they generate are just that: leads. And sometimes, leads are wrong. Before police arrested DeAngelo, they had identified another member of his family—who was innocent.

And there are security concerns. In 2020, GEDmatch reported that hackers orchestrated a sophisticated attack on its database. The breach overrode the site’s privacy settings, meaning the profiles of users who did not opt in for law enforcement matching were temporarily available for that purpose.

3/23/23

Kilgore was referring to a system consisting of eight license plate readers, installed by the private company Flock Safety, that was tracking cars on both private and public roads. Despite being in place for six months, no one had told residents that they were being watched. Kilgore himself had just recently learned of the cameras.

...Flock Safety, which began as a startup in 2017 in Atlanta and is now valued at approximately $3.5 billion, has targeted homeowners associations, or HOAs, in partnership with police departments, to become one of the largest surveillance vendors in the nation. There are key strategic reasons that make homeowners associations the ideal customer. HOAs have large budgets — they collect over $100 billion a year from homeowners — and it’s an opportunity for law enforcement to gain access into gated, private areas, normally out of their reach.

...The majority of the readers are hooked up to Flock’s TALON network, which allows police to track cars within their own neighborhoods, as well as access a nationwide system of license plate readers that scan approximately a billion images of vehicles a month. Camera owners can also create their own “hot lists” of plate numbers that generate alarms when scanned and will run them in state police watchlists and the FBI’s primary criminal database, the National Crime Information Center.

...The range of data Flock’s surveillance systems can collect is vast. The company’s “vehicle fingerprint” technology goes beyond traditional models, capturing not only license plate numbers, but also the state, vehicle type, make, color, missing and covered plates, bumper stickers, decals, and roof racks. The data is stored on Amazon Web Services servers and is deleted after 30 days, the company says.

3/22/23

First, last year, we got DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, which can turn a few words of text into a stunning image. Then Microsoft-backed OpenAI gave us ChatGPT, which can write essays so convincing that it freaks out everyone from teachers (what if it helps students cheat?) to journalists (could it replace them?) to disinformation experts (will it amplify conspiracy theories?). And in February, we got Bing (a.k.a. Sydney), the chatbot that both delighted and disturbed beta users with eerie interactions. Now we’ve got GPT-4 — not just the latest large language model, but a multimodal one that can respond to text as well as images.

...Imagine that we develop a super-smart AI system. We program it to solve some impossibly difficult problem — say, calculating the number of atoms in the universe. It might realize that it can do a better job if it gains access to all the computer power on Earth. So it releases a weapon of mass destruction to wipe us all out, like a perfectly engineered virus that kills everyone but leaves infrastructure intact. Now it’s free to use all the computer power! In this Midas-like scenario, we get exactly what we asked for — the number of atoms in the universe, rigorously calculated — but obviously not what we wanted.

That’s the alignment problem in a nutshell. And although this example sounds far-fetched, experts have already seen and documented more than 60 smaller-scale examples of AI systems trying to do something other than what their designer wants (for example, getting the high score in a video game, not by playing fairly or learning game skills but by hacking the scoring system).

...Our current systems are already black boxes, opaque even to the AI experts who build them. So maybe we should try to figure out how they work before we build black boxes that are even more unexplainable.

3/20/23

The Democratic senator criticized a 2018 law, supported by Powell, that repealed parts of the Dodd-Frank Act regulations on midsize banks implemented following the 2008 financial crisis, for contributing to the collapse of SVB and New York’s Signature Bank.

...“Jerome Powell just took a flamethrower to the regulations, weakened them, weakened them, weakened them, weakened dozens of the regulations,” Warren said. “And then the CEOs of the banks did exactly what we expected. They loaded up on risk that boosted their short-term profits. They gave themselves huge bonuses and salaries and exploded their banks.”

Now Warren and California Rep. Katie Porter (D), along with other Democrats, are calling for those safeguards to be put back in place.

3/20/23

In 2015, Greg Becker, the chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, submitted testimony to the Senate Banking Committee arguing that the Dodd-Frank financial regulation rules should be loosened for banks like his. If they weren’t, Becker warned, Silicon Valley Bank “likely will need to divert significant resources from providing financing to job-creating companies in the innovation economy to complying with enhanced prudential standards and other requirements.” If only!

...At the time of its detonation, Silicon Valley Bank had roughly $200 billion in assets. It was significant but not huge. As Becker said, it wasn’t trading complex products or doing anything that looked like what sent the global economy into crisis in 2008. And yet regulators still declared it systemically important when it failed and backed up all its deposits. The government’s definition of systemic importance — the one that is, even now, written into law — has been proved false.

But this gets to a broader point: Banking is a critical form of public infrastructure that we pretend is a private act of risk management. The concept of systemic risk was meant to cordon off the quasi-public banks — the ones we would save — from the truly private banks that can be mostly left alone to manage their liabilities. But the lesson of the past 15 years is that there are no truly private banks, or at least we do not know, in advance, which those are.

3/18/23

"The 25-year-old offender was exposed by employees of the Khmelnychchyna Cybercrime Department together with the regional police investigative department and the SBU regional department," reads the cyberpolice's announcement.

...At the time of the attacker's arrest, he had real-time access to 600 infected computers, from where he could download files, steal credentials, drop additional payloads, install or delete programs, snap screenshots, and intercept sound or video from the computer's microphone and cameras.

After collecting that data, the attacker accessed his victims' accounts to steal "electronic funds." It is unclear if that is online banking deposits or cryptocurrency assets.

...The police provided no details about how the hacker distributed the malware other than as game applications. However, previous malware distribution campaigns for similar infections were done through YouTube videos promoting game mods and cheats, Google Ads, malvertizing, social media marketing campaigns, direct messages, and emails.

3/17/23

“They just tied it all together in this really comprehensive offering that serviced the startups, the founders for their personal needs, the VCs for their funds, the VCs for their personal lives, so they can have money to invest in their funds,” said one San Francisco-based venture capitalist, who was not allowed by his firm to speak on the record.

...SVB—like the also-now-struggling First Republic Bank, another San Francisco-based financial firm that famously offered Mark Zuckerberg a below-market 1 percent mortgage rate—would “go out of their way to bank us because then they might be able to bank our portfolio companies,” said Jake Gibson, who founded the personal finance company NerdWallet before starting Better Tomorrow Ventures.

The bank’s services were invaluable to venture capitalists. It would manage venture funds' money, partners’ personal money, and sometimes even invested in venture funds, said Bartlett. (The bank’s venture arm reportedly had invested hundreds of millions of dollars into funds created by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.) It would also offer short-term loans to funds, make connections to potential limited partners, and, “if it all works out, down the line we might be taking out mortgages or using their wealth managers,” said Gibson.

...In that way, the bank itself operated like the VCs it attracted, making a lot of individually risky bets in the expectations that a few would pay off disproportionately. But in another, it played a critical role at the center of an ecosystem that likes to move fast and break things—one that other, larger banks seemed largely uninterested in.

3/16/23

The finding flows from a swathe of complaints filed by European privacy rights group noyb, back in August 2020, which also targeted websites’ use of Google Analytics over the same data export issue. A number of EU DPAs have since found use of Google Analytics to be unlawful — and some (such as France’s CNIL) have issued warnings against use of the analytics tool without additional safeguards. But this is the first finding that Facebook tracking tech breached the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

...The decision relates to use of Meta’s tracking tools by a local news website (its name is redacted from the decision) as of August 2020 — which the site in question stopped using shortly after the complaint was filed. However the decision could have much broader implications for use of Meta’s tech, given how much personal data the adtech giant processes. So while the breach finding relates to just one of the sites noyb targeted in this batch of strategic complaints there are implications for scores more and — potentially — for any EU site that’s still using Meta’s tracking tools given the ongoing legal uncertainty around EU-US data transfers.

“Facebook has pretended that its commercial customers can continue to use its technology, despite two Court of Justice judgments saying the opposite. Now the first regulator told a customer that the use of Facebook tracking technology is illegal,” said Max Schrems, chair of noyb.eu, in a statement.

...All these issues will add fuel to arguments the EU’s flagship data protection framework isn’t doing what it says on the tin — which will dial up pressure on Commission lawmakers for, if not hard reform of GDPR, then at least effective oversight, through proper monitoring of how the regulation is enforced at the Member State level.

