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Everyone is talking about Facebook's end-to-end encryption plans and the US, UK and Australian government's response. Feeling lost? Here is what you need to know.
What's Facebook trying to do?
First let's be clear: Facebook has many faults when it comes to privacy. It's also suffered a number of security failures recently. See here for instance.
In response to their successive failures to protect your privacy, Facebook announced in their 'pivot to privacy…
Content Type: Examples
In August 2017, it was reported that a researcher scraped videos of transgender Youtubers documenting their transition process without informing them or asking their permission, as part of an attempt to train artificial intelligence facial recognition software to be able to identify transgender people after they have transitioned.
These videos were primarily of transgender people sharing the progress and results of hormone replacement therapy, including video diaries and time-lapse videos. The…
Content Type: Examples
In January 2019, Facebook announced that as of February 28 the site would add more information to that displayed when users click on the "Why am I seeing this?" button that appears next to ads on the service. Along with the brand that paid for the ad, some of the biographical details they'd targeted, and whether they'd uploaded the user's contact information, Facebook would also show when the contact information was uploaded, whether it was by the brand or one of their partners, and when access…
Content Type: News & Analysis
In December 2018, we revealed how some of the most widely used apps in the Google Play Store automatically send personal data to Facebook the moment they are launched. That happens even if you don't have a Facebook account or are logged out of the Facebook platform (watch our talk at the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Leipzig or read our full legal analysis here).
Today, we have some good news for you: we retested all the apps from our report and it seems as if we…
Content Type: Examples
In August 2018, banks and merchants had begun tracking the physical movements users make with input devices - keyboard, mouse, finger swipes - to aid in blocking automated attacks and suspicious transactions. In some cases, however, sites are amassing tens of millions of identifying "behavioural biometrics" profiles. Users can't tell when the data is being collected. With passwords and other personal information used to secure financial accounts under constant threat from data breaches, this…
Content Type: Examples
Cookies and other tracking mechanisms are enabling advertisers to manipulate consumers in new ways. For $29, The Spinner will provide a seemingly innocent link containing an embedded cookie that will allow the buyer to deliver targeted content to their chosen recipient. The service advertises packages aimed at men seeking to influence their partners to initiate sex, people trying to encourage disliked colleagues to seek new jobs, and teens trying to get their parents to get a dog. However,…
Content Type: Examples
In July 2018, Dutch researcher Foeke Postma discovered that Polar, the manufacturer of the world's first wireless heart rate monitor manufacturer, was exposing the heart rates, routes, dates, times, duration, and pace of exercises performed by individuals at military sites and at their homes via its social platform, Polar Flow. Polar placed these individuals at particular risk by showing all the exercises a particular individual has completed since 2014 on a single global map. Postma was able…
Content Type: Examples
In June 2018, Uber filed a US patent application for technology intended to help the company identify drunk riders by comparing data from new ride requests to past requests made by the same user. Conclusions drawn from data such as the number of typos or the angle at which the rider is holding the phone would determine which, if any, driver they were matched with. What plans the company may have for the technology is unknown; however, critics expressed concerns that it could deter prospective…
Content Type: Examples
In April 2018, the Austrian cabinet agreed on legislation that required asylum seekers would be forced to hand over their mobile devices to allow authorities to check their identities and origins. If they have been found to have entered another EU country first, under the Dublin regulation, they can be sent back there. The number of asylum seekers has dropped substantially since 2016, when measures were taken to close the Balkan route. The bill, which must pass Parliament, also allows the…
Content Type: Examples
In October 2018 Amazon patented a new version of its Alexa virtual assistant that would analyse speech to identify signs of illness or emotion and offer to sell remedies. The patent also envisions using the technology to target ads. Although the company may never exploit the patent, the NHS had previously announced it intended to make information from its online NHS Choices service available via Alexa.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/09/amazon-patents-new-alexa-feature-knows-…
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In March 2018 the Palo Alto startup Mindstrong Health, founded by three doctors, began clinical tests of an app that uses patients' interactions with their smartphones to monitor their mental state. The app, which is being tested on people with serious illness, measures the way patients swipe, tap, and type into their phones; the encrypted baseline and ongoing data is then analysed using machine learning to find patterns that indicate brain disorders such as a relapse into depression, substance…
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In 2018, a Duke University medical doctor who worked with Microsoft researchers to analyse millions of Bing user searches found links between some computer users' physical behaviours - tremors while using a mouse, repeated queries, and average scrolling speed - and Parkinson's disease. The hope was to be able to diagnose conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's earlier and more accurately. Other such studies tracked participants via a weekly online health survey, mouse usage, and, via…
Content Type: Examples
In 2017, the Massachusetts attorney general's office reached an agreement under which Boston-based Copley Advertising agreed to eschew sending mobile ads to patients visiting Planned Parenthood and other health clinics. In 2015, Copley's geofencing technique used location information from smartphones and other internet-enabled devices to target "abortion-minded" women and send them ads for alternatives to abortion in a campaign it conducted on behalf of a Christian pregnancy counselling and…
Content Type: Examples
In 2011, the US Department of Homeland Security funded research into a virtual border agent kiosk called AVATAR, for Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time, and tested it at the US-Mexico border on low-risk travellers who volunteered to participate. In the following years, the system was also tested by Canada's Border Services Agency in 2016 and the EU border agency Frontex in 2014. The research team behind the system, which included the University of Arizona, claimed the…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, the EU announced iBorderCtrl, a six-month pilot led by the Hungarian National Police to install an automated lie detection test at four border crossing points in Hungary, Latvia, and Greece. The system uses an animated AI border agent that records travellers' faces while asking questions such as "What's in your suitcase?". The AI then analyses the video, scoring each response for 38 microexpressions. Travellers who pass will be issued QR codes to let them through; those who don't will…
