EFF: “…The government watchdog issued yet another report – Facial Recognition Services: Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Should Take Actions to Implement Training, and Policies for Civil Liberties this month about the dangerously inadequate and nonexistent rules for how federal agencies use face recognition, underlining what we’ve already known: the government cannot be trusted with this flawed… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: E-Records
Delete your digital history from dozens of companies with this app
Washington Post: “A new iPhone and Android app [does not work on Mac or PC) called Permission Slip makes it super simple to order companies to delete your personal information and secrets. Trying it saved me about 76 hours of work telling Ticketmaster, United, AT&T, CVS and 35 other companies to knock it off.Did I… Continue Reading
Can Sensitive Information Be Deleted From LLMs?
Can Sensitive Information Be Deleted From LLMs? Objectives for Defending Against Extraction Attacks. Vaidehi Patil, Peter Hase, Mohit Bansal: “Pretrained language models sometimes possess knowledge that we do not wish them to, including memorized personal information and knowledge that could be used to harm people. They can also output toxic or harmful text. To mitigate… Continue Reading
Cities Should Act NOW to Ban Predictive Policing
EFF: “Sound Thinking, the company behind ShotSpotter—an acoustic gunshot detection technology that is rife with problems—is reportedly buying Geolitica, the company behind PredPol, a predictive policing technology known to exacerbate inequalities by directing police to already massively surveilled communities. Sound Thinking acquired the other major predictive policing technology—Hunchlab—in 2018. This consolidation of harmful and flawed… Continue Reading
H&R Block, Meta, and Google Slapped With RICO Suit
Gizmodo: “Anyone who has used H&R Block’s tax return preparation services in recent years may have unintentionally helped line Meta and Google’s pockets. That’s according to a new class action lawsuit which alleges the three companies “jointly schemed” to install trackers on the H&R Block site to scan and transmit tax data back to the… Continue Reading
Is Amazon Alexa spying on you?
Proton VPN Blog: “Amazon and third parties (including advertising and tracking services) collect smart speaker interaction data. We find that Amazon processes voice data to infer user interests and uses it to serve targeted ads on-platform (Echo devices) as well as off-platform (web). Smart speaker interaction leads to as much as 30X higher ad bids… Continue Reading
CISA Toolkit Encouraging Americans to Keep Themselves and Families Safe Online
“The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) today announced the launch of “Secure Our World,” a nationwide cybersecurity public awareness campaign to educate all Americans on how to stay safe online. The campaign includes a public service announcement (PSA) that will air on stations around the country, as well as digital content, a toolkit, and… Continue Reading
You Can Now Get Your Free Credit Report Every Week, Forever
Lifehacker: “Monitoring your credit history regularly reduces the likelihood that reporting errors (best case) or identity theft (worst case) will derail your financial health—and you can now do this at no cost every single week, indefinitely, through Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, each credit bureau offered one free credit report per… Continue Reading
New phone call etiquette: Text first and never leave a voice mail
Washington Post: “Phone calls have been around for 147 years, the iPhone 16 years and FaceTime video voice mails about a week. Not surprisingly, how we make calls has changed drastically alongside advances in technology. Now people can have conversations in public on their smartwatches, see voice mails transcribed in real time and dial internationally… Continue Reading
Behind the Scenes at ‘Have I Been Pwned’
Via Slashdot and contributor slincolne [the link is behind a paywall]: “The founder of the data-breach notification site Have I Been Pwned manages “the largest known repository of stolen data on the planet,” reports Australia’s public broadcaster ABC, including over 6 billion email address. Yet with no employees, Troy Hunt manages all of the technical… Continue Reading
The Man Who Trapped Us in Databases
The New York Times [read free]- “Hank Asher was a drug smuggler with a head for numbers — until he figured out how to turn Americans’ private information into a big business. One of Asher’s innovations — or more precisely one of his companies’ innovations — was what is now known as the LexID. My… Continue Reading
Your Face Belongs to Us: A Conversation with Kashmir Hill
Tech Policy Press: “In 2019, journalist Kashmir Hill had just joined The New York Times when she got a tip about the existence of a company called Clearview AI that claimed it could identify almost anyone with a photo. But the company was hard to contact, and people who knew about it didn’t want to… Continue Reading