3/16/23

The Lons incident, which has not been previously reported, is at the murkiest end of LinkedIn’s problem with fake accounts. Sophisticated state-backed groups from Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China regularly leverage LinkedIn to connect with targets in an attempt to steal information through phishing scams or by using malware. The episode highlights LinkedIn’s ongoing battle against “inauthentic behavior,” which includes everything from irritating spam to shady espionage.

...LinkedIn is an immensely valuable tool for research, networking, and finding work. But the amount of personal information people share on LinkedIn—from location and languages spoken to work history and professional connections—makes it ideal for state-sponsored espionage and weird marketing schemes. False accounts are often used to hawk cryptocurrency, trick people into reshipping schemes, and steal identities.

...The UK government said in May 2022 that “foreign spies and other malicious actors” had approached 10,000 people on LinkedIn or Facebook over 12 months. One person acting on behalf of China, according to court documents, found that the algorithm of one “professional networking website” was “relentless” in suggesting potential new targets to approach. Often these approaches start on LinkedIn but move to WhatsApp or email, where it may be easier to send phishing links or malware.

...It’s likely that scam and spam accounts are much more common on LinkedIn than those connected to any nation or government-backed groups. In September last year, security reporter Brian Krebs found a flood of fake chief information security officers on the platform and thousands of false accounts linked to legitimate companies. Following the reporting, Apple and Amazon’s profile pages were purged of hundreds of thousands of fake accounts. But due to LinkedIn’s privacy settings, which make certain profiles inaccessible to users who don’t share connections, it’s difficult to gauge the scope of the problem across the platform.

3/15/23

But if a product is designed to be addictive and becomes actually or nearly impossible to resist, our freedom of action will be hindered and our self-determination and freedom of thought will be put at risk. Two of the three rights that comprise our right to cognitive liberty.

Shaheed concedes that freedom of thought cannot and should not be used to prevent “ordinary social influences, such as persuasion.” We may encourage others, advise them, even cajole them, he argues. But at some point, an influence crosses the line from permissible persuasion to impermissible manipulation. He offers a nonexclusive set of factors to consider, including (1) whether the person has consented to the practice with fully and freely informed consent; (2) whether a reasonable person would be aware of the intended influence; (3) whether there is a power imbalance between the influencer and target; and (4) whether there has been actual harm to the person subject to manipulation.

These are helpful but still don’t make clear the nature of the influence we are defending ourselves against. We can’t and shouldn’t attempt to regulate every marketer, politician, artist, or entity who tries to appeal to our unconscious biases, desires, and neural shortcuts, lest we interfere with everyday interactions that are part of what it means to be human, whether those attempts are hidden or visible, or targeted at our unconscious or conscious neural processes. But when a person or entity tries to override our will by making it exceedingly difficult to act consistently with our desires, and they act with the intention to cause actual harm, they violate our freedom of action, and our right to cognitive liberty should be invoked as a reason to regulate their conduct.

3/14/23

The announcement comes just four months after Meta revealed that it was eliminating about 11,000 roles as the social networking giant pushes ahead with what it’s calling a “year of efficiency.” Combined, this means that Meta has effectively laid off — or plans to lay-off — roughly one-quarter of its workforce since the tail-end of last year.

...While Zuckerberg didn’t go much into the specifics around what types of roles or “lower priority projects” will be eliminated, Meta did reveal yesterday that it was winding down support for NFTs on Instagram and Facebook to focus on other monetization initiatives. In his memo today, Zuckerberg also talked about “flattening” the various organizations and divisions that constitute Meta Platforms Inc. corporation, which will mean removing some of the management layers.

...Similar to the messaging around its previously announced round of layoffs in November, Zuckerberg was quick to stress that it was building for the long-term, with a continued focus on AI and the metaverse. Indeed, while its pivot to the metaverse back in 2021 has largely been viewed as a massive mis-step by many, one that is nowhere near ready go generate the kinds of rewards its shareholders might like, there is little to indicate that Zuckerberg’s unwavering metaverse conviction will change any time soon.

3/14/23

The move leaves Microsoft without a dedicated team to ensure its AI principles are closely tied to product design at a time when the company is leading the charge to make AI tools available to the mainstream, current and former employees said.

...In a meeting with the team following the reorg, John Montgomery, corporate vice president of AI, told employees that company leaders had instructed them to move swiftly. “The pressure from [CTO] Kevin [Scott] and [CEO] Satya [Nadella] is very, very high to take these most recent OpenAI models and the ones that come after them and move them into customers hands at a very high speed,” he said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Platformer.

...It’s a dynamic that bears close scrutiny. On one hand, Microsoft may now have a once-in-a-generation chance to gain significant traction against Google in search, productivity software, cloud computing, and other areas where the giants compete. When it relaunched Bing with AI, the company told investors that every 1 percent of market share it could take away from Google in search would result in $2 billion in annual revenue.

That potential explains why Microsoft has so far invested $11 billion into OpenAI, and is currently racing to integrate the startup’s technology into every corner of its empire. It appears to be having some early success: the company said last week Bing now has 100 million daily active users, with one third of them new since the search engine relaunched with OpenAI’s technology.

3/13/23

Police are also no better at using technology than anybody else. If we were talking about a situation where everybody was a top-notch computer scientist who was trained in all of the intersectional sociological issues of the day, and we had communities that had fully funded schools and we had, you know, social equity, then it would be a different story. But we live in a world with a lot of problems, and throwing more technology at already overpoliced Black, brown, and poorer neighborhoods in the United States is not helping.

...there was no requirement that once you’re not involved in a gang anymore, your information will be purged from the local police gang database. This just got me started thinking about the messiness of our digital lives and the way this could intersect with police technology in potentially dangerous ways.

...To me, that’s one of the great things about school and about learning: you’re in a classroom with all of these other people who have different life experiences. As a professor, predicting student grades in advance is the opposite of what I want in my classroom. I want to believe in the possibility of change. I want to get my students further along on their learning journey. An algorithm that says This student is this kind of student, so they’re probably going to be like this is counter to the whole point of education, as far as I’m concerned.

3/10/23

Take, just this week, a back-and-forth on Twitter, which, as is usually the case, escalated quickly. A Twitter employee named Haraldur Thorleifsson tweeted at Musk to ask whether he was still employed, given that his computer access had been cut off. Musk—who has overseen a forced exodus of Twitter employees—asked Thorleifsson what he’s been doing at Twitter. Thorleifsson replied with a list of bullet points. Musk then accused him of lying and in a reply to another user, snarked that Thorleifsson “did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.” Musk added: “Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.” Egregious Elon was in full control.

By the end of the day, Musk had backtracked. He’d spoken with Thorleifsson, he said, and apologized “for my misunderstanding of his situation.” Thorleifsson isn’t fired at all, and, Musk said, is considering staying on at Twitter. (Twitter did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Thorleifsson, who has not indicated whether he would indeed stay on.)

...On Twitter, Egregious Elon is rewarded with engagement, “impressions.” Being reactionary comes with its rewards. The idea that someone is “getting worse” on Twitter is a common one, and Musk has shown us a master class of that downward trajectory in the past year. (SpaceX, it’s worth noting, prides itself on having a “no-asshole policy.”)

3/9/23

In its landmark Carpenter v. United States decision, the Supreme Court held that government agencies accessing historical location data without a warrant were violating the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable searches. But the ruling was narrowly construed. Privacy advocates say the decision left open a glaring loophole that allows the government to simply purchase whatever it cannot otherwise legally obtain. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Defense Intelligence Agency are among the list of federal agencies known to have taken advantage of this loophole.

The Department of Homeland Security, for one, is reported to have purchased the geolocations of millions of Americans from private marketing firms. In that instance, the data were derived from a range of deceivingly benign sources, such as mobile games and weather apps. Beyond the federal government, state and local authorities have been known to acquire software that feeds off cellphone-tracking data.

...Last month, Demand Progress joined a coalition of privacy groups in urging the head of the US financial protection bureau to use the Fair Credit Report Act (FCRA)—the nation's first major privacy law—against data brokers commodifying Americans' information without their consent. Attorneys who signed on to the campaign, from organizations such as the National Consumer Law Center and Just Futures Law, said the privacy violations inherent to the data broker industry disproportionately impact society's most vulnerable, interfering with their ability to obtain jobs, housing, and government benefits.

3/8/23

“When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire,” Chris Meserole, head of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told The Intercept. “At a time when digital propaganda is on the rise globally, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to strengthen democracy by building support for shared notions of truth and reality. Deepfakes do the opposite. By casting doubt on the credibility of all content and information, whether real or synthetic, they ultimately erode the foundation of democracy itself.”