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In July 2014, a study conducted by Adam D. I. Kramer (Facebook), Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock (both Cornell University) and published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences alerted Facebook users to the fact that for one week in 2012 689,003 of them had been the subjects of research into "emotional contagion". In the study, the researchers changed randomly selected users' newsfeeds to be more positive or negative to study whether those users then displayed a more…
Content Type: Examples
Users downloading their Facebook histories have been startled to find that the company has been collecting call and SMS data. The company has responded by saying users are in control of what's uploaded to Facebook. However, the company also says it's a widely used practice when users first sign in on their phones to a messaging or social media app to begin by uploading the phone's contact list. That data then becomes part of the company's friend recommendation algorithm. On versions of Android…
Content Type: Examples
The CEO of MoviePass, an app that charges users $10 a month in return for allowing them to watch a movie every day in any of the 90% of US theatres included in its programme, said in March 2018 that the company was exploring the idea of monetising the location data it collects. MoviePass was always open about its plans to profit from the data it collects, but it seems likely that its 1.5 million users assumed that meant ticket sales, movie choice, promotions, and so on - not detailed tracking…
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The Danish company Blip Systems deploys sensors in cities, airports, and railway stations to help understand and analyse traffic flows and improve planning. In the UK's city of Portsmouth, a network of BlipTrack sensors was installed in 2013 by VAR Smart CCTV, and the data it has collected is used to identify problem areas and detect changing traffic patterns. The city hope that adding more sensors to identify individual journeys will help reduce commuting times, fuel consumption, and vehicular…
Content Type: Examples
In 2016, Facebook and its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram rolled out a new reporting tool that lets users anonymously flag posts that suggest friends are threatening self-harm or suicide. The act of flagging the post triggers a message from Instagram to the user in question offering support including access to a help line and suggestions such as calling a friend. These messages are also triggered if someone searches the service for certain terms such as "thinspo", which is associated with…
Content Type: Examples
Recruiters are beginning to incorporate emotional recognition technology into the processes they use for assessing video-based job applications. Human, a London-based start-up, claims its algorithms can match the subliminal facial expressions of prospective candidates to personality traits. It then scores the results against characteristics the recruiter specifies. HireVue, which sells its service to Unilever, uses the emotion database of Affectiva, a specialist in emotion recognition that…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, pending agreement from its Institutional Review Board, the University of St Thomas in Minnesota will trial sentiment analysis software in the classroom in order to test the software, which relies on analysing the expressions on students' faces captured by a high-resolution webcam. Instructors will be able to see the aggregate detected emotions of up to 42 students displayed in a glance at their computer screen. The project hopes to help teachers adapt their approaches in response, but…
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In a report on mobile security updates, the US Federal Trade Commission finds that because of the complexity of the mobile ecosystem applying security updates to operating system software on some mobile devices is time-consuming and complicated. Based on information gathered from eight device manufacturers - Apple, Blackberry, Google, HTC, LG, Microsoft, Motorola, and Samsung, the FTC recommends that manufacturers should deploy these updates more quickly and suggests that manufacturers should…
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In February 2018 the Canadian government announced a three-month pilot partnership with the artificial intelligence company Advanced Symbolics to monitor social media posts with a view to predicting rises in regional suicide risk. Advanced Symbolics will look for trends by analysing posts from 160,000 social media accounts; the results are intended to aid the Canadian government in allocating mental health resources. The company claims to be able to predict suicidal ideation, behaviours, and…
Content Type: Examples
In 2014, the UK suicide prevention group The Samaritans launched Radar, a Twitter-based service intended to leverage the social graph to identify people showing signs of suicidal intent on social media and alert their friends to reach out to offer them help. The app was quickly taken offline after widespread criticism and an online petition asking them to delete the app. Among the complaints: the high error rate, intrusiveness, and the Samaritans' response, which was to suggest that people…
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In 2016, the US Federal Trade Coimmission issued a warning to app developers that had installed Silverpush, software that uses device microphones to listen for audio signals inaudible to the human ear that identify the television programmes they are watching. Nonetheless, similar technology continued to spread. In 2017, software from the TV data collection startup Alphonso, began to spread. As many as 1,000 gaming, messaging, and social apps using Alphonso's software, some of them aimed at…
Content Type: Examples
Websites have long used third-party analytics scripts to collect information about how visitors use their sites. In November 2017, researchers at Princeton found that an increasing number of sites use "session replay" scripts that collect every action the user performs while on the site, including mouse movements, keystrokes, scrolling behaviour, and the complete contents of pages loaded. Users logically expect the sites to receive typed data only after they're pressed the "submit" button, but…
Content Type: Examples
In 2017, after protests from children's health and privacy advocates, Mattel cancelled its planned child-focused "Aristotle" smart hub. Aristotle was designed to adapt to and learn about the child as they grew while controlling devices from night lights to homework aids. However, Aristotle was only one of many tech devices being released onto the market to take over functions that have traditionally been part of the intimate relationship between children and their parents: a smart cradle that…
Content Type: Examples
In the wake of Tesla’s first recorded autopilot crash, automakers are reassessing the risk involved with rushing semi-autonomous driving technology into the hands of distractible drivers. But another aspect of autopilot—its ability to hoover up huge amounts of mapping and “fleet learning” data—is also accelerating the auto industry’s rush to add new sensors to showroom-bound vehicles. This may surprise some users: Tesla’s Terms of Use (TOU) does not explicitly state that the company will…