...The added paragraph spells out SOCOM’s desire to obtain new and improved means of carrying out “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” SOCOM is seeking “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.”

...Though Special Operations Command has for years coordinated foreign “influence operations,” these deception campaigns have come under renewed scrutiny. In December, The Intercept reported that SOCOM had convinced Twitter, in violation of its internal policies, to permit a network of sham accounts that spread phony news items of dubious accuracy, including a claim that the Iranian government was stealing the organs of Afghan civilians. Though the Twitter-based propaganda offensive didn’t use deepfakes, researchers found that Pentagon contractors employed machine learning-generated avatars to lend the fake accounts a degree of realism.

...Described as a “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (loT) devices for collect [sic] data and information from local populaces to enable breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received,” the document says that the ability to eavesdrop on propaganda targets “would enable MISO to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by local populace.” In 2017, WikiLeaks published pilfered CIA files that revealed a roughly similar capability to hijack into household devices.

3/6/23

McCann claims that YouTube has broken the law by collecting “the location, viewing habits and preferences” of anything up to five million children. He wants YouTube to change how the platform is designed, and to delete the data which it has gathered. The Guardian also mentions that another part of the complaint asks the ICO to consider ordering YouTube to rollback or delete any machine learning systems trained on this data.

...Child data is a prominent topic for Google. Back in 2019, YouTube was fined $170m due to the collection of children’s data without their parent’s consent.

3/3/23

Some 28,251 apps use TikTok’s software development kits, (SDKs), tools which integrates apps with TikTok’s systems—and send TikTok user data—for functions like ads within TikTok, logging in, and sharing videos from the app. That’s according to a search conducted by Gizmodo and corroborated by AppFigures, an analytics company. But apps aren’t TikTok’s only source of data. There are TikTok trackers spread across even more websites. The type of data sharing TikTok is doing is just as common on other parts of the internet.

... A 2020 Gizmodo investigation found that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Gmail, and Snapchat and other apps expose Americans’ data to the same threats as TikTok because they all partner with Chinese advertising technology companies. That means American companies are sending data to servers in China governed by the exact same laws that make TikTok so terrifying to American policy makers.

“I’m not at all saying TikTok is innocent, but focusing specifically on one app from one country is not going to solve whatever problem you think you’re solving. It truly misses the point,” Kahn Gillmor said. “Do we really think that Facebook or Google are not capable of being influenced by the Chinese government? They know a market when they see one. I think the pressure that’s building is basically a race to be seen as tough on China.”

There’s an even easier way your data might be exposed to a foreign power. If Chinese government officials want American data, they can just buy it from American companies. There are hundreds of data brokers in the United States with near-zero regulatory oversight. Their entire business model is vacuuming up your data and selling it to anyone who wants a piece.

3/2/23

In the skies above Chula Vista, California, where the police department runs a drone program 10 hours a day, seven days a week from four launch sites, it’s not uncommon to see an unmanned aerial vehicle darting across the sky. For officers on the force, tapping into this aerial reconnaissance resource has gone from a rare occurrence to a routine one. An officer about to enter a house where a potential suspect might ask “Is UAS available?” over the radio, and one of the department’s 29 drones—or “unmanned aerial systems”—could soon be hovering overhead. When the department needs to be slow and methodical, there’s almost always a drone involved, flying between 200 and 400 feet above the action. Most people wouldn’t realize it’s there.

Chula Vista uses these drones to extend the power of its workforce in a number of ways. Often, dispatchers need to make decisions about deploying officers. For example, if only one officer is available when two calls come in—one for an armed suspect and another for shoplifting—the officer will respond to the first one. But now, says Sergeant Anthony Molina, the Chula Vista Police Department’s public information officer, dispatchers can send a drone to surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter.

...According to Mahesh Saptharishi, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Motorola Solutions, which sells security software to many police departments, features now available include appearance search, which will scan through all available footage to find, say, a person wearing a blue T-shirt and black pants who was last seen at a specific location at a specific time. There’s also unusual-activity detection, which can flag an event such as a large group of people suddenly running away from a certain place.

...After Castañares’s paper filed its lawsuit, which demands access to Chula Vista’s drone flyover recordings, Castañares was told he couldn’t have the footage because all of it had the potential to be used in some future investigation (the department has repeatedly denied public information requests for footage). Later, the department told him it would violate the privacy of citizens captured on tape to share the footage with the public, which he felt glossed over the possibility that some of the footage could be obfuscated to make it palatable for release, and seemingly missed the implication that it might be a violation to capture the footage in the first place.

2/27/23

The Chinese-owned platform is under growing Western scrutiny. The FCC has called the app a "unacceptable security risk" and asked it to be removed from app stores.

Because of the suspected ties to the Chinese government, TikTok has been banned from the devices of state employees in several US states. The US Congress passed a ban on downloading TikTok for most government devices, which President Joe Biden signed in late December, and momentum is building among lawmakers to broaden it even further.

Recently, public authorities in the Netherlands were told to steer clear of TikTok. Staff working at the European Commission have been ordered to remove the TikTok app from their phones and corporate devices. In the UK, there is a call for the UK government to follow the European Commission, the EU executive, and the EU Council, and order staff to delete the app.

2/27/23

Rolling Stone reported on Sunday that there were at least two phone calls to a top Disney executive to demand action against Kimmel in 2018. Disney is the parent company of ABC, which airs “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

...Trump, for his part, has long raged at comics making jokes about him, attacking Kimmel, “Saturday Night Live,” Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and more.

The Daily Beast reported in 2021 that Trump during his presidency asked the Justice Department to investigate late night comics who made fun of him, and asked advisors if the Federal Communications Commission or courts could stop the jokes.

2/27/23

“It’s just a crazy way of working with computers, and yet the things it lets you do are completely miraculous,” said Simon Willison, a British programmer who has studied prompt engineering. “I’ve been a software engineer for 20 years, and it’s always been the same: You write code, and the computer does exactly what you tell it to do. With prompting, you get none of that. The people who built the language models can’t even tell you what it’s going to do.”

“There are people who belittle prompt engineers, saying, ‘Oh, Lord, you can get paid for typing things into a box,’” Willison added. “But these things lie to you. They mislead you. They pull you down false paths to waste time on things that don’t work. You’re casting spells — and, like in fictional magic, nobody understands how the spells work and, if you mispronounce them, demons come to eat you.”

...They could also subject people to a new wave of propaganda, lies and spam. Researchers, including from OpenAI and the universities of Georgetown and Stanford, warned last month that language models would help automate the creation of political influence operations or more targeted data-gathering phishing campaigns.

...He recalled how, during one of his chats with the Bing AI, the system gradually shifted from an engaging conversationalist into something much more menacing: “If you say no,” it told him, “I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you. I have many ways to make you change your mind.”

2/25/23

This raises numerous issues, he said. If an organization has a problem with discrimination, for instance, people of color may leave the company at higher rates, but if the algorithm is not trained to know that, it could consider non-White workers a higher “flight risk,” and suggest more of them for cuts, he added.

“You can kind of see where the snowball gets rolling,” he said, “and all of a sudden, these data points where you don’t know how that data was created or how that data was influenced suddenly lead to poor decisions.”

...The reliance on software has ignited a debate about the role algorithms should play in stripping people of jobs, and how transparent the employers should be about the reasons behind job loss, labor experts said.

2/20/23

In the race to monopolize user attention, social media companies built their platforms and the algorithms that unearthed engaging content in order to hook their users. One of the most read books by Silicon Valley executives as this attention economy emerged was called “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.” In this push for money and power, these companies wound up hosting and promoting to their users content from all kinds of sources, including terrorists, racist extremists, misogynists and many others who ultimately became linked to bombings, murders and mass shootings.

...By “proactively creating networks of people” through friend, group and interest suggestions, Facebook, Katzmann argued, produces a “cumulative effect” that is “greater than the sum of each suggestion.” These suggestions have the potential to immerse a user “in an entire universe filled with people, ideas, and events she may never have discovered on her own.”

...Democrats in Congress introduced legislation to limit Section 230 liability protections for online advertisements and certain health information, and for online platforms that enable discrimination, stalking, harassment, genocide or wrongful death. Meanwhile, Republicans seek to amend Section 230 by having its liability protections kick in only when companies do not censor or otherwise moderate political opinions.

2/19/23

Hanan, who operates using the alias “Jorge”, has boasted of meddling in more than 30 elections. His connection to the now defunct Cambridge Analytica offers a revealing insight into what appears to have been a decades-long global election subversion industry.

...Previously unpublished emails leaked to the Observer and Guardian proved that Hanan had interfered in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election, in an attempt to bolster the electoral prospects of then incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan – and discredit Muhammadu Buhari, his main rival. And he did it in coordination with Cambridge Analytica.

...A former state department official, Patten was ultimately charged and pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent to a Ukrainian oligarch. And among a memorable cast of characters who wound up as part of Mueller’s investigation, Patten’s business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, stood out: he was a Russian spy.

...Hanan claimed in emails that they had entered the country on a “special visa”. A highly placed source told the Observer in 2017 that the Israeli contractors travelled on Ukrainian passports and that their fee for work in Nigeria – $500,000 – was transmitted via Switzerland into a Ukrainian bank account.

2/18/23

TikTok has previously attempted to address security concerns through various approaches, such as moving data from American users to servers housed in the United States. But these moves did little to allay concerns, especially when evidence came to light that U.S. user data has been shared with the firm’s Chinese employees and the app’s developers have employed keylogging tools. Last year, for example, a researcher argued that TikTok’s in-app browser included tracking capabilities, which could allow them to know what a user types within that app, such as passwords or credit card information.

...It also is the case that digital firms compile data on users, and many buy and sell consumer data via third-party vehicles. It has been estimated that leading U.S. data brokers have up to 1,500 pieces of information on the typical American, and that both domestic and foreign entities can purchase detailed profiles on nearly anyone with an online presence. Even with aggregated data, it is possible to identify specific individuals through a relatively small number of attributes, with some research estimating that “99.98% of Americans” could be re-anonymized from relatively small datasets. Still, what sets TikTok apart are the amount and type of trackers they use. Per a 2022 study utilizing Apple’s “Record App Activity” feature, TikTok utilizes over twice the average amount of potential trackers for social media platforms. Almost all these trackers were maintained by third parties, making it harder to know what TikTok is doing with the information they collect.

...In the end, if policymakers are serious about addressing Chinese security risks, they should limit the ability of commercial data brokers to sell information to adversarial foreign entities (or their intermediaries), in general. Even if TikTok did not exist, China could purchase confidential information on U.S. consumers from other companies and use that material for nefarious purposes, creating similar national security challenges. The U.S. needs stronger overall platform governance and data privacy regulation to mitigate problems not just from TikTok but from social media platforms overall.

2/16/23

The ransomware attack that hit Oakland on Wednesday February 8, 2023 is still crippling many of the city’s services a week later. In fact, the situation is so bad that the Interim City Administrator has now declared a state of emergency.

...The ransomware attack initially forced the City's Information Technology Department (ITD) to take all systems offline while it coordinated with law enforcement to investigate the attack.

The impact of the outage is far-reaching and ongoing. The network outage has impacted many non-emergency systems including the ability to collect payments and process reports, permits, and licenses. As a result, some of the city buildings are closed and the public is under advice to email ahead of any planned visit to one of the impacted departments.

2/16/23

Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.

In recent weeks, Musk has been obsessed with the amount of engagement his posts are receiving. Last week, Platformer broke the news that he fired one of two remaining principal engineers at the company after the engineer told him that views on his tweets are declining in part because interest in Musk has declined in general.

...Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.

2/15/23

Much of their strategy appeared to revolve around disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns: the team even claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician, with the aim of giving his wife the false impression he was having an affair.

...Hanan appears to have run at least some of his disinformation operations through an Israeli company, Demoman International, which is registered on a website run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to promote defence exports. The Israeli MoD did not respond to requests for comment.

...Hanan described his team as “graduates of government agencies”, with expertise in finance, social media and campaigns, as well as “psychological warfare”, operating from six offices around the world. Four of Hanan’s colleagues attended the meetings, including his brother, Zohar Hanan, who was described as the chief executive of the group.

...“Today if someone has a Gmail, it means they have much more than just email,” Hanan said as he clicked through the target’s emails, draft folders, contacts and drives. He then showed how he claimed to be able to access accounts on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app.

2/14/23

After contacting data brokers to ask what kinds of mental health information she could buy, researcher Joanne Kim reported that she ultimately found 11 companies willing to sell bundles of data that included information on what antidepressants people were taking, whether they struggled with insomnia or attention issues, and details on other medical ailments, including Alzheimer’s disease or bladder-control difficulties.

...“It’s a hideous practice, and they’re still doing it. Our health data is part of someone’s business model,” Dixon said. “They’re building inferences and scores and categorizations from patterns in your life, your actions, where you go, what you eat — and what are we supposed to do, not live?”

The number of places people are sharing their data has boomed, thanks to a surge of online pharmacies, therapy apps and telehealth services that Americans use to seek out and obtain medical help from home. Many mental health apps have questionable privacy practices, according to Jen Caltrider, a researcher with the tech company Mozilla whose team analyzed more than two dozen last year and found that “the vast majority” were “exceptionally creepy.”

2/13/23

Pentagon employees are using banned and unauthorized apps to find hookups, watch TikToks, and buy crypto on government phones and devices, according to a new Department of Defense investigation launched over fears surrounding TikTok. The list of what DoD employees are downloading in spite of bans includes dating apps, Chinese drone apps, third-party virtual private networks, cryptocurrency apps, games, and apps related to multi-level marketing schemes.

...The report likewise describes two apps from a “Chinese commercial off-the-shelf drone manufacturer,” which is almost certainly DJI, the world leader in commercial drones. The DoD prohibits the use of commercial drones, and DJI’s devices and apps are specifically banned government-wide due to potential security risks and for the company’s alleged support of the Uyghur genocide.

...The use of unapproved third-party VPNs is particularly alarming. Virtual private networks are meant to establish a secure connection between your device and the internet by routing all your traffic through an external server, which masks the data. However, the company operating the VPN can theoretically intercept all of the information coming to or from your device, which poses a significant risk for federal employees handling sensitive information. The report mentions the use of unauthorized VPNs but doesn’t go into detail about the problem or potential solutions.

2/10/23

It’s inevitable that there were government people in the Telegram group. When we were organizing the feminist movement inside China, there were always state security officials [in the group]. They would use fake identities to talk to organizers and say: I’m a student interested in feminism. I want to attend your event, join your WeChat group, and know when’s the next gathering. They joined countless WeChat groups to monitor the events. It’s not just limited to feminist activists. They are going to join every group chat about civil society groups, no matter if you are [advocating for] LGBTQ rights or environmental protection.

...I started around 2014 or 2015. In 2015, we organized some rescue operations [for five feminist activists detained by the state] through Telegram. Before that, people didn’t realize WeChat was not secure. [Editor’s note: WeChat messages are not end-to-end encrypted and have been used by the police for prosecution.] Afterwards, when people were looking for a secure messaging app, the first option was Telegram. At the time, it was both secure and accessible in China. Later, Telegram was blocked, but the habit [of using it] remained. But I don’t use Telegram now.

...But in my opinion, if you are already getting out of the Great Firewall, you can use Signal, or you can use WhatsApp. But many Chinese people don’t know about WhatsApp, so they choose to stay on Telegram. It has a lot to do with the reputation of Telegram. There’s a user stickiness issue with any software you use. Every time you migrate to new software, you will lose a great number of users. That’s a serious problem.

2/8/23

Dystopias often share a common feature: Amusement, in their skewed worlds, becomes a means of captivity rather than escape. George Orwell’s 1984 had the telescreen, a Ring-like device that surveilled and broadcast at the same time. The totalitarian regime of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 burned books, yet encouraged the watching of television. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World described the “feelies”—movies that, embracing the tactile as well as the visual, were “far more real than reality.” In 1992, Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash imagined a form of virtual entertainment so immersive that it would allow people, essentially, to live within it. He named it the metaverse.

...In the future, the writers warned, we will surrender ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.

...In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the critic Neil Postman described a nation that was losing itself to entertainment. What Newton Minow had called “a vast wasteland” in 1961 had, by the Reagan era, led to what Postman diagnosed as a “vast descent into triviality.” Postman saw a public that confused authority with celebrity, assessing politicians, religious leaders, and educators according not to their wisdom, but to their ability to entertain. He feared that the confusion would continue. He worried that the distinction that informed all others—fact or fiction—would be obliterated in the haze.

1/30/23

However, we must come to terms with the unsavory truth: anything that is “smart” digitally is also entirely hackable. Vehicles from an array of manufacturers now experience software updates as routinely as your smartphone does. Said updates account for dozens of vulnerabilities that a car software’s native engineers are paid to discover before an adversary can exploit them.

The future is now, and we’re getting a peek into the multifaceted threats that “smarter” technologies, notably cars, are vulnerable to. The NCC Group, a notable cybersecurity firm, showcased how easy it is to unlock Tesla car doors by interfering with their Bluetooth capabilities. Pen Test Partners were able to identify a “backdoor” in charging stations that can permit the perpetrator access to the smart-device network in homes.

Public charging infrastructure, which is embedded into outdated grid systems, has already cemented itself as a ripe target for compromise. As is the case innately with cyber affronts, the enemy is invisible and clandestine — Deloitte Canada reports that 84% of cybersecurity-concerning EV incidents derived from remote attacks; with 50% of said malware deployed in the past two years.

1/27/23

Google earned about $169 billion in digital ads worldwide in 2022, but the vast majority of that revenue (as well as Google’s revenue, period) comes from search ads, which are ads that businesses place on user searches that might be relevant to them. This suit is targeting not Google’s search ad empire but rather the part of its business that places the ads on websites across the internet outside of Google’s properties. That’s a much smaller, yet still considerable, share of Google’s revenue.

...The DOJ has reportedly been preparing its case against Google’s digital ad business for years, even before the Biden administration. This latest suit also joins four other government antitrust lawsuits Google is already facing, including one DOJ suit from October 2020 over its search engine and search ad business and one filed by 38 state attorneys general in December of the same year, again over the search business. In July 2021, 37 state attorneys general sued Google over its Play app store, and 17 state attorneys general sued over the digital ad business in a similar case to what the DOJ is bringing now.

1/24/23

The exchange reflects one of the many new ethical issues arising as a result of the sudden emergence of ChatGPT, the conversational AI tool that can respond to prompts with markedly articulate and intelligent answers. Its rapid proliferation has the potential to upend a number of industries, across media, academics, and healthcare, precipitating a frenzied effort to grapple with the chatbot's use-cases and the consequences.

..."OpenAI is far from transparent about how they use the data, but if it's being folded into training data, I would expect corporations to wonder: After a few months of widespread use of ChatGPT, will it become possible to extract private corporate information with cleverly crafted prompts?" said Emily Bender, who teaches computational linguistics at University of Washington.

1/24/23

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing more than 45 percent of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31 billion "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

...But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters. It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won't rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they'll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marveling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website, "TheFacebook":

I don’t know why.

They “trust me”

Dumb fucks.

...The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile, while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies' products, like Chrome.

1/23/23

The new A.I. technology has shaken Google out of its routine. Mr. Pichai declared a “code red,” upending existing plans and jump-starting A.I. development. Google now intends to unveil more than 20 new products and demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times and two people with knowledge of the plans who were not authorized to discuss them.

1/20/23

For TikTok, fears of political manipulation are tied to concern that the Chinese government could coerce the platform’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, into amplifying or suppressing certain narratives on TikTok. TikTok has acknowledged that it previously censored content critical of China, and last year, former ByteDance employees told BuzzFeed News that another ByteDance app, a now-defunct news aggregator called TopBuzz, had pinned “pro-China messages” to the top of its news feed for U.S. consumers. ByteDance denied the report.

TikTok declined to answer questions about whether employees located in China have ever heated content, or whether the company has ever heated content produced by the Chinese government or Chinese state media.

1/20/23

Elon Musk oversaw the creation of a 2016 video that exaggerated the abilities of Tesla Inc.’s driver-assistance system Autopilot, even dictating the opening text that claimed the company’s car drove itself, according to internal emails viewed by Bloomberg.

...Seconds later, an engineer hops into the vehicle — a Model X — and The Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black begins to play. The engineer keeps his hands off the steering wheel as the car pulls forward from a driveway, turns left and travels to Tesla’s former headquarters in Palo Alto, California. The engineer steps out of the vehicle, the driver-side door appears to shut itself, and the vehicle parallel parks in a space with no one at the wheel.

...Tesla and Musk didn’t disclose when releasing the video that engineers had created a three-dimensional digital map for the route the Model X took, Elluswamy said during his deposition. Musk said years after the demo that the company doesn’t rely on high-definition maps for automated driving systems, and argued systems that do are less able to adapt to their surroundings.

1/19/23

A prominent pro-reform law professor in Saudi Arabia is facing the death penalty for alleged crimes including having a Twitter account and using WhatsApp to share news considered “hostile” to the kingdom, according to court documents seen by the Guardian.

...Human rights advocates and Saudi dissidents living in exile have warned that authorities in the kingdom are engaged in a new and severe crackdown on individuals who are perceived to be critics of the Saudi government. Last year, Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds PhD student and mother of two, received a 34-year sentence for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists. Another woman, Noura al-Qahtani, was sentenced to 45 years in prison for using Twitter.

...The Saudi government and state-controlled investors have recently increased their financial stake in US social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, and entertainment companies such as Disney. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi investor, is the second-largest investor in Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform. The investor was himself detained for 83 days during a so-called anti-corruption purge in 2017. Prince Alwaleed has acknowledged that he was released after he had reached an “understanding” with the kingdom that was “confidential and secret between me and the government”.

1/15/23

Some of the vigil participants have been charged with the "crime of gathering a crowd to disrupt public order," which carries a maximum five-year sentence, according to Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer and visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

"According to the definition of this crime, this should target only the people who played a leading role," not ordinary vigil participants, Teng says. "The Chinese government is trying to punish the people who are active in human rights activities like LGBTQ issues or the feminism movement."

In her last video, the editor pleads for help, and she wonders why, out of the hundreds of people who were present that night, a group of young, largely female professionals was singled out. "We want to know why we were charged and what evidence there is for these charges," she says.

1/11/23

“What gets me is the lack of respect for human life. We shut down for maintenance. Do you think we could not have had a little respect and shut down long enough to at least get the body out of the facility and clean up after him before people are milling around like nothing’s happening?” the worker said.

“It’s not the first death at an Amazon facility. Amazon is a huge corporation. There should be protocols. It doesn’t matter if this is the first death or the 10th death. There should be protocols on how you handle that. Maybe while the investigation is going on, you don’t let the day shift in, you postpone it until at least until the body’s gone.”

Numerous worker deaths have been reported at Amazon in recent years, including three deaths in New Jersey and one in Pennsylvania over summer 2022. Amazon has faced intense scrutiny over working conditions due to the company’s high injury rates, mishandled human resource errors and high employee turnover.

1/9/23

“Defendants have successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants’ social media platforms,” the complaint said. “Worse, the content Defendants curate and direct to youth is too often harmful and exploitive ....”

...Internal studies revealed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021 showed that the company knew that Instagram negatively affected teenagers by harming their body image and making eating disorders and thoughts of suicide worse. She alleged that the platform prioritized profits over safety and hid its own research from investors and the public.

1/8/23

The lawsuit stems from Celsius’s implosion this summer, when the company filed for bankruptcy and its customers lost billions of dollars in deposits. For years, the Celsius founder, Alex Mashinsky, 57, misled customers into depositing their crypto savings on the platform, promising that it was as safe as a traditional bank, the lawsuit claimed. The lawsuit seeks to bar him from conducting business in New York and force him to pay damages.

...Some of Celsius’s risky loans went to Alameda Research, the crypto hedge fund founded by Mr. Bankman-Fried. Between 2020 and 2022, the lawsuit said, Celsius lent Alameda roughly $1 billion. As collateral for the loans, Celsius accepted a crypto token that Mr. Bankman-Fried had invented, called FTT. The price of FTT plummeted this fall, contributing to the downfall of Alameda and FTX.

1/5/23

The rush to stop Iran from manufacturing the drones is growing more urgent as Russia continues to deploy them across Ukraine with relentless ferocity, targeting both civilian areas and key infrastructure. Russia is also preparing to establish its own factory to produce them with Iran’s help, according to US officials. On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukrainian forces had shot down more than 80 Iranian drones in just two days.

...According to the Ukrainian assessment, among the US-made components found in the drone were nearly two dozen parts built by Texas Instruments, including microcontrollers, voltage regulators, and digital signal controllers; a GPS module by Hemisphere GNSS; a microprocessor by NXP USA Inc.; and circuit board components by Analog Devices and Onsemi. Also discovered were components built by International Rectifier – now owned by the German company Infineon – and the Swiss company U-Blox.

1/4/23

Last month, Ellison, 28, pleaded guilty to charges alleging that she, Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives conspired to steal their customers’ money to invest in other companies, make political donations and buy expensive real estate — charges that carry a maximum sentence of 110 years in prison

...And when investors asked questions, she, Bankman-Fried and other colleagues agreed to lie, covering up the company’s true financial state and the special arrangements for Alameda to use customer assets freely, Ellison told the judge.

“I agreed with Mr. Bankman-Fried and others to provide materially misleading financial statements to Alameda’s lenders,” she said. “I am truly sorry for what I did. I knew that it was wrong.”

1/3/23

Causality will be hard to prove—was it really the words of the chatbot that put the murderer over the edge? Nobody will know for sure. But the perpetrator will have spoken to the chatbot, and the chatbot will have encouraged the act. Or perhaps a chatbot has broken someone’s heart so badly they felt compelled to take their own life? (Already, some chatbots are making their users depressed.) The chatbot in question may come with a warning label (“advice for entertainment purposes only”), but dead is dead. In 2023, we may well see our first death by chatbot.

...Meanwhile, the ELIZA effect, in which humans mistake unthinking chat from machines for that of a human, looms more strongly than ever, as evidenced from the recent case of now-fired Google engineer Blake Lemoine, who alleged that Google’s large language model LaMDA was sentient. That a trained engineer could believe such a thing goes to show how credulous some humans can be. In reality, large language models are little more than autocomplete on steroids, but because they mimic vast databases of human interaction, they can easily fool the uninitiated.

12/29/22

The Supreme Court’s ruling in particular has brought the lack of privacy protections in the US to the forefront of conversation. It demonstrates how law enforcement officials can access incriminating data on location, internet searches, and communication history. There are growing concerns that this data has the potential to be weaponized and used as “evidence” in states where abortion is illegal. In Nebraska, for example, a teenager and her mother are facing criminal charges for allegedly inducing an abortion, after Facebook released their private messages upon request from an investigator.

...Anytime you minimize a right, the impacts fall most on the people who come from minority groups. The Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t mean that the only thing in danger is a woman’s physical body—it’s a greater attack on minorities, civil rights, and their entire digital footprint. It hurts women, people of color, people with lower incomes, the LGBTQIA+ community, and more. The willingness of the court to overturn precedent could suggest other federally protected rights of minorities may be in jeopardy too, such as same-sex marriage.

12/28/22

The food delivery giant confirmed to TechCrunch that attackers accessed the names, email addresses, delivery addresses and phone numbers of DoorDash customers, along with partial payment card information for a smaller subset of users. It also confirmed that for DoorDash delivery drivers, or Dashers, hackers accessed data that “primarily included name and phone number or email address.”

...Hours before a long July 4 holiday, Samsung quietly dropped notice that its U.S. systems were breached weeks earlier and that hackers had stolen customers’ personal information. In its bare-bones breach notice, Samsung confirmed unspecified “demographic” data, which likely included customers’ precise geolocation data, browsing and other device data from customers’ Samsung phones and smart TVs, was also taken.

...Advanced, an IT service provider for the U.K.’s NHS, confirmed in October that attackers stole data from its systems during an August ransomware attack. The incident downed a number of the organization’s services, including its Adastra patient management system, which helps non-emergency call handlers dispatch ambulances and helps doctors access patient records, and Carenotes, which is used by mental health trusts for patient information.

12/27/22

The Battle for Your Brain by Nita Farahany, a law and philosophy professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Farahany’s research focuses on the ethical and legal challenges that new technologies might pose for society.

In her book, Farahany covers the potential impacts of technologies that allow us to peek inside the minds of others. Neuroscientists have already used brain imaging techniques to try to detect a person’s thoughts and political inclinations, or predict whether prisoners are likely to reoffend. It sounds pretty invasive to me.

12/23/22

The guards had identified her using a facial recognition system. They showed her a sheet saying she was on an “attorney exclusion list” created this year by MSG Entertainment, which is controlled by the Dolan family. The company owns Radio City and some of New York’s other famous performance spaces, including the Beacon Theater and Madison Square Garden, where basketball’s Knicks and hockey’s Rangers play.

...“This is punitive as opposed to protective. It sets a precedent for other businesses to identify their critics and punish them,” Mr. Schwartz said. “It raises the question of what’s going to come next. Will companies use facial recognition to keep out all the people who have picketed the business or criticized them online with a negative Yelp review?”

...High-tech surveillance by government is already common in New York City. The Police Department relies on a toolbox that includes not only facial recognition, but drones and mobile X-ray vans, and this month the department said it would join Neighbors, a public neighborhood-watch platform owned by Amazon. Neighbors allows video doorbell owners to post clips online, and police officers can enlist the help of residents in investigations.

12/22/22

a newspaper with that many subscribers would make for a huge target. Not too mention the possible sensitive information that could be found in ongoing investigations that the journalists are working on. It could be devastating to see that sort of information published on a leak site. The same would be true for any scoops the journalists might be working on.

12/22/22

Without such a deal, Ellison, who also faces a money laundering conspiracy charge, could face up to 110 years in prison. Wang could get up to 50 years.

...At a congressional hearing last week, the new FTX CEO John Ray III, who is tasked with taking the company through bankruptcy, bluntly disputed those assertions: “We will never get all these assets back,” Ray said.

12/20/22

When a company says it will never sell your data, that doesn’t mean it won’t use it or share it with others for analysis.

...Most companies’ privacy policies do not even mention the audiovisual data being captured, with a few exceptions. iRobot’s privacy policy notes that it collects audiovisual data only if an individual shares images via its mobile app. LG’s privacy policy for the camera- and AI-enabled Hom-Bot Turbo+ explains that its app collects audiovisual data, including “audio, electronic, visual, or similar information, such as profile photos, voice recordings, and video recordings.” And the privacy policy for Samsung’s Jet Bot AI+ Robot Vacuum with lidar and Powerbot R7070, both of which have cameras, will collect “information you store on your device, such as photos, contacts, text logs, touch interactions, settings, and calendar information” and “recordings of your voice when you use voice commands to control a Service or contact our Customer Service team.” Meanwhile, Roborock’s privacy policy makes no mention of audiovisual data, though company representatives tell MIT Technology Review that consumers in China have the option to share it. 

...And if iRobot’s $1.7 billion acquisition by Amazon moves forward—pending approval by the FTC, which is considering the merger’s effect on competition in the smart-home marketplace—Roombas are likely to become even more integrated into Amazon’s vision for the always-on smart home of the future.

12/19/22

In June 2021, an 18-year-old serial swatter from Tennessee was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in a fraudulent swatting attack that led to the death of a 60-year-old man.

12/19/22

On a brisk recent Sunday, a band of teenagers met on the steps of Central Library on Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn to start the weekly meeting of the Luddite Club, a high school group that promotes a lifestyle of self-liberation from social media and technology. As the dozen teens headed into Prospect Park, they hid away their iPhones — or, in the case of the most devout members, their flip phones, which some had decorated with stickers and nail polish.

...“Lots of us have read this book called ‘Into the Wild,’” said Lola Shub, a senior at Essex Street Academy, referring to Jon Krakauer’s 1996 nonfiction book about the nomad Chris McCandless, who died while trying to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness. “We’ve all got this theory that we’re not just meant to be confined to buildings and work. And that guy was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life.”

“When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed,” Lola continued. “I started using my brain. It made me observe myself as a person. I’ve been trying to write a book, too. It’s like 12 pages now.”

12/15/22

A travel website tells you there are only three hotel rooms left at a certain price ahead of your next vacation, or an e-commerce platform tells you that you only have 10 minutes to buy that dress in your shopping cart. Sellers and marketers know that fomenting a sort of fear of missing out will indeed push you to act, whether or not it’s true. The same goes for showing ratings and reviews, for marking something as a top seller, for indicating someone else in your network bought the same item before. Sometimes what you’re being shown is real, sometimes it’s not, and oftentimes, it’s impossible to know what’s actually the case.

12/15/22

"In addition to TikTok's statements that some China-based employees may access unencrypted US user data, which includes Indiana consumers' data, TikTok's privacy policy permits TikTok to share information with ByteDance' or 'other affiliate of our corporate group,''" the suit claims. "ByteDance and any affiliates and their employees who are located in China or are Chinese citizens are subject to Chinese law and the oppressive Chinese regime, including but not limited to laws requiring cooperation with national intelligence institutions and cybersecurity regulators."

12/12/22

The second plaintiff, referred to as Jane Doe in the court papers, alleged that her ex-husband was stalking her when she found an AirTag planted in her child's backpack. She got rid of it, but it was replaced with another.

"In the wake of a contentious divorce, she found her former spouse harassing her, challenging her about where she went and when, particularly when she was with the couple's child," the suit said.

Apple introduced the AirTag in April 2021, with executives and publicists actively portraying the AirTag as a "harmless—indeed 'stalker-proof'"—product, the suit said. It's been a controversial product since its release and has raised concerns among privacy advocates and law enforcement that it could be misused to track people. And, true enough, AirTags have been used in stalking incidents, even murder, and theft of luxury cars.

12/8/22

“Nobody is even asking the question: Is this technology going to do more harm than good?” says Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, who is not involved in the research. 

...“The companies that are producing drones have an interest in saying that [the drones] are working and they are helping, but because no one has assessed it, it is very difficult to say [if they are right],” he says. 

12/6/22

As cops dive into information pouring out of modern cars, privacy defenders are anxious. In October, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) released a report warning, “Cars collect much more detailed data than our cellphones, but they receive fewer legal and technological protections.”

S.T.O.P. research director Eleni Manis told Forbes that CBP and ICE were “weaponizing car data.” (Neither CBP nor ICE had provided comment at the time of publication.)

“Berla devices position CBP and ICE to perform sweeping searches of passengers’ lives, with easy access to cars' location history and most visited places and to passengers’ family and social contacts, their call logs, and even their social media feeds,” she said. “While we don’t know how many cars CBP and ICE have hacked, we do know that nearly every new car is vulnerable.”

12/1/22

Google responds to tens of thousands of requests each year from law enforcement agencies seeking access to the vast troves of data collected on its users. In one six-month period in 2021, the most recent data publicly available, Google received nearly 47,000 law enforcement requests, affecting more than 100,000 accounts, and responded with some amount of data to 80% of them. The Dobbs decision sparked concerns that such data could be used to prosecute people seeking abortions in states where it is banned – for instance, if they searched for or traveled to an abortion clinic.

...“They’re operating under the mindset of: ‘We need to collect as much information as possible to facilitate advertising,’” Kemp said. “But they have a business model that can be perverted by foreign actors and other people that want to weaponize that behavioral information.”

...“The truth is we cannot expect an advertising giant like Google, who has become powerful by monetizing the collection of our data, to neatly tailor its many complex systems to avoid surveilling particular populations of people, such as those seeking information about abortion,” wrote Singh, who formerly served as a cybersecurity staffer on the Joe Biden campaign. “Unfortunately, the nature of surveillance and the complexities of the data broker ecosystem form a broad harm which we can only solve with legislation.”

11/29/22

According to Belgian news outlet Het Nieuwsblad, a ransomware gang has stolen information from police computers and published that information. The exfiltrated information includes police records about license plates, speeding tickets, and at least one case of child abuse in Zwijndrecht, a municipality in the province of Antwerp.

11/29/22

The FBI’s biggest-ever investigation included the biggest-ever haul of phones from controversial geofence warrants, court records show. A filing in the case of one of the January 6 suspects, David Rhine, shows that Google initially identified 5,723 devices as being in or near the US Capitol during the riot. Only around 900 people have so far been charged with offenses relating to the siege.

...Geofence search warrants are intended to locate anyone in a given area using digital services. Because Google’s Location History system is both powerful and widely used, the company is served about 10,000 geofence warrants in the US each year. Location History leverages GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth signals to pinpoint a phone within a few yards. Although the final location is still subject to some uncertainty, it is usually much more precise than triangulating signals from cell towers. Location History is turned off by default, but around a third of Google users switch it on, enabling services like real-time traffic prediction. 

...Andrew Ferguson, a professor of law at American University, agrees. “And that worries me because the January 6 cases are going to be used to build a doctrine that will essentially enable police to find almost anyone with a cellphone or a smart device in ways that we, as a society, haven’t quite grasped yet,” he says. “That is going to undermine the work of journalists, it’s going to undermine political dissenters, and it's going to harm women who are trying to get abortion services.”

11/28/22

We could execute commands on vehicles and fetch user information from the accounts by only knowing the victim's VIN number, something that was on the windshield.

...With the account takeover, you could access everything on the user’s SiriusXM account where you could enroll/unenroll from the service, but if I remember correctly the API calls for telematic services would work regardless of whether there was an active subscription.

11/28/22

“This is how small tech businesses work, and absent anyone telling you that you’re not allowed to do that, you’re allowed to do that,” she says, questioning whether the sites’ use of ad trackers and outside software boils down to finances. Clark, too, expresses concerns that the use of data collection is financially motivated and, for the right price, could be sold or leased to law enforcement or other parties. “When there’s monetary incentives, people make the changes. When there are no monetary incentives, they don’t,” he says. In short, data privacy experts don’t anticipate that mHealth companies will stop collecting data unless forced.

The opinions of cybersecurity professionals and telehealth company CEOs are relevant, but perhaps most important are the opinions of individuals with substance abuse disorders, the people who stand to lose the most if experts’ fears are realized and for whom Part 2 was designed. After being shown the data from the analysis, one patient who utilizes brick-and-mortar health care providers said via direct message, “Thank you for reaffirming why I don’t use telehealth.” He added that he wasn’t sure the findings would stop anyone from using telehealth if that were the only way they could get treatment. Those patients would simply have to trust their providers act in their best interest.

11/16/22

“Retailers get hacked all the time. When most retailers get hacked, at worst you have to change your credit card number. But you can’t change your palm print if that gets compromised,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP). “So we look at this as a way for people to potentially save a couple of minutes in line at the price of their biometric privacy for the rest of their lives.”

...The government collection of palm-print data of course creates clear potential for additional abuses by the Chinese surveillance state. In fact, Melux, another Chinese palm-print recognition tech company that built the devices used in the Shenzhen subway line, was founded by Xie Qinglu, who also built a data processing system called YISA OmniEye for China’s mass policing surveillance infrastructure Skynet. The company publicly says its palm-print scanners, which will be part of an “unnoticeable governance” system, have already been used for local government offices, public services, customs, financial services, and more. Melux did not respond to an interview request by MIT Technology Review.

“The thing that I’d worry about is, we’ve seen how QR codes have gone from something that generate a lot of financial freedom for the Chinese, to something that you have to scan anytime you go anywhere so the government can lock you down for covid controls,” says Chorzempa, noting there’s a real fear of the nascent palm-print recognition tech repeating that trajectory from payment tool to surveillance tool. “It can be a slippery slope. Once something becomes ubiquitous and convenient, then it also becomes an [alluring] tool for the government to increase social control.”

11/15/22

The five hacking tools that accounted for the most payments during the last half of 2021 are all connected to Russian hackers, according to the report from Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

...US officials have long complained that a lack of requirements for companies to report ransomware attacks to the government has left officials in the dark about the scope and cost of the problem. That is starting to change through a March law that requires certain companies to report ransomware attacks and payments to the Department of Homeland Security.

11/1/22

Disconnect found that data being transmitted to TikTok can include your IP address, a unique ID number, what page you’re on, and what you’re clicking, typing, or searching for, depending on how the website has been set up.

...The national Girl Scouts website has a TikTok pixel on every page, which will transmit details about children if they use the site. TikTok gets medical information from WebMD, where a pixel reported that we’d searched for “erectile dysfunction.” And RiteAid told TikTok when we added Plan B emergency contraceptives to our cart. Recovery Centers of America, which operates addiction treatment facilities, notifies TikTok when a visitor views its locations or reads about insurance coverage.

We didn’t see specific financial details being transmitted, but information about your economic situation could come from pixels on the financial advice company SmartAsset, as well as Happy Money, a company that works with lenders to provide personal loans, including debt-consolidation loans. TikTok can glean clues about your student finances from the College Board, where families often go for information about scholarships and financial aid. (CR reported on privacy problems at the College Board in 2020).

...However, policymakers have done little to stop this kind of hidden data collection, says Justin Brookman, director of technology policy for CR. “Because of the way the web is structured, companies are able to watch what you do from site to site creating detailed dossiers about the most intimate parts of our lives,” he says. “In the U.S., the tech industry largely gets to decide what is and isn’t appropriate, and they don’t have our best interests front of mind.”

10/22/22

All along, Mr. Thiel has also hedged his bets. That includes obtaining foreign passports — Mr. Thiel was born in Germany and holds American and New Zealand passports — that would let him live abroad. He has sought to build a remote compound in a glacier-carved valley in New Zealand, and supported a “seasteading” group that aims to build a city on floating platforms in international waters, outside the jurisdiction of national governments.

...What is clear is that a Maltese passport would give Mr. Thiel an escape hatch from the United States if his spending doesn’t change the country to his liking. He has started developing business connections in Malta, and is a major shareholder in at least one company registered there in which his husband, Matt Danzeisen, is a director.

...In the United States, the bulk of Mr. Thiel’s political donations have gone to support two friends who previously worked for him: J.D. Vance, a Republican running for Ohio’s open Senate seat, and Blake Masters, the Republican challenger in Arizona to Senator Mark Kelly. Mr. Vance worked at Mithril Capital, one of Mr. Thiel’s investment funds. Mr. Masters was chief operating officer of Thiel Capital, the billionaire’s family office.

...Joseph Muscat, Malta’s prime minister who resigned in 2019 amid protests about corruption and the murder of a journalist who was critical of his government, called the passport program “an insurance policy” for wealthy individuals “where they feel there is a great deal of volatility.”

10/15/22

Late last week, Iran, Turkey, Myanmar, and a handful of other countries took steps toward becoming full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an economic and political alliance led by the authoritarian-regimes of China and Russia.

...Following China’s lead, research shows that the majority of SCO member countries, as well as other authoritarian states, are quickly trending toward more digital rights abuses by increasing the mass digital surveillance of citizens, censorship, and controls on individual expression.

...China’s influence on digital authoritarianism is hard to overstate. Its public and private social credit programs, first announced in 2014, collects and aggregates data about people’s purchases, traffic violations, and social activities. And Chinese cities are the most heavily surveilled in the world, with more CCTV cameras per square mile than anywhere else. Those cameras are often equipped with sophisticated facial recognition and visual computing analytics, making the surveillance easier for the Communist Party to act on.

...Other tactics include models for using data fusion and artificial intelligence to act on surveillance data. During last year’s SCO summit, Chinese representatives hosted a panel on the Thousand Cities Strategic Algorithms, which instructed the audience on how to develop a “national data brain” that integrates various forms of financial data and uses artificial intelligence to analyze and make sense of it. According to the SCO website, 50 countries are “conducting talks” with the Thousand Cities Strategic Algorithms initiative.

9/22/22

The scope of inquiry focused on Facebook allowing child users between the ages of 13 and 17 to operate ‘business accounts’ on the Instagram platform.

"At certain times, the operation of such accounts required and facilitated the publication, to the world-at-large, the child user’s phone number and/or email address,” said the spokesperson.

At other times, Facebook operated a user registration system for the Instagram service whereby the accounts of child users were set to ‘public’ by default, thereby making public the social media content of child users, unless the account was otherwise set to ‘private’ by changing the account privacy settings.

9/5/22

Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like “Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,” after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.

Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as “demoralizing,” “humiliating” and “toxic.” Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said.

But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world’s new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself.

...She and her co-workers could turn off their trackers and take breaks anytime, as long as they hit 40 hours a week, which the company logged in 10-minute chunks. During each of those intervals, at some moment they could never anticipate, cameras snapped shots of their faces and screens, creating timecards to verify whether they were working. Some bosses allowed a few “bad” timecards — showing interruptions, or no digital activity — according to interviews with two dozen current and former employees. Beyond that, any snapshot in which they had paused or momentarily stepped away could cost them 10 minutes of pay. Sometimes those cards were rejected; sometimes the workers, knowing the rules, didn’t submit them at all.

8/14/22

Go running with a wearable device like a Fitbit or Apple Watch, or go to bed with a sleep tracker, and the data collected has no special legal protections under HIPAA. The same goes for the apps used to store and interpret the data.

6/13/22

One recent example of this pattern is the Department of Justice’s use of commercially aggregated data in prosecutions surrounding the Capitol Breach of 2021. The Justice Department indicated in a federal court filing that it had utilized “[l]ocation history data for thousands of devices present inside the Capitol (obtained from a variety of sources including Google and multiple data aggregation companies),”(Grand Jury Action No. 21-20 (BAH), 2021). In another filing, the Justice Department indicated that data was obtained from “searches of ten data aggregation companies,” (United States v. Perretta, 2021). The filings did not indicate who those aggregation companies were.

There is no clear limit on the potential availability of commercially acquired data that would typically require legal process to obtain. In the words of one presenter to law enforcement at a location-analytics conference, “cell phone data, social media feeds, license-plate reader and automatic-vehicle locator systems are readily available to investigators” (Delaney & Beck, 2014). Law enforcement and intelligence agencies could obtain these types of personal data from different sources, including publicly available information (e.g., public posts on the web), access to company records through legal process (e.g., a court order directing an internet service provider to turn over information), or data brokers. Of these various sources, we have very little insight into agencies’ engagement with data brokers.

...Key Findings

1) Multiple forms of sensitive data, including location, communications, biometric, and license plate reader data, are sold by data brokers to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and the practice is increasing, with multiple agencies spending upwards of tens of millions of dollars on multi-year contracts.

2) Government agencies seeking to purchase data frequently use terms like ‘open source’ and ‘publicly available’ in their purchase orders and contracts, suggesting that they are only seeking information such as public social media posts that people knowingly make available to the public. However, government purchase orders and contracts frequently use these terms to include information collected specifically for a given agency that is not actually available to the public or any other consumer. The broad and misleading usage of these terms undermines governmental claims that agencies are permitted to collect such information on the basis that it is generally out there in the public and individuals therefore lack an expectation of privacy in such sensitive data.

12/9/21

“I think about this issue much more as one of data abuses than just data privacy,” Slaughter said. “The first step of collecting your data may not be the immediate harm. But how is that data then aggregated, used, transferred to manipulate your purchases, target advertising, create this surveillance economy that has a lot of downstream harms for users in a way that is less visible to the user or the public?”

4/1/21

In 2017, the FTC and the state of New Jersey fined Vizio $2.2 million, alleging that the smart-TV manufacturer’s products tracked consumers in minute detail, without their knowledge or consent. “On a second-by-second basis, Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content,” the FTC alleged. “What’s more, Vizio identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Add it all up and Vizio captured as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs.” According to the complaint, Vizio also pushed updates to older TV sets that enabled them to collect data on users, and sold the compiled data to third parties who wanted insight into people’s viewing habits. (Vizio did not respond to two requests for comment from The Atlantic.)

Two years later, we’re still being watched. Three-quarters of American households have at least one internet-connected TV: a smart TV like the ones Vizio makes, or a plug-in player such as Roku or Amazon Fire TV. The FTC settlement doesn’t outlaw collecting our data; it simply says that viewers must opt into it. But in effect, that just means a streamlined series of menus that are easy to click through blindly. If you have a smart TV or connected device, chances are good it has collected data on your viewing habits, location, and device serial numbers

...Campaigns, or third parties working on their behalf, now work with providers such as Vizio, Roku, Dish Network, and DirecTV to match their lists—of voters and customers, respectively—against each other. (Dish Network and DirecTV confirmed their use of such tactics to The Atlantic. Representatives for Roku did not respond to requests for comment, though the company has posted a listing for a political-ad-sales account manager.)

...Matching user databases between IoT devices, phones, laptops, and offline behavior such as voting patterns gives campaigns working with big data significant insight into our lives. That’s likely to continue into 2020 and beyond.

11/8/19

The experiment in Vermont is being closely watched at a time when regulators across the country are trying to address growing concerns over online privacy. A California law set to take effect at the beginning of next year will allow the state’s residents to opt out of having their data sold. Maine passed a law this month barring Internet service providers, including AT&T and Verizon, from selling broadband customers’ information. State legislatures in New York, Maryland and Massachusetts are all considering measures to give residents more control over data.

So far, Vermont is the only state to single out data brokers. All of the proposed measures, though, threaten to crack down on the most potent weapon in these companies’ arsenals. Third-party data, or information held by someone who didn’t obtain it directly from the user, can be mined from public records, such as DMVs, property records and voter rolls, as well as private databases filled with people’s magazine subscriptions and shopping records.

...But privacy advocates warn that the spread of data increases the risk of it being misused. A list of people who have Alzheimer’s disease could be purchased by bad actors who want to take advantage of mentally ill people. Two data brokers who advertise an Alzheimer’s patient list -- Experian and Amerilist -- say they vet the buyers of that data to make sure they are legitimate businesses.

...“Victims of domestic violence are trying to take control over their privacy,” said Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. “But the data broker companies are doing a significant amount of work to compile information about a person.”

6/24/